01-01-07-n°0056.
Christian Erroi, 2008.

Last summer, while I was living for a moment in Chelsea, Christian Erroi had a show up at Michael Mazzeo. The pieces on display – from his series “As Above” – were both exquisitely light and unusually solid.

The photographs, at the simplest level, were composed of pieces of vegetation, fragments of vines, leaves, stalks, tumbleweeds. Erroi had edited them down until only a slender element or two remained. One weed rolling alone, two wisteria vines reaching toward each other. He printed these on transparent media and mounted them on sheets of clear acrylic, perhaps an inch thick. The resulting slabs rested upright on wooden bases, ethereal trophies for a fragmentary game.

By applying this process Erroi created objects that were pure in their abstraction, yet more concrete than the originals, more solidly real than photographs typically have any claim to be.

Start with the moment that the image was captured by the camera. In addition to a silhouetted trunk curving across the frame, there was background – other trees, grass, vines, a fence, shadows, sky, the world in its usual complexity. All of this was there for capturing, for reproducing, for enhancing, for displaying. Erroi chose to focus in, to remove everything that could be removed, until one compositional element was left. This is a move from scene to object, a slide along the spectrum of abstraction away from image and towards ideal; this is a removal of detail to increase the conceptual power of what’s left.

04-27-08-n°5368.
Christian Erroi, 2008.

Next the printing of the image on a transparent medium. Instead of the artificial projected white of the computer screen, and instead of the quiet reflected white of a usual print, the abstracted image was now surrounded by clearness. In other words, by whatever actually happened to be behind it. This is a return to the world. In place of the erased, forgotten, ignored context of the original physical trunk, we now have our own context – the immediate context of the photograph. This is a move from object back to scene, and this is a strengthening of the image, since it has now taken on physical form; but this is also an addition of detail that increases the trunk’s conceptual power, and too a further slide along the spectrum of abstraction towards ideal.

And then the transparent medium, mounted on a thick piece of acrylic, itself also transparent, held vertically in the air by a small block of wood. The clarified image now took on weight. It had substance. You could hold it as you never could the living tree. The simplified trunk was framed by the clear edge of the plastic – an edge which was barely there. The transparency of the plastic thus both included and excluded the world around it, defining the photograph’s context without imposing upon it. This is a demarcation of limits. Not movement towards ideal or specific, but a chosen stopping point. A captured moment made physical, tangible indefinitely, but precisely delimited in its abstract representational powers. One small piece of the world, examined, truncated, clarified, and given new life, in a new form that captures the essence of the old.

Chelsea, New York / Ashland, Oregon.
June 27, 2010.

In Hannah Hinchman’s wonderful book on seeing the details of the world, A Trail Through Leaves, she wrote:

Thoreau, with his insatiable appetite for phenomena, relished and reported on the unmeasurable as well as the measurable. The twentieth century has produced no scientific literature about the way light and wind work on the surface of a pond, for instance, unless the adherents of chaos theory are at work on it. There are no papers published about it, no seminars, no grants given to study it. And because no named category exists for that and similar phenomena, most of us don’t see them.

No scientific literature perhaps, but Edward Tufte has proposed a new type of high resolution data flow graphic based precisely on the way light and wind work on the surface of a pond, called the wavefield.

Wavefields.
Edward Tufte, 2007.

As far as I can tell, wavefields have never been been used for data display – other than to display the data of which they actually consist, which is to say what the surface of the pond behind Tufte’s house in Connecticut looks like sometime in the early summer.

But perhaps, as Hinchman suggests, that data is enough. Perhaps capturing, displaying, understanding, representing the way light and wind interact with the surface of a pond is a hard enough problem on its own. Perhaps we need to study that.

This isn’t scientific literature, of course, and it’s not measurement either, nor chaotic theory. This is careful observation of complex phenomena, presented clearly, accurately, and precisely, in a way that removes distraction and concentrates the attention on the specific phenomenon at hand. This is, once again, that point where abstraction and concrete detail are the same.

Ashland, Oregon.
June 14, 2010.

Bethany, Connecticut.
January, 2005.

When I began taking photographs again, in 2005, one of my first subjects was sunlight through winter beech leaves.

Much of the Eastern forest consists of American Beech (Fagus grandifolia), often in conjunction with Sugar Maples, and so they form a central part of my formative landscape. And for years I have been fascinated by their principle quirk: Marcescence.

The beech is deciduous, they say, but in an odd fashion: Beech leaves are often marcescent – which is to say that they die and brown and shrivel in the fall like proper deciduous leaves, but they don’t fall off. Instead, they linger through the winter until new spring leaves take their place.

