Georgia On My Mind

As I missed class Tuesday, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about Terry Tempest Williams book, an Unspoken Hunger (which I had signed by the author by the way!). Instead of boring you with black and white print, I thought I'd offer a more colorful deliniation of what I derived from the text. One of my close friends, Stephanie, is a talented photographer. In my opinion, what makes her photos more captivating than her fellow peers is the fact that she doesn't take photos professionally; on any given day, she'll walk onto Morgan Hill and take photos of the landscape, just because it, for one reaosn or another, moves her emotionally that day. She allows a transparent perspective of nature, her goal being to elicit emotion from the eye of the beholder. My admiration of Stephanie is much like that of William's of Georgia O'Keefe. Williams wrote that O'Keefe had the power to "transform desert landscapes into emotional ones, using color and form to startle the senses. Scale belonged to the landscape of the imagination. When asked by friends if these places really existed, O'Keefe responded with her usual cando 'I simply paint what I see'". (p. 20) Like O'Keefe, Stephanie "paints what she sees", and what she "paints" is what she feels--she just does it with a camera instead of a brush. These are some of her photos: