Texture, Geometry and Life
Fez, Morocco, 2009
I would have given anything to have taken this photo back when I was studying photography at the local college. We were striving for black blacks, white whites and all the shades of gray in between. We wanted texture. We wanted geometry. And we wanted life. How to get life in a photo without a person? You show movement…tree branches waving in the wind, smoke billowing from a chimney or, as in this case, water droplets (from wet hides in the tannery of Fez) hitting the surface of a vat of dye; life could be shown, as one critic pointed out, even by a mote of dust floating on a shaft of light.
Oh, it has taken me a long time to get here! But I got here. That is the important thing. Keep working, keep trying, don’t give up. We can all master any skill we set out to master if we persevere.