This habit – and its precise causes are unknown – makes the beech and its translucent leaves a defining element of the Northeastern forest in winter.

Bethany, Connecticut.
January, 2005.

The taxonomic family within which botanists place the beech, and to which it lends its name, is Fagaceae. And a large and wonderful family it is, including the prolific oak and tanoak genera (Quercus and Lithocarpus), the chinkapins (Castanopsis and Chrysolepis), and the chestnuts (Castanea). Fagus even gives its name to its botanical order: Fagales, whose members are distributed all over the world. But of Fagus proper, only grandifolia and mexicana are native to North America, and none are native west of Wisconsin.

Earlier this month I was again in New England, and found myself once more captivated by sunlight through beech leaves. The light came through in drips and drops this time, revealing the lush yellow greenness of the young foliage.

Ashland, Oregon.
June 13, 2010.

Bethany, Connecticut.
June, 2010.

As once on a cliff I found a near-dead
fish; and when, in sudden and blind
fear, I threw her back to the sea
and watched, not yet numb, and heard
her body land heavy on the rock.

As today small tufts of light played
in the air where the morning sun
warmed them, possible worlds
twisting in each other's eddies,
circling, dancing, no different

than the actual. Not a green demon
out of place on the path, but
two raspberries in place of one,
women instead of men, life.
The broad world felt real

because it is. And the osprey that stepped
lightly off its perch to fall over me,
the lake, the earth no less concrete
than the bark of the tree now felled,
the voice of the child not born.

A leveling of the field, whereby
nothing is changed, no law
altered, no definition recast.
Time rises up, becomes fundamental,
and in becoming ceases to be.

The infinities might seem too great
and finally trivial, but they branch
only to come again together,
as the world chases its own tail,
passing through itself

as ripples
from my boat reflect off the shore
to rock me gently the moment
I stop. As once I chose to kiss her,
and still that moment shapes the world.

My other self did not - and his world,
is it more beautiful than this?
As once the earth was a desert island
and still beautiful, and as it will be
again. Seen from here,

laws are only
what is and what might be, boundaries
fixed hastily around the edge of all worlds
and drawn tighter in our minds,
loose nets to catch the real.

As the sow in her pen can know only
its rough wooden shape.
I lay on my back and watched the sky
come and go and from nowhere
birds were above me, eagles floating high.

I looked through them as easily
as I didn't look far enough.
As the morning water reflects
my face as I can't see it.
As last August's blackberries exist

wholly independent of those the birds
eat outside my window, which is to say
not at all. And really, all this talk
of worlds, possible, actual, real,
is just another trick

to multiply the beauty,
to take what is and what is already
marvelous and elevate it to the point
of miraculous by simple repetition,
again, simple alteration. The simplest

idea: this might as well be that,
ripe tomorrow as today, so why not
both, simultaneous and rich.
Occam's razor applied and inverted
and applied again. A giving

of depth. The kingfisher flying north
is left unchanged, but this glimpse
of the promise of the possible,
of the other that is not, allows
us to see what surrounds what is.

When does a metaphor grow
too heavy? Two dead fish
as easily as one, decomposition
as growth, pain. As once
I kissed her. The present, the living

is given life by the past, the dead,
so that it too may fall behind, die,
and cease to be. And if we could
step back again, we might see that
even time is just a facet of itself.

As once was once and is now
no less than as once will be.
Time is our explanation, our almighty
rhythm. But think of time the immaterial
and the place of fixity becomes clear.

Or equally the lack of fixity, that lack
which we feel so sharp in the fall
of a star, the moon's crescent setting,
that lack against which we fight
so strongly that it - the absence,

our pain, the joint struggle -
has come to define us, to shape us
from birth, that first fading
from permanence. As we slipped under
the bridge the night blue heron

was not there in the reeds, was
lifting up through the thick hazed
air, was not there. A ghost
of necessary beauty. The family
of ducks looked no less surprised,

no less humbled than we felt.
That great bird's blue weight
shifted the world's focus; possibility
poured through her wings into actuality,
worlds opening, splitting, merging

into one, one world momentarily
doing the work of all, one bird
carrying the beauty, until
she slid between the trees,
out of sight,

and time caught her breath.
The pulse resumed. The actual became again
merely normal, the real became again
the perceived, or perhaps the reverse.
And the crabapples now fatten;

the raspberries grow ripe on the bush;
and the goslings are almost grown.
As yesterday we slaughtered the hens;
as tomorrow we leave and others come.
Late summer, and the pace quickens.

Plymouth, Vermont.
August, 2003.

Falling leaf polychrome map.
Fritz Horstman, 2009.

Late last year, Fritz Horstman posted a new project of his: Falling Leaf Diagrams. The concept is simple, the execution is elegant, and the results are beautiful.

The concept: Take a video of leaves falling. For each frame, trace the location of the leaf onto paper. Thereby accumulate a static record of the leaf's motion through space, on paper.

The execution: Two drawings, one in color, one monochrome. The monochrome drawing – thin black lines on white paper – appears to trace the patterns of five leaves, each beginning its fall from a separate point in space. The polychrome drawing – thicker lines, each its own color – traces eighteen leaf paths, each beginning from the same point and diverging almost immediately.

The results: Intricate twisting diagrams, revealing shifting leaf aspects, the depth of the landscape, the complexity of motion of a simple object. Insight into a seasonal pattern, an evolved survival mechanism, a mundane event.

These drawings look like choreographic plans, seen from above, somewhat abstractly marking out the movements of a company of dancers. Starting from one end of the stage, they shimmy most of the way across, passing each other lightly. The speed of their motion is implied by the spacing of the lines, and certain moments of line–crossing chaos hint at complexities of motion hidden by the transfer of their movements to paper.

Like a plan, but Fritz's word "map" is more accurate, since this is a diagram of what actually is, not what is intended. There is no choreography. The dance exists only so long as the leaves are falling; as soon as they reach the ground the dance is over and the dancers are gone.

This is a map of what actually was. By focusing on two elements only – the aspect of each leaf and its position in space and time – and abstracting away all others, Fritz has revealed much about the scene that would not otherwise have been visible.

There is no air here, on these pieces of paper, but you can see it implicitly, even almost feel it in places, as you trace your eyes down the leaf paths, observing how the turning of each successive line happens in consort with the arcing and curving of the entire path. There is no ground, yet each leaf line ends at a different place within the unstated perspective. There is no time, no minutes and seconds, though the paper itself has been transformed into time's axis, a flattening of all four dimensions into two, with no loss of information. There is no time in the larger sense either, no months and years, no seasons, no weather, no climate, no life, no growth, no transformation.

And there is, in fact, no leaf – but your mind comes alive with curled, browned, dried out leaves, dropped mid–fall, the changing lengths of day, the changing temperatures, the fading chlorophyll, and the resulting hormonal changes within the tree itself all working towards the moment of abscission, when the cells of the stem part and the leaf falls, to twist and turn through the air, spinning down towards the ground.

Ashland, Oregon.
May 3, 2010.

Fairlee, Vermont.
April, 2009.

Cut from the bush outside
which still flowers
despite the cold date
and arranged in an old mottled vase,
the two clusters of petals
appear as one, one who fades
from light white green
to pink, pale red.
Brightens.
In one smooth curve
from right to left
without motion, that splendid
continuity of the living.
Though these now die
in place, their two trimmed stems
bound together for effect.
Movement of another sort,
perpendicular to the first,
or, better yet, of another dimension
entirely, that fading into dryness,
continuous and bright.

Hanover, New Hampshire.
Fall, 2002.

Bethany, Connecticut.
April, 2009.

Late into the night of January 2nd, 2009, I skated out onto the pond at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and began to photograph the ice.

The sky was clouded over and lit poorly by moonlight and light pollution from New Haven. The trees around the pond were so dark as to be almost indistinguishable. The ice itself, covered by a thin layer of snow, glowed uniformly pale white.

My camera was mounted on a tall lightweight tripod. I set the tripod on the ice in front of me, lined up the camera with the pond horizon, and began skating.

The result was a series of photographs that capture something of the abstract beauty of a winter pond at night. Above is the first of that series. More will be forthcoming, with any luck.

A little more than a month later, R. and I traveled to Maine, to spend a weekend winter camping with Alexandra & Garrett Conover. On our way back to Brooklyn we stopped at Moosehead Lake and spent part of a morning wandering around its vastness and dodging snow machines.

Again, the sky was clouded over and the ice was covered in snow. But though the effect was similar, the quality of the light was substantially different.

Earlier that month, on a drive from Brooklyn to New Castle Pennsylvania, I began a series of abstractions – attempts to capture certain facets of the experience of traveling across the land. On the far right is the first of these.

On our drive up to North Woods Ways, in Willimantic, I continued work on the series. The second of this series of experimental abstracts is on the right.

The first ice picture, from the Albers Foundation, is an abstraction of light by virtue of collecting it over time, while the vantage point is in motion. These photographs can be described in exactly the same way, but are nonetheless quite distinct.

Both these photographs – taken from a moving car – and the ice photograph – taken while being propelled by a moving skater – are the product of linear motion along the surface of the earth. The path of motion is relatively steady and straight, in all cases, but the important difference is that the trade route photographs capture the world at a right angle to the motion and the ice photograph captures it directly in front.

In both cases, the result is an accumulation of light. In that sense, then, these photographs are more precise than snapshots would have been. However, that accumulation of light, through its accumulation of detail, produces also a certain abstraction. More precision yields a broader perspective, images of, respectively, a place over time, and motion through time.

In April I was back in Vermont. On a walk through woods I know well, I explored a different technique for capturing a specific place in ways simultaneously abstract and precise. The result was this tetraptych of beech leaves, and trunks, and one little conifer.

These forests composed of American beech and sugar maple were once dominant throughout the northeastern part of the United States. Now, climate scientists predict that they will soon be completely displaced by more southerly tree varieties, and that the sugar maple will not be able to survive.

In May, R. and I left Brooklyn, and in June we left New York. In July we left the northeast entirely, and spent the summer and fall traveling. Now we are in southern Oregon, and I’m catching up on old photographs and other postponed work.

Over the next few months Hypsography will continue to expand and shift. I have a tremendous backlog of projects to finish, and I'm starting new ones all the time. Keep your dial locked here.

And thanks to Dalton Rooney, for the excellent photographs, and for the impetus to write this summary and thus get this new news section moving along. Happy new year.

Ashland, Oregon.
January 1, 2010.

Hoh Rain Forest, Washington.
March, 2009.

My name is Christopher Boone. Above is a photograph I took of myself, with a fallen Douglas-fir I met on the Hoh River Trail. The tree died of natural causes. More about that later.

Hypsography is an experimental project of mine — an ongoing investigation into patterns and processes. An exploration into how to represent phenomena that are fundamentally time-based in forms that are accurate, yet not themselves intrinsically tied to change over time.

In other words: An attempt to be precisely real, while preserving the abstract. To put it slightly differently, Hypsography is a field guide to the world.

Currently I live and work in Ashland, a small town on the Oregon side of the Klamath–Siskiyou bioregion. The water here is clean, there are mountains on both sides of the valley, and it rains too much.

The World Wildlife Fund describes this area as “one of Earth’s most extraordinary expressions of temperate biodiversity”. They also summarize the bioregion’s conservation status as “critical / endangered”.

The Siskiyou and Cascade Mountains.
R.H. Whittaker, Ecological Monographs, 1960.
Volume 30, number 3, page 280.

For more information, please email me using the address available on the site. To subscribe to Hypsography’s updates, you can add the site’s feed – feeds.hypsography.com/hypsography-news – to your feed reader. Or, if you prefer, you can subscribe to updates via email.

Ashland, Oregon.
November, 2009.

There – tenth photograph in – at last –
a man, a man on a camel.
Mountains came first,
young stone massive and sharp,
but this is about us
and we must be here.
In this game water trumps stone,
like sand and wind
carved holes through which stars shine.
Once we too – in the ninth –
carved rock; and in the tenth
we carved it and piled it high
into pyramids so men could ride by.
Some shaped dirt into steps –
not so long lasting
but better for rice, for now.
Thirteen and here we come,
men, flesh, then children
and the masses: Hong Kong
tenements, tropical skyscrapers,
Indonesian women rolling my cigarettes,
Polish men smelting your steel.
But all the places are the same.
Poverty and hard work,
a little girl behind bars.
One boat stranded high on the shore.
A crumbling temple, stone statues without heads –
where we are, where've we gone –
a mosque, two cathedrals, and cracked statuary.
A clay army lined and stony-faced,
statuary newly reborn.
Forty-seven: another army,
flesh and rockets.
Forty-nine: skulls without jaws
piled – no, heaped – and bones behind.
Heaps of us, as before people
picked through refuse
brought in by dump truck
and turned over by bulldozer.
Birds and cattle and pigs and goats
but mainly us,
scavenging what we left behind
and carrying it away
in sturdy wicker baskets.
Some waste is better than others
I suppose, trash than skulls
or a thousand burnt-out trucks
lit orange by burning oil
piped to the surface to burn
blacken and smoke.
In the fifty-fourth we come back,
but I don't know any nuns,
any holy men or dervishes,
and you don't finger prayer beads
before rows of burning candles.
The clouds move fast,
streak by; the stars burn slow
overhead; the tree is already dead
and the rock cannot move.

Wilder, Vermont.
Spring, 2002.

Horstman Pond, Connecticut.
January, 2009.

Moosehead Lake, Maine.
February, 2009.

From Brooklyn to Willimantic.
February, 2009.

From Brooklyn to New Castle.
February, 2009.

Chihuahuan Desert, Texas.
November, 2007.

Chihuahuan Desert, Texas.
November, 2007.