"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop."
--Auguste Rodin, 1878

Rebroadcast this week, the "Time" episode of Radiolab* covers the event that prompted the Rodin quote above, the Leland Stanford/Eadward Muybridge experiment that leapt camera technology and techniques forward and prompted the accelerated development of motion pictures in the late 19th century.

The thing is, though Rodin can be excused for defending his craft against new and threatening competition from photographic images, there's little in my mind to distinguish theoretically the striving realism of Rodin's sculpture from the selective and crafted photographs produced by early, complexly constructed camera equipment.

A hundred and thirty years later though, I've got a picture machine that fits in the pocket of my dungarees and also rings the switchboard operator and also plays my phonograph records. Admittedly, consumer technology has removed much of the artistry and craft from our visual production, and this is almost definitely something to lament. Qualitative change, it seems, can happen gradually.

But: if I had to assemble a stable tripod and step under a big black hood thing, or if I had to purchase and replace emulsion film after every 24 shots, this laptop certainly wouldn't contain more than 2000 images from the last three months alone.

Costs! Benefits!

So! While not every photo you'll see here belongs in a gallery, just about everything worth posting will reveal and illustrate some "real" and "reliable" experiences now etched on my mind. And that's something.

Above is a herd of bison, some as big as the car we're driving, leisurely crossing a busy British Columbian section of the Alaska Highway, which stretches the roughly 1500-mile distance from Fort Nelson, BC to Fairbanks, AK.




*Listen to the episode, from Radiolab's first season, here. Then listen to the 35-odd other episodes they've produced since 2005. It is time well spent on learning.