I’m not much for artist’s statements. Maybe I’d like them more if we artists were banned from writing them! As if I really know what I’m doing. But while I may not have answers, I do have some questions.

For starters: Are photos found or made? And what’s the difference between an observer and a creator?

Across all these years, I still find meaning in arranging and rearranging common elements. Maybe it started with crayoned icons like mommy, daddy, house with curling chimney smoke, beaming sun above. Now it’s grasses, rocks, water, mountains, and clouds. Otters. Thrushes. Swallowtails. Pine needles in a shaft of light. Same thing.

Making a world. As if Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond was built to shelter one’s thoughts. Or like Snyder’s riprap, a trail thru cold, polished granite. Then there’s William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow: “No ideas but in things.” Or E.M. Forster’s “Only connect.” The jagged architecture of Pound’s Cantos. And Eliot’s “Fragments I shore against my ruin.”

Modernism. Pieces. Or even worse: The far-off view through the bars of a postmodern prison cell.

Finding a world. What power animates things and makes them real? Maybe the trick is to just get out there enough that they start to tell you. So maybe images are not made…but given? Gifts. What will the tide wash up today?

Again, Thoreau on Mt. Katahdin: “Contact! Contact!

But simple bedrock things are not always so simple to see or to photograph. Maybe I’m writing my own story, too, as I walk amidst theirs. Focus moves back and forth. The camera is a tool that does not aim itself—and really, in a way, it also faces IN.

So maybe these images are both found and made. OK, for now I’m pitching my tent on this middle ground.

Either way, it’s a magical world. And surely there must be something in these dusky woods…? Some meaning writ in things? Do we finally move into the house with the curling smoke?

Well, heck: Let’s see.

By Scott Atkinson

Simple Things

The Other Autumn