TOUCHSTONES

September, 2005

Photographs lie. As photographers we understand this simple fact. As photographers we take a three dimensional reality and make a representation of it in two dimensions. When you touch a photograph you are not touching the object. The stone in Plate 6 looks huge. It isn’t.

This Standing Stone is found at Calanais II or Cnoc Filibhir Bheag. The Cnoc Filibhir Bheag site contains two concentric ellipses with eight stones on the outer ring and four on the inner ring. It is within sight and walking distance of Calanais I. This stone is on the outer ring. It is majestic in its own right. It appears to loom over the landscape towering above everything reducing the sheep in the distance to mere white dots on the horizon. In reality it is about three feet tall.

This image came out of desperation. I had been on Lewis for several days photographing with friends and former student, Ian Wilson (who lives on Lewis) and Tony Halston. The wind had been blowing and the rain pouring down. But I was bound and determined to make some images on this particular day. (When I am on the road photographing I set specific goals for the amount of film I need to shoot. If I don’t shoot that much I feel guilty. So I go work in an effort to avoid feeling guilty.)

We had been at Calanais I every day that week. Ian took me to visit this smaller site and unlike the main site at Calanais I, we had this stone circle to ourselves. After trying to make images about the circles, and placing it in its environment, working on the idea of near/far relationships, smallness of stature, and other absurd ideas, I finally decided to make a portrait of each stone. I wanted to isolate each individual stone in an effort to present it at its best.

I choose a low camera position deliberately. I have found that camera position does influence how the viewer perceives the subject of the photograph. If you photograph a child by standing above them the viewer feels the subject is small and frail, if viewed from an eye level position the subject is perceived as an equal. And when the subject is looked at from below the subject tends to be perceived as heroic. So I tried to photograph each of the stones in this circle independent of each other (with no other stone in the background) and from a camera position equal to the center point in height of each stone. In the case of the stone in Plate 6, the tripod was about as low as it could go.

On blustery days, when the rain and clouds are flying you also get the brief moments when the light is magic. The clouds open up and the light draws the photograph for you. When I set up to make the image in Plate 6 there was no shadow, no sense of texture in this stone. But as I began to focus the image the light broke through he clouds revealing every line and detail of texture in the stone. The dark clouds in the background allow this stone to emerge from the gray dismal background. When I made the image I knew that it would speak to texture and light of Scotland.