I’m pleased and excited to learn about a new Italian translation of Composition & Photography from ApoGeo in Milan. The title sounds sonorous and compelling in Italian: La Compsizione Fotografica: Dare struttura e forma alle immagini.

I am very excited to get the first advance copy of my new book, Composition & Photography. I think this is a beautifully produced book that takes a unique approach to the subject. In keeping with family tradition, Katie Rose is shown here with our new, hot-off-the-press title. The publication date is June 21, 2022. You can pre-order Composition & Photography from the publisher (Rocky Nook) or Amazon.

© Harold Davis

I believe that you can tell a great deal about a book by reading its index. A good index should allow the reader to quickly find what they want to find in a book. To create such an index means understanding both the contents of the book, and also how readers will be using the book.

Click here for the index we’ve created for my new book, Composition & Photography. This index is preliminary, and is subject to revision.

With the index to Composition & Photography we have tried to be genuinely useful to the reader. However, according to a professional indexer who is a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, one should never index one’s own book: “It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work…It’s a shameless exhibition—to the trained eye.”

In honor of World Book Day March 4—Hashtag #WorldBookDay—here are some of our books. Also, tomorrow is #PandemicFU day for me personally as I will be two weeks out from my second vaccination. #2shots2weeks

Some of our books #WorldBookDay © Harold Davis

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Words and writing are fundamental to what it means to be human. Click here to read more.

Harold Davis’s Creative Garden Photography is out now with Rocky Nook.

Click here for Creative Garden Photography on the publisher’s website, here for Creative Garden Photography on Amazon, and here for Harold’s Amazon author page.

Nature versus nurture, er, nature versus vision?

I love being in, and photographing, nature and the wilderness. But on the whole, I subscribe to the philosophy of artist, solographer, and photographer Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890) who wrote “I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.”

Agreed. Even when the visions are of nature. Indeed, if everything comes from nature then Man Ray’s statement is tautologically true. There is no such thing as an artistic depiction of nature, such as a photograph, without a vision of what the image is to be, to convey, and to portray.

Calling Alice © Harold Davis

End of Days © Harold Davis

Related: My “Impossible” album on Flickr; upcoming Finding the Mysterious in Photography webinar, scheduled for October 24, 2020 in time for Halloween. 

Trouble with Tracks © Harold Davis

The Garden of Wilderness

The garden of wilderness
was my heart’s delight:
gray dawn met alpenglow
in the long morning
of deep rivers
and distant mountains.

Windswept timberline tarns;
far away the machines and levers work.

Alas, the mechanism must be mastered,
all the law-and-order and social ranking
step by weary step down to the low lands;

So I came to leave the mountains.

Columbia River Gorge © Harold Davis

Memory

The days spent on the trail
fade in a flurry of miles as we speed
parallel to the mountains on Route 395.

All is forgotten in the exhilarating rush
of dotted white lines and speeds not attained over months on foot.

This compaction recalls memory:
the terrain of years disappears
leaving only peaks and valleys.

At first I am startled by the jolt of “civilization”;
later, recalling the calm of alpine meadows,
the last light on the tall peaks in the evening,
I understand that these memories last longest.

Ladyboot Arch © Harold Davis

Looking at a Map

A topographic map of the wilderness:
the contour lines denote height and evoke
distant valleys and mountains leading by rivers
to unknown forests; enchanted places all.

Alone in the dismal city watching gray snow fall
I envy cartographers and explorers of wild places:
the sun on their backs, the morn on their faces,
nights of brights stars and moon;
the wild, wild wind most of all.

Morning Fog © Harold Davis

Back to the Wilderness

When the gray spider web of the city
wraps its filigree around my heart
and the subway roars in my naked ear
and the lonely cold does its part;

When its been so long that the stars go unseen
and I’ve forgotten to go out and walk;
with phone calls and meetings
and all this empty talk;

It might be that it might be time to go back to the wilderness.

The wind that will blow around me
and the flowers that garland the trail
will make living worthwhile and my days young again.

Death Valley Campsite © Harold Davis

While We Were in the Wilderness

While we were in the wilderness
the sunset of humanity
happened.

We spent so long walking on the trail,
sleeping under the star-encrusted sky,
heeding the call of the marmot and water ouzel,
that we forgot about everyone.

So who knows precisely when it happened,
or what caused it.

We simply came down from the mountains
empty stomachs and badly needing a hot bath
to find: no one.

This could easily be the future, we say:
as we watch the sunset turn red then to blue evening,
distant valleys disappearing in the oncoming night.

Red Dragon Sunset © Harold Davis

Author’s note: I wrote these poems quite a number of years ago during what was obviously not the happiest period of my life. Always, periodic adventures and wilderness walking have been refreshing for me, and solace for my soul. In researching for the upcoming webinar presentation I will be making with William Neill in early September, The Solace of Nature, I remembered this cycle of poetry, and decided to look for the drafts among the many boxes of my papers and art work in our basement. I’ve edited the poems lightly from the original versions, with the advantages that distance in time can sometimes give.

You might also be interested in the webinar we have scheduled for October 3, 2020: Photography and Writing | Using Your Words to Become a Better Photographer.