A Woodland Golgotha

Fig. 1: 140-12, version 1

Note: before reading on please click on Fig. 1 to open the larger version. Spend a minute or two forming your own impression of the picture, just as you would if you came across it in an art gallery. What mood and meaning to you take away from it?

Metaphor

Golgotha, or Place of Skulls, (also translated as Calvary in the King James Bible), is the site of the crucifixion of Jesus.

In the fall of 2002 I was shooting 35mm Reala one morning in a local spot and captured the frame as shown in Fig. 2.

At some point during the edit process, being the emotional kind of a guy I am, it hit me that the abandoned telephone pole on the right was wooden and very like a crucifixion "cross" (technically, of the T or crux commissa variety) in shape. I've always found it very hard not to anthropomorphize trees, so this image instantly became a symbol for me of the casual way in which humanity exploits nature. If the trees in the scene had awareness and feelings, we could imagine them grieving over the fate of the tree felled to make the telephone pole, then left there in the Roman manner as a grim reminder to an audience that can never look away. This vision informed my editing, resulting in the version in Fig. 1.

Fig. 2: 140-12, raw scan

Composition

But now, several years later, I was dissatisfied enough with my detail-handling in version 1 to be driven to re-scan and re-edit. Fig. 2 is what came out of the scanner, given minor colour cast correction. The first thing you'll probably notice is the difference in colour and contrast, between my romantic edit and the scanner's output. What I want to call your attention to, however, is the difference in the horizon line to the right of the smoke stack (which happens to belong to the local landfill). Notice how it slopes down in Fig. 1 but not in Fig. 2. I well remember how tedious it was to make this change and did not look forward to having to repeat the effort, so was pleased to be able to copy/paste that section of the original edit.

The question I have for you is: why did I go through that effort to change what the camera captured and do you agree it constitutes an improvement over the original scene? I do these things on instinct but I feel they're intellectually defensible, based on the principles of composition as expounded here.

Fig. 3: Lines of attention in the original scene

The red slashes in Fig. 3 show how the original scene parses – simply as a nested set of rectangles. Very little energy in that. The green slashes show some contrasting diagonals, but these do not seem strong enough to me to rescue the composition. By sloping the ridge on the horizon, one of the two horizontals becomes a diagonal (Fig. 4) and (to me, at least) rescues the scene. There is now a strong energy of convergence from right to left -- or radiation from left to right – which the parallel horizontals in the original scene contradicted.

Fig. 4: Lines of attention in the edited scene

Colour

Fig. 5: New edit

Fig. 5 is the result of my re-edit. You can see that I've retained something of the more varied pallet in the foliage of the actual scene instead of moving back to the more emotional orange/amber cast of version 1. So the next question is: which coloring do I go with – version 1's or version 2's? (This is of course a question I have to answer for myself; but I'm not yet ready to make the call.) For me, version 1's pallet amplifies the Golgotha metaphor; but version 2's pallet is more varied and in a sense more poignant in that it contrasts the grimness of the crucifixion metaphor with the light-heartedness of the sunny day fall colours.

That poignancy would make a better argument on its own behalf, if I could reasonably count on the viewer hitting upon the crucifixion metaphor just by looking at a final print. And for either version that's something I don't feel I can expect of any potential viewer, no matter how astute. I could certainly title the picture Golgotha and print the title just below the image area, but that's something I feel is a cop-out. For me, a picture needs to tell its own story and to do so in an entirely non-verbal language. What I can expect of the sympathetic viewer is to discover the contrast between the dead and artificial phone pole, needing guide wires for support, and the living, colourful, and graceful world of the trees on the left. That's a different story and one for which the new colours work well.

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