The Treachery of a Photograph

by MATT HOLSOPPLE

“Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

1.

Should the 1.75 million pixels in this photograph be laid out in an XY grid, you would find, peering out from behind a single one of them as a child would from behind a telephone pole, a Colorado chipmunk. It’s an adolescent chipmunk, rusted red and white stripes running down its back, its globular onyx eyes sweeping contentedly across the expanse of the serene alpine lake as it scampers invisibly among the branches of the towering trees surrounding Lake Haiyaha. The water laps lazily in the gentle breeze of the rocky mountain morning. This assumed chipmunk is always pleasantly surprised at just how quickly a gray rock can be painted crimson at sunrise, at how otherworldly the powder blue of the lake seems, at the remarkable ability of the sun’s rays to warm a frigid body. This chipmunk is also a scholar specializing in surrealism—in fact, in its burrow, it has a framed print of René Magritte’s 1931 painting, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, on its wall. It’s a simple painting; it shows a single tobacco pipe with a deep brown bowl and a sloping shank that transitions into a midnight-black stem all set against a plain beige background. Beneath the painted pipe, in Magritte’s homely handwritten cursive, it reads the aforementioned statement, which, translated, means This is not a pipe. Ironic, the chipmunk thinks, to own a replica of a painting that stands to mock the false realities we create within art. Ironic, it thinks too, that I’ve been conjured and believed in when I myself don’t even exist; I am not even visible in the frame of my own faux reality.

2.

Lodgepole pines are characterized by their tremendous height and skewer-like appearance. Standing as the ever-present sentinels surrounding Lake Haiyaha, they aim to pierce a hole through the heavens. In this photograph of Lake Haiyaha, between the two tallest visible pines discernible only by their iconic silhouette, the healing glow of the sun fans out in eight equal beams. This phenomenon, known as a sun star, is most commonly associated with a lower aperture setting, in this instance f/10, in conjunction with a wide-angle lens. It’s hypnotic, really, the shape of a constantly-in-duress ball of gas 91.2 million miles away. How, even through a screen, one can’t help but wince at its brightness cutting through the lodgepole pines. Photograph resolution is measured in PPI, or pixels per square inch. The smaller the pixel and denser the image, the crisper the image is. The warmth of the sun is forty pixels by forty pixels—or, 40x40—but its rays stretch 195 pixels across the image before fading into wavelengths that post-processing determined to be more dominant. For reference, the entire image is 1080x1616 pixels. One can’t be empathic toward an image, toward something so unflinchingly inorganic. So, why do I feel those long-since-absorbed sunbeams caressing my face and running their fingers through my beard? Why do I feel so much, when so little actually exists? This, perhaps, is the power of memory. I was there, so it makes sense; why then, do you too feel that 40x40 sun’s warmth flowing through your body just the same?

3.

A photographer friend once told me a joke: There was a man, raving mad they thought, who was seemingly afraid of everything. They showed him photos of everything from happy puppies to his own wife—at every one of them he screamed and cowered in the corner, rolled up into a little ball. They brought a real specialized doctor in to evaluate him. When the doctor returned after their appointment, he was laughing. “What are you laughing at?” they all asked him. “Did you figure it out?” The doctor caught his breath for a moment before saying, “That man isn’t afraid of everything, he’s just afraid of paper!” 

Rotate a photo ninety degrees toward yourself, close one eye, and focus the other along the thin white edge of it. Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment wherein a cat, hidden in a box, is simultaneously dead and alive; all Schrödinger could know is that when he opened that box, there would be a cat in some form. Looking along the edge of a photograph guarantees but one outcome when one looks at the face of it; that there will be a picture. But, while looking squarely at the side of it, the photograph is simultaneously every photo ever taken. One of those photos, those moments, is a picture of Lake Haiyaha where beneath the eight barbs of sunlight there are stacks of smooth, wind-shaped boulders sitting stoically at the edges of the lake, as well as a line of six of them bisecting the middle of it that grow smaller and smaller the farther they get. Reach for that farthest one. Notice as your hand presses into the paper, crinkling from the pressure, that it’s the same distance away as the closest one. 

4.

The Seven Sisters are seven stars that appear in close proximity to one another in the Pleiades Star Cluster. But, if one looks to the Seven Sisters and places each forefinger to their opposite thumb before holding it up to the night sky like a looking glass, or a camera lens, they would be looking at well over one thousand stars in the Pleiades Star Cluster, probably over a million. To comprehend a photograph is much the same; it takes a sliver of reality and renders it in point-by-point mixtures of red, green, and blue to create a still-frame moment. Within the 1080x1616 frame of this image, there are approximately 1.75 million pixels. These pixels form the shell-grooved divots of seemingly frozen liquid water; the gray radiance of a sunlit rock; the blank sheen of a cloudless sky. Each individual pixel takes a pickaxe to the mines of the viewer’s mind and convinces them that the water isn’t frozen, that the sunlight is real, that the tips of the lodgepole pine sway gently in a gusty wind that pierces through the fabric of your jacket like a needle. They invade your core and pull your blood in willing droves away from your fingertips until they feel cold and you begin to wonder just how cold the water is—if it’s warmer than the wind. But these pixels have never felt the wind or seen the rising sun; these pixels can’t reach out toward you any more than you can to the farthest rock that threatens to fall through the back of the photograph.  

5.

Beyond the frame of the photograph, there is a mountain range dotted with more lodgepole pines leaning up against one another like dominoes. Where those mountains reach too close to the sun, the trees disappear and the exposed rock glows red in the rising sunlight. It’s a moment of sublimity. The water laps up against the rock from which I aim my camera eastward over Lake Haiyaha; I watch one fish—a green torpedo-shaped trout—swimming in timeless, lazy circles, while the great pyramid of rock in the center of the lake stares at me through my lens as if to say son, this ain’t nothin’ special. I adjust my ISO, bringing it as low as I can, lower my aperture to capture the sun star’s reaching beams, and raise my shutter speed to 1/125, just above double my focal length. It’s the perfect shot—a wagon train of rocks creates a leading line into the distance and the top third of my image is negative space, a perfect contrast to the textured divots of the wind-tossed water. I take fifty photos, maybe a hundred. Only one turns out good. My girlfriend and I had hiked up to the lake early that morning, starting around two-thirty, and had to force tired conversation the entire while to ward off any potential bears or mountain lions. We ignored the fact that my headlamp had old batteries in it, so we walked in an unspoken yet constant fear of unexpected darkness. We jumped across perilously wobbling rocks on the way to our setup spot and were a little concerned when I sliced my knee open slipping on a boulder. It wouldn’t stop bleeding, so all the pictures of us show only our top halves. 

Is the picture clearer now? More real? 

6.

Emerson spoke for everyone when he wrote, I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. But we are not all God, because God would not change his own creation; God would take refuge in it. He would not sit in front of a bright screen in a dark room twisting knobs and moving dials—commanding the sun and its beams to grow brighter, the trees to be greener, the lake to traverse time, to be illuminated like the picture wasn’t taken at 6:27:33 AM. He would not prescribe color to a dark lake as if it were a remedy for ineptitude. The folly of the photographer is not that they must futilely try and imitate nature, it’s that in their pursuit of it they mustn’t bastardize her. Should Emerson have sat where I sat when I took the photograph, he would likely remark on the darkness of it all; on how the silhouettes of the lodgepole pines clawed their way above the rocks surrounding the lake so they might be the first ones warmed by the rising sun; on the wind whispering into his ears, and on the invisibility of opaque water in the early hours of the morning. How, should there have been no wind, the water would appear to be glass. He would close his eyes and dig his palms into the pebble-ridden rock beneath him, pushing until an inverted cityscape was worn into his hands—perhaps until his palms began to bleed. He would inhale sharply, the caramel-tinged scent of Ponderosa and the crisp coolness of the mountain air swirling through his nose and permeating his body. He would feel the water, frigid and gentle, rushing over the scales of the green torpedo-shaped trout; he would feel the sharp spines of the soft pines embracing the still body of the chipmunk not daring to move for fear of a predator. He would open his eyes, wipe his hands of the blood, and listen to the soulful melody of an awakening world slowly exposing itself to the light. Should he sit next to me as I hunch over my computer, editing the photo, he might click his tongue. You lie to them, he’d say to me. I know, I’d respond, but they can only experience a part or particle of it all. 

7.

In a nondescript room, the photo sits on a wooden desk under a light—bright but natural. Respectful. There is no noise, either musical or ambient, and the air tastes like pennies. In the upper-right quarter