Pictorial space

Riverside County, 2007 copyright of Douglas Stockdale – 

As I pull back to re-examine my Riverside project, I also finding myself thinking not so much about what the project is per se, but more about the pictorial space that I am confronting.  Which is to say, how I use a camera/lens to create and capture the spacial relationships in my photograph. To try to create a series based on the concept of pictorial space just seems tooooo simple. There has to more than that to it, eh?

It just seems that what I photograph, the actual subject rendered in the photograph, appears to be secondary to the concept of trying to define the ‘space’. Maybe I just cannot articulate it at the moment. sigh.

I find that what I photograph is just not that important in this series. And I don’t fully get it at this moment. I do know that as I go through this Riverside series that the photographs that stop me are not what I thought that this project was about. I do take that particular picture nevertheless, but perhaps not for the reason I had thought.

Something had attracted my attention to the point that I stopped, composed and captured an image. Many of these photographs still do resonate with me and now I am trying to understand why. So I will continue to think about it, but more importantly I am also trying to just react to the photographs that cause me to slow down and look again.

As to this photograph, above, made of a ranch in Riverside, California, I do have an opportunity to photograph what appears as vast amounts of visual space. So in a sense, this is one aspect of pictorial space, with the light source to create shadows and volume and the use of foreshortening that give the illusion of a three dimensional space on a two-dimensional field.

More to think about, eh?

Best regards,

Doug