Page 106 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #4

"In the moment of empathy you can't separate yourself from the other."

Mark Robertson (in conversation with Falcon, November 15, 2013)

εν πάθος. En pathos.
In the Fall of 2010, I traveled to Mount Mitchell in North Carolina to assist at a photogra-
phy seminar offered by another company. Virtually everyone who attended was a landscape pho-
tographer. On the morning of the second day, we rouse early and headed for a section of the hilly
road to the mountain that overlooked a now abandoned orchard.
When we arrived at the place where we would be working, a ridge where the road wound
around and over an orchard, we parked our vehicles at the edge of the road and got out. The dawn
was coming. Quickly. Yet the valley bellow and in the distance was consumed in a deep, obscuring,
myst, a myst that almost always renders the dawn imperfect and stripped of color. The first fingers
of the dawn were reaching over the far mountainscape and I could see that there would be little to
be gained from being here, in the place.
I watched as the other phoographers setup their tripods, attached bulb releases to their
cameras and began the process of configuring the camera settings they needed. This included, in
a couple of cases, light meters. Uneasy and restless, I couldn't remain on the ridge. Every moment
was passing quickly and I could feel the first light of dawn streaming across the valley towards us.
There was precious little time left. Within minutes, I had gotten what I wanted while some of the
photographers had failed to create a single image.
Leaving the rental car on the ridge, I descended into the orchard. The myst of the morning
ran through the cotton of my cargo pants and began to trial thin tears down my legs. Heavy with
dew, the shoes slid over the tall grass. The air was cold and I watched my breath seperate into a
thousand moments of gray haziness. I remembered the description in Ceasar's Gallic Wars about
how the Romans felt when first they experienced weather cold enough to let them see their breath.
In Honduras earlier in the year I had broken ribs in a fall. I was concerned that in the tall wetness
of the grass, I would do so again.
It was still very dark in the orchard when I found the ruts of an old road. At the time, I had
a small “point of view” video camera with me and Andy Walcott had given me the task of talking
about what I was experiencing when I was working. It was the first time I had ever “been forced”
to articulate what I thought about as I worked. For a moment, I debated whether or not I would
just lose the camera in the dense grass at the edge of the old road. But my sense of responsibility
got the best of me - it often does - and I did what I could to remember how to use the POV. It was
still cold enough for my hands to shake so managing the camera was difficult to begin with. I found
the camera distracting - listening to my "inner dialogue" out loud was not something I wanted to
do. The fact that I didn't even understand why Andy wanted me to record what I was feeling and
thinking didn't help. Not at all. The best I could do, I eventually discovered, was to just talk. Still,

106 | Autumn