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Flatland Photography & "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"
There's a certain quality of light here in North Florida I've never seen anywhere else. In the late afternoon during winter, fall, and spring, it turns a pure transparent gold. Saturated in that light, the colors of ordinary objects and of the natural world emerge as if color had just been invented. In that certain slant of light, even the peeling paint on an old abandoned building seems portentous, as if it is just on the point of some mysterious transformation. Everything--a quiet family beach, the the lacy woodwork of an old-style Florida house, a tin roof shining in the afternoon sun, an old-fashioned commercial building in a town you may never have heard of, or the peeling paint of a disused building, seems to glow with significance. Suffused in that mysterious radiance, everything looks evocative and valuable.
But even the occasional grey winter's day or a stormy afternoon has a certain muted beauty. Objects merge in and emerge from the mist. That light is silver rather than gold; in it colors are greyed down, subdued. It's a secretive, subtle ambiance. It gives everything a strange, bygone feeling, like an old daguerreotype.
During the period between 1996 and 2000, my late husband Don and I took hundreds of photographs as we chased the North Florida sun from town to town. Places we visited in search of photo ops included (but were definitely not limited to): Fernandina Beach and Amelia Island, Jacksonville, Green Cove Springs, Crescent Beach, St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach, Keystone, Orange Springs, Hastings, Melrose, Micanopy, Alachua, MacIntosh, Gainesville, Ocala, Williston, Lake Butler, Lake City, High Springs, Liveoak, Waldo, Hawthorne, Dunnellon, Romeo, Florahome, Lawtey, Starke, Archer, Trenton, Cedar Key, Cedar Island, Keaton Beach, Yankeetown, Inglis, Fort Island Gulf Beach, Horseshoe Beach, Salt Creek, Crystal River, Chiefland, Perry, and Homosassa Springs.
We were entranced during that certain period with the fall of the light on ordinary objects.
If there was a theme to our photographs, it was (to borrow a line from Muriel Spark) ‘the transfiguration of the commonplace.’
Photography, even---or especially--- amateur photography, makes you pay more attention to how the light falls. Photographs, even ones as crude as these were, help you to remember how it looked as it fell. Photography makes you pay attention to how the way it falls changes the colors of things. It makes you realize that there is a whole universe of rainbows inherent in an old tin roof that catches the light at just the right angle and that color---and all of reality---is about how the light catches it. The same scenes and the same towns look completely different in the uncompromising perpendicular white light of noon, under the opalescent light of early morning, and under those long slanting yellow rays at the end of the day. The sky looks different too. It’s the same objects in the same position in the same small towns---but the light changes how they make you feel about them.
Don and I weren't fussy about our subjects----we photographed anything that seemed to be giving back the light or the color in a way that called attention to itself. Water shining on marsh grass, the sun reflecting off the tin doors of an old warehouse or the tin roof of a house deep in the woods, an orange tree, a lifeguard shining in the afternoon sun, on a small family beach on the northwest coast, a display of ceramic fish in the window of a shell shop, the ocean at dawn, a brightly painted hamburger stand, a baby alligator among the leaves, the wooden ramp leading across the water into the woods...all of it was fair game.
We took the pictures because we'd seen those things and we wanted to remember seeing them. Memory isn't sufficient---a white church against a blue sky; so what? Our photographs, however crude, reminded us that the front of the church literally blazed with the reflected light and that the blue sky was really almost indigo it was so deeply and densely blue.
They reminded us that the grass outside an old abandoned house was so saturated with the sunlight pouring out of the west that it had literally turned yellow and that the in the late afternoon before sunset, the glass towers along the Jacksonville landing first turn a blindingly brilliant silver and then a very soft luminous gold. They reminded us that when the sun filters through the liveoak trees or onto the leaves of a palm tree, it's reflected in each leaf as if each were a mirror, so that at certain times of the day the whole landscape glitters. They reminded us that on the west coast at sunset and on the east coast at dawn, the rocks along the shores look as if they'd been painted yellow. They reminded us that the ocean at dawn at St. Augustine Beach is really midnight blue, streaked with gold, and that even ordinary things give back the Florida sun in extraordinary ways.
Whenever I took a photograph, I took it saying to myself, 'Get it now before it's all gone.' The light goes out of things very quickly here. If you don’t catch it when it’s there, you don’t catch it.
Even the way the light falls doesn’t grab everyone the same way. 'It's an old warehouse,' said one of my friends, glancing at one of our photos. 'So what?'
Maybe the photographs just aren't very good. Maybe they don't get across what I mean about the light here. I'm still really glad that I have them and that I had the experience of getting them. It was like grabbing back a tiny bit of time in the moment it was passing.
Even if the photographs don't speak to anyone but me, the years I spent trying to capture an aspect of reality I’d never paid attention to have---as previously noted---fundamentally changed how I experience the world. While riding with Don through a small town in the Panhandle (outside my usual range), Don said, “Look! Look at the pattern the palm shadows make on the front of the buildings. And look at the way the palm leaves catch the light and how the sunset is reflected in the windows of the hotel up ahead. I wish I had my camera.” We stopped the car to watch the sunset reflected in the hotel windows. ‘Next time we’re here, I want to get a picture of that,’ Don said.
Next time didn’t ever arrive for him; an aneurysm a couple of years later carried him off. That was several years ago; I’ve since remarried and done what you do when life doesn’t offer any other choice: moved on, turned into someone else with a completely different name. Now I have a trunk filled with photographs that we took while we were rambling around the neighboring counties. Most of them aren’t very good. Furthermore, neither one of us is in a single one of them.
It’s an odd thing though. The family photos we took---and there are quite a lot of them---have that odd flat look that old photographs invariably take on. I’m glad to have them, but they are just the reflections of the way that our life together was the same as every other couple’s. You don’t photograph the anger, tears, and anguish that life hands you, after all. They are just pictures like everyone else’s.
The photographs he took---that we took together--- are a different matter. They bring back much more hard-to-articulate aspects of our marriage----the pursuit of a shared interest and shared perceptions. They also prompt my memory to regenerate the thing that fades faster than anything else: light, color, the way the world looked on a day back when the future---this future---was still unimaginable. Though some of the photographs during periods of maximum turmoil, what I remember is the peace and enjoyment we both derived from getting in the car and driving to some little Florida town I’d never even heard of till then to look at the light.
And I remember the light---and the color.
RELATED POSTINGS
Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts.
The False Nostalgia Syndrome.
How Donne Missed the Point.
The Ghost in the Image: Photography and Memory.
Thanatology 101---The Need for an Etiquette of Dying.
Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
5:57:19 AM 
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