We pulled over at the beckoning of a nondescript sign that said Wildlife Management Area, and this is what we found. I am fully embracing the assignment for my online photo class to make landscape pictures using my 50 mm lens.
So many go around hoping to influence or create something that lasts an eternity, when the goal should really be to enter the eternal through the gateway of the everyday.
—James Crews, on Allowed to be Ordinary
Vernacular landscape incorporates spatial structures intimately associated with regional environments, agricultural production, and rural life.
From Sage Rerference:
Vernacular landscapes, sometimes termed ordinary landscapes, are the surfaces of everyday life that we see all around us and that are created and re-created daily. Cultural geographers study vernacular landscapes to understand the lives of ordinary people who live in those landscapes. Ordinary landscapes take the form of everyday places such as parking lots, tree-shaded suburbs, trailer parks, or a patchwork of fields in Midwestern U.S. farmlands. They are lived in and are continuously changing.
A vernacular landscape is the combination of natural and human structures in the context of ordinary people's lives.
I’ve just begun a new online class taught by Paul Sanders in which students use one lens, a 50mm, for an entire year. The first assignment is to make landscape pictures. This is NOT my strength. I started practicing today with more traditional landscape views, but really I’m much more interested in vernacular landscape, so that will likely be my primary direction. We’ll see how it goes.
And you can view it here!
For my husband, Dave, forever and always. And for Zachary and Jacob, the brightest flowers in my garden.
James Crews shared his beautiful poem, A Friend’s Voice, in his newsletter today. I love how the poem describes the gentle joy of being called honey or sweetheart by a friend. I do this, call my loved ones by these old-fashioned terms of endearment. And I melt when someone calls me the by the same.
James goes on to explain:
Who doesn’t want to feel valued by a someone willing to ask all the right questions so that, for hours and even days after, we feel more seen, known, and valued by another? If we are lucky enough to have a friend like this, we must not only keep them close, but also tend that relationship as we would a garden that helps to feed us and keep us alive. What else is a friendship if not a garden that can sustain us even in the leanest of times?
I would add . . . if we are lucky enough to have family like this, and I do.
I have friends like this, too. Teresa, thank you for sitting with me as I shared the mock-up of this book, turning the pages one-by-one and asking all the right questions.
This is the feeling I love most and the one I try to extend to others—to feel more seen, known, and valued. In the end, I think this is mostly what making these photo books is about. It’s not about money or praise or accomplishment, it’s about refusing to hold back my love.
