Essence of Place

From my Graffiti Series (click to enlarge)

Recently, I was in conversation with a fellow photographer friend who had developed a list of places he wanted to visit and photograph before and after his retirement from the workforce.  It was a formidable list consisting of over 400 places.

After reading his list, I commented that I thought he needed to add a challenge to his ambitious to-do list.  That addition was in the form of attempting to make one image of each of those places which would fully represent that particular place.  It is easy to fire off hundreds of images of a national park, scenic area, historic structure, city, etc., creating many, many images covering a noted location, but could one successfully boil down all of those images into just one that was representative of essence of the place in question?

Now there a couple of things to consider about this challenge, as well.  Does one try to capture the essence of a place as the place is generally known by the public or does one try to capture the essence of the location to represent one's own experience in that particular place? 

One could choose either or both.

If nothing else, the exercise of trying to determine if you can capture the essence of a place in a single image, or even the essence of your experience in a particular place, will cause you to critically think about that place in context of what it is or has been to everyone, in the context of historically, culturally, naturally, environmentally, it's role in our society, etc., as well as what it means to you personally, resulting in a far deeper understanding of that place as well as a greater appreciation of its significance.  (Wow! What a sentence!)

Even if you can't capture the place in just one image, you win!  Why?  Your exhaustive thought and contemplative process will result in newfound knowledge and appreciation of the place.

Try it sometime.  Don't take hundreds, tens or even several images of a particular place. Stop, sit, stand, whatever...and just contemplate, look, listen and think about it in every way and see if you can find one vantage point, angle, time of day, movement, action, color, or one aspect of it to represent what that place means to you.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!

Dennis A. Mook

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