I have written before about fog and minimalism and sworn not to write about it anymore. Yet I keep taking the exact same photographs: roads with no visible end, trees stripped to silhouettes, a lone streetlamp looking like a Cyclops’s squinting eye.
But I’m not sure these pictures are minimalist, exactly.
Minimalism is a deliberate removal of the unnecessary. But fog is not as fussy. It’s indiscriminate. First, it erases the distance and then goes to work on the middle ground, leaving only a few things behind: the curb, the black shape of a tree, the painted line in the asphalt.
A place wrapped in fog is harder to read. That is exactly what I like about photographing it. A well-lit street tells you what it is for. It leads somewhere specific. The houses have addresses, the trees belong to a neighborhood. But not in the fog. In the fog, those explanations vanish.
A road becomes a pair of pale lines fading into nothingness. A streetlamp feels like a transmission from another planet. The ordinary doesn’t become magical, just temporarily unavailable.
Shooting in black and white helps with this, though I don’t use it because I romanticize the past or because color is somehow less serious. Color is practical: green leaves, yellow lights, red brake lights, wet pavement. Black and white asks the eye to work differently. It shifts the question from “what is that?” to “where’s the light, and what exactly is it doing?”
The cinematographer The Last Picture Show Robert Surtees once said that in black and white, “if you want a shadow, you’ve got to put it there.” That feels right, even if you’re framing a shot on an iPhone. There’s no color left to separate the world for you, so a shadow has a job to do. So does a patch of gray. So does the small flare around a streetlamp.
Fog has always known this. In Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, mist makes the forest feel like a place where a sense of direction has broken down. Joel Coen uses black and white to do something similar in The Tragedy of Macbeth. As Coen noted, it lets the mind “fill in the blank parts.” Fog doesn’t just add atmosphere. It helps create the entire scene.
That might be the difference between a photograph OF fog and a photograph that USES fog. The first simply records the weather. The second lets the weather build the world.
I like that these images refuse to settle into a single mood. They are bucolic, sure, but they create a world that’s a little out of this world. Quiet, but not exactly peaceful. A field is still a field. A road is still a road. Yet, for a few minutes, neither one wants to be fully known.
Maybe that isn’t minimalism after all. Maybe it is simply a refusal to explain itself.
The photograph gives us a few lights, a few bare branches, lots of gray. And it asks us to deal with what cannot be seen.
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’Til next time.
ak
www.framingthestory.com
