My sister and I ventured into the nearby forest, as we often did, playing games, looking for interesting plants or berries to use for make-believe meals. And if it was raspberry and blackberry season, then we’d actually have a real meal off the wild plants. We walked along an old path, mostly overgrown and shadowed by tall pine trees, and discovered a rusted-out frame of a car, long abandoned on a road that never was. How it got to be in the middle of the woods, I will never know. We continued our exploration, passing random bags of trash, and coming to a small clearing with scattered sand on the ground.
The afternoon sun intermittently broke through the branches and needles, casting fractured pieces of light along the soft forest floor. The light was warm and bright, contrasting sharply with the cool shadows. And there we saw it, the world between the woods–a fantastic civilization of old plastic cars, toy trucks, gravel roads, and rock-and-twig houses. Like some crude depiction of Armageddon, the byproduct of some child’s imagination lay abandoned and forgotten in the middle of nowhere.
I bent down and picked up a broken car, feeling its light weight in my hand. Who had made this world? Why had they carefully gathered all these toys, crafted all these houses and roads, and created this unreal land? Why did they leave it? I felt a sense of chills crawl up my arm as I stood in that forsaken place.
I don’t exactly know why this discovery piqued my curiosity so much–whether it was the remoteness of the location, the ethereal cast of the light, or my own inner imagination’s longings–I will never be able to say. But I still wonder about it. That moment of discovery…of realizing so vividly that another world existed outside of mine…that there was more to the story than my own point of view–it still sits with me today.
As children, it’s easy to be curious. Many experiences are new and fresh, and we readily greet them with wonder. When we were children, we could embellish the ordinary with a bit of extraordinary simply by using our imaginations. But as we grew older, it became easy to lose a sense of wonder about the world. Now we stop asking questions because we think we already know the answers. We look for the expected, never finding the great discovery that’s just beyond our point of view.
As photographers and artists, that’s a dangerous place to be in. When we lose the ability to be curious, our work will become boring and expected. We will be unable to see our subjects as anything more than our mind’s categorization of them. Conversely, if we can hold onto a sense of wonder about the world, we will be able to keep discovering new things, creating incredible images for our clients.
I of course, have no photo of that world between the woods, just a strongly etched image in my mind. Sometimes, that’s the best kind of photo.
And just in case you are wondering if my sister and I lived wild lives in the forest, don’t worry, we only lived at the dacha in the summertime.
And this photo has nothing to do with the forest, but it was taken during our trip to Scotland last summer, when I got to indulge my sense of curiosity quite a bit.
by mary