A landscape portfolio is an autobiography – written not with words, but with light. It’s a record of the photographer’s life: where we’ve traveled, where we put down roots, and how we see the world. Like any honest memoir, though, it’s probably tinged with some wistfulness. I know mine is, as I reflect on my younger self and think, “If only I knew then what I know now.”
The Paradox of Proximity
Twice I’ve lived in the shadow of world-class landscapes: New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Grand Teton National Park. Proximity is a huge advantage. You can really get to know and understand a place. You see it in every season, in all its moods, and in every sort of condition. Familiarity produces the best photographs.
I’ve never taken that ongoing, open dialogue with a local landscape for granted, because I’ve done my share of relocating. Where I hang my hat has a way of being impermanent. Even so, nearness can breed complacency. There’s a tendency to tell yourself, “I’ll wait for the next storm front to move through,” or “I’ll shoot that lake in the spring.”
Then you move thousands of miles away.
Photographs aren’t just art; they’re physical anchor points to specific eras in our lives. The images I made while living in New England represent a distinct chapter – a period defined by both geographic proximity and a specific stage in my artistic development.
Thankfully I still work there, but the easy access to those landscapes is gone. Now my shoots are scheduled appointments, each one with a limited duration, and long-distance travel is required.
The Illusion of the “Do-Over”
Reviewing older work sometimes conjures up a mix of pride and a bittersweet pang of missed potential. While some of my earlier images have held up quite well over time, others haven’t. The imperfection might have nothing to do with a technical flaw. Often, it’s knowing I’d approach the scene differently now because the artist I am today is not the artist (or the person) I was back then.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a photographer who looks at older work and doesn’t yearn for a time machine. We want to take our hard-earned skill, refined patience, and our current viewpoint and interests, and use them to reinterpret scenes previously captured.
The truth is, we can never truly replicate a scene – even if it the location can be revisited – because nothing in nature remains static, and we are different people now. The imperfect early image is a record of who we were. It is part of our story.
Consider this: if you are lucky enough to return to a place where you captured one of those earlier images, take advantage of the fact that you have evolved artistically. Forget about trying to reproduce something you made earlier; create something better.
The Beauty of the Archive
Those early, sometimes imperfect frames capture something important. They reveal raw curiosity, or the exact moment we fell in love with a covered bridge or a mountain range or a waterfall, or the first time we stumbled on some out-of-the-way nook in the middle of nowhere. They document our relationships with special places.
Our photographs are chronicles of progression as well as constraints: our developing skills, our changing zip codes, our evolving perspective – even our finite time on earth.
Growth requires an imperfect past. You wouldn’t be the photographer you are today without your earlier attempts. Images you look at today with a more critical eye are what ultimately led you to become the artist you are now. Conversely, successful photos you made early on underscore how much you'd already learned and verify that you were on the right track.
Your Unique Story
In any written autobiography, one of the most powerful and universal themes is nostalgia mixed with the clarity of hindsight. Landscape photography operates on that exact same wavelength. Every choice of location, shutter speed, framing, perspective – and on and on – is a chapter of the photographer’s story.
We may look back at our earlier work with a wistful yearning to do it all over again and a longing for places we no longer call home, but the beauty of this visual memoir is that it is still being written. The light changes, the landscapes shift, and we evolve.
Our bodies of work are distinctive, honest accounts of who we are, where we’ve been – and promises of where we are going next.
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