A Good Walk by Paul.Butzi

A Good Walk Paul Butzi

Snoqualmie Valley Press, Carnation, Washington

Copyright ÂŠ 2008 Paul Butzi All rights reserved. No part of this book my be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical or electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review First Edition Hardcover Edition ISBN x-xxxx-xxxx-x Softcover Edition ISBN x-xxxx-xxxx-x Library of Congress Catalog Card Number XX-XXXXX Printed in the United States of America

About this book In November, 2007 I visited my cousin, Curt Laumann. A musician of considerable skill, Curt told me that he’d recorded a solo album. What’s more, he’d written, performed, and recorded all the music for the solo album in one month, when he participated in National Solo Album Month. I was amazed. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of tackling such a big project in such a time limited way. I started to think hard about what a similar effort for photographer might be. It didn’t take me long to realize that as a solo album is to a musician, a solo photo book is to a photographer. I started to wonder if it was possible to do an entire photo book in one month - make the photographs, do all the editing, write the text, do the layout - all in 31 days. In January, 2008, I floated the idea of a Solo Photo Book Month (or SoFoBoMo) on my blog. The response took me by surprise. It turns out there were a lot of photographers out there who were just waiting for a good excuse to take a try at doing a photo book. And it turned out that a lot of folks agreed that the constraints imposed by doing the entire thing in a month might make it more fun, not less. The prevailing sentiment was that one month didn’t give you enough time to worry about details; you’d just have to plow ahead, making decisions as you went. No one thought the books that resulted would represent anything like the best possible efforts of the photographers, but everyone seemed to think that, having one book under your belt, you’d be that much more likely to tackle a bigger project outside the confines of SoFoBoMo. This book is my SoFoBoMo 2008 book.

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A Good Walk

I started out this project in my usual free form way. I thought I’d go for walks with Kodak, my Golden Retriever, and take the camera along. I reasoned that I’d make a lot of photos of what I saw while on these walks, and it would all be very easy. I even thought I might try to take a photo or two of the dog, and see if those photos fit into the landscape photos somehow. But that notion didn’t last long. Each time Kodak and I took a walk, I’d copy the images off the memory card and look at them, and with each day’s take I’d discover that the project was no longer what I thought it had been before. In the end, it ended up being not so much about what I saw during our walks together, but more about the lessons I learned by watching Kodak being a dog in the landscape. I’m a landscape photographer because I like to use photography as a tool to figure things out. I want to understand what processes are at work in the landscape, and photography is a great way for me to do that. When I started out, I thought that I probably wouldn’t learn much about about the landscape from this project, because I thought the dog would be a distraction. I was wrong. Everything I learned about the landscape during this project, I learned from my dog.

Kodak is a Golden Retriever. Like most Goldens, Kodak is sometimes goofy, always friendly, perpetually curious, and always ready for an adventure. In Kodak’s world, however, an adventure doesn’t need to be on the scale of Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic. Kodak is perfectly happy with adventures along the lines of riding in the car down to town to get the mail. Or, better yet, taking a walk along our fairly lengthy rural driveway. So that’s where Kodak and I started. The famous photographer Minor White once commented “If he (a photographer) were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that.” Amusingly, Kodak’s registered name is “Beckwith’s Minor White”, something of an inside photograper’s joke based on the fact that Kodak had lots of blond marking when he was a pup. Beckwith’s Minor White the dog very much agrees with Minor White the photographer. And the lesson for me was that a dog on a walk is a perfect example of being in a state of sensitized empathy to everything. No detail is too small to be appreciated. A dog doesn’t ask “What should I look at?” A dog asks “What should I look at first?”

When Kodak and I moved on and started taking walks down in the valley below our home, I noticed some subtle changes. One change was that in an larger, open space, he still spends time checking out small details and interesting spots, but he also starts taking in the landscape in the broader sense. The prevailing breeze up the valley brings smells I can detect - smoke from a woodstove or a slash fire, the smell of manure spread on fields. But for a dog, that same wind seems to bring thousands of stories from far away.

People think of the landscape as consisting of the land, and we tend to think of water as a force that acts on and shapes the landscape. It seems that to Kodak, it’s all one thing. He’ll happily walk through the wet marshy areas, stand in the water, even swim if that’s what seems appropriate. Getting wet isn’t a problem to him; it’s just one more way of experiencing the landscape.

In my mind, I’d always thought of studying the landscape as one thing, and playing as another thing. Like the distinction between land and water, that’s a distinction that Kodak doesn’t make. Playing in the landscape is an essential part of his direct experience approach to learning. Kodak is a Golden Retriever. An essential part of play is running around and acting goofy.

One of the things Kodak taught me right away was that it was more fun taking a walk together than it was if each of us separately took parallel walks. I’d be photographing some detail, and Kodak would come over to see what was so interesting. Sometimes, Kodak would seem to say “Come look at this. Isn’t this great?”

Despite my best efforts to see the landscape through Kodak’s eyes, he often spends time exploring spots that confuse me. I look at the sign. He looks behind it. In any given scene, I’m focusing on one thing, and Kodak’s focusing on something else. I often thought he was missing the exciting stuff. I’ve little doubt that he was thinking I was missing the exciting stuff.

Toward the end of the process of making the photographs for this book, I noticed an interesting trend. I was making fewer and fewer photos of Kodak, and fewer photos of the landscape that didn’t include Kodak. Instead I was coming home, more and more, with photographs of the landscape that included Kodak as an element in that landscape. “I’ve seen photos like this before,” I thought. There was a set of photos where a red couch was plopped into different places. A friend of mine did a set of landscape photos that each included a translucent glass Japanese fishing float. But these felt different. Kodak was included, but not as an outside element that happened, somehow, to be inside the frame. Instead he seemed to be an integral part of the landscape.

In forensics, there’s something known as Locard’s Exchange Principle. Simply put, it says that whenever someone visits a scene, they leave something they brought with them behind, and they take away with them something from the scene. Because Kodak’s style of interaction with the landscape is so enthusiastic and participatory, he left behind a lot of dog hair. I left behind, somewhere, a 77mm black plastic lens cap. Both of us got pretty muddy. I brought home a lot of photographs. The important things Kodak and I left behind and brought home don’t show up directly in photographs.

A SoFoBoMo 2008 Book