I took this photograph a few years ago, and I didn’t care much for it at the time. I had some idea of what a picture that included fog should look like, and this didn’t meet that expectation. So I shunted it aside.
I came across it yesterday and had new thoughts about it. My main thought is that expectations get in the way of experience.
Back to the photo: it has feeling, which I missed at first. The very oddness of the tree silhouetted against the weak sun that turned me off now triggers the opposite reaction. Maybe the tree is sad in whatever ways trees are sad: perhaps it’s lofty ambitions thwarted, perhaps it’s a comical tree and quite happy despite it’s strange shapes. But the fog laughs at all of this: dominating the view, making the tree stand out, no place to hide in a medium that hides everything it can (the fog, that is).
The texture of the grass, its lack of much of a green color: this picture’s claim on my emotions comes almost entirely from how everything is squelched. I can fee the pressure of it, the non-conformity going at the eye like a stark realization about the the past—that is was nothing like what memory insists, only better.
And maybe the tree just reminds me of my own feelings after so many months of isolation and low-grade fear of infection. More likely, the truth is simply unknowable, and the picture makes me want to try to understand anyway. That is art, in a nutshell.