I recently had the chance to show a small sample of my photographs to four different reviewers at a photography curation event, an opportunity that presented itself through an unexpected twist of fate. That twist is its own story. But the story that’s been tumbling around inside of me like river rocks in a polisher lies with two reviewers and their opposing perspectives — perspectives I have held at different times — and how both are correct, neither is right, and the truth lies elsewhere altogether.
I showed them the image above. My younger daughter is looking eastward into the sun before she and her sister make the long slog up that steep volcanic cylinder cone in Lassen National Park, a cone flattened only by the wide angle of my lens. I love this image for its Wes Anderson feel — a sparse, moon-like landscape with the remains of a tree slowly being absorbed back into the earth; my daughter’s red shirt and confident stance, her left hand on hip and right hand shading her eyes as she peers into the bright sunlight. What does she see? I love how she anchors the trail with her presence even as the path is pulling her, pulling all of us, into the blue that lies just around that curve at the top. And, imperceptible to the eye without magnification, I marvel at the tiny humans near the top, leaning into the steep climb of the future.
The first reviewer, a museum curator at a prestigious university, praised the image for the way human and land inform one another, as well as for its quirkiness and how quirkiness itself says something meaningful about humanity in relation to land. The second reviewer, a director of a well-known environmental organization, kept putting her hand over my daughter. At one point she said, “I would like this image more without a human in it.” Oh, indeed? For years I avoided making landscape images with people in them, agreeing with her that the land was somehow better without us. I then began to wonder if my love of this particular human in the image, my own flesh and blood, was blinding me to the singular beauty and significance of this inactive volcano which against all odds was generating new life, albeit in a span of time extending far longer than any human family has ever existed? Did my change in perspective from believing that land without humans is ‘better’ or more ‘pure’ to believing that land with humans is more compelling and honest mean I was on some kind of slippery slope into, what, bidding on a parcel next to the park and opening a gift shop to sell stuffed bears? Or had I finally come to understand that love of land and humans is one?
I pondered and mused, polishing the rocks within. I had to know if I would like the image as the environmentalist imagined it. So I used the AI feature in my software, which removed my daughter from the scene with one click of a button. The scary fact of such technology is not the point of this story, although it could be. My point here is about the truth: the image doesn’t matter. It could exist or not, have a human figure or not, be seen or unseen, be altered by AI or not. Who really cares? But my daughter — her body, her mind, her heart, the sound of her voice, her very presence in this time and place? Nothing, nothing can erase her, not even time, and especially not AI. She’s on the trail. She is leaving her own trail. She is looking into the sun. She is climbing toward the blue. She is rounding the corner. The world changes by her very presence within it, as it is changed by us all. And I am standing here with camera in hand admiring her.