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ric caddel wrote <<You read history from it (which is important) but you don't have to actually be part of it (in the sense of randolph/cris's important body dance thread which I hope to come back to at some point). Click. the camera does it. (with big sloppy paintbrushes you can participate more - but usually that's mostly with your medium, not your actual landscape). Remember all those poems where the great - uh - Phil Larkin gets no further to engagement w/ his (one assumes) fellow humans than looking, through a window, or a frame. It's that sense of "right down among 'em" that I get in Niedecker & Clare that I'm interested in. That's the pastoral I want to move forward in.>> A number of things here that have and do greatly interest me. One is the difference between click of the camera and the paint brush *unless you take account of how different they are* all that film being purchased delivering pictures which disappoint - _it doesnt show it really_... you can learn, but many give up or go on repeating mistakes and disappointment.... because the camera does not record what you see - separating what you see from the image your brain receives before filtering i sat through some home videos the other night, trying hard to be interested in someone else's personal narrative and felt like a man in a mask - not being able to see peripherally i was watching a young girl with some birds - offscreen was someone else i hadnt seen in 20 years and i was interested in seeing what she looks like now... but the process was focussed on the child whom i have seen only once and to whom therefore i have no great attachment... the cameraman her father was capturing her on film, whereas the woman with him he was content to leave unrecorded at least on that day - a selective in among em the more you photograph the less what you photograph seems accessible to memory i have hundreds of photographs of specific places i went to mid eighties... a few spark memories... largely not and i find it hard to recall those places without the photographs compared to places since AND before.... before i was less into photographing... since i have learned to control the addiction and my recall is much better i find walking through and sitting in a landscape - motion recollected in tranquillity - and letting the memory build is more effective in getting in among it all than trying to record it you get round the problems of framing by composing with awareness of the frames of course _click of the camera_ is deceptive watching a photographer prepare and prepare, the slowness of it can be that of a painter and THEN the click is completion of a process not THE process itself that frame will be there always is we walk around framed [no police jokes intended] it is just that much more obvious with a camera because it makes the edge of the frame so clear getting right down among them not i hope farm holidays we walk or drive through the landscape and that's a specialised kind of movement since i got an allotment i have had a sense of what it might be like to be a cauli cutter and i dont fancy it but it's slow and you would become aware of many textures on the skin... there's an exercise and scything and all the other movements, regular and repetitive and backbreaking i am quite happy not to be among them what about a landscape of labour-saving machines frollicking and shepherds with keyboards - so long as they play into headphones - and so long as those machines have fulfilled lives and are dismantled quickly after them Lawrence %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%