Two Days in Montseny, One Lens

In November I took the bus north to Montseny with one camera and one thirty-five lens. I had begun to notice that I was photographing the same four corners of the city, and that the city had begun to look identical in every frame. I wanted a day where nothing was happening in front of me.

The fog came down at nine and stayed. Beech woods, wet leaves, a sound of something moving that turned out to be water. I made eleven frames in six hours. In the city I can make eleven in twenty minutes, and nine of them are worth nothing. These were worth nothing too, but in a different way.

Looking at Nothing

A photographer I admire once said the forest is the hardest subject because it has no edges. He was right. There is no gesture, no decision, no face about to change. You have to build the frame yourself, out of trunks and mist, and then admit that the frame is arbitrary.

In the city the subject finds you. In the forest you have to earn it, and most days you don't.

I stayed the night in a small hostel with a wood stove and no signal. I ate bread and cheese standing up, listened to the radio, and slept ten hours. In the morning the fog was gone and the mountain looked ordinary and enormous.

Down the Hill

The bus back took an hour and a half. I sat with the camera bag on my knees and watched the suburbs assemble themselves — warehouses, football pitches, laundry on the lines. I made three frames through the window that I already knew would be bad, and I made them anyway.

When the prints dried I pinned two of them above the desk. They are not good photographs. They are quiet, though, and after a week I understood that I had gone up there to learn how to stand still, which is the whole job, and the part nobody teaches you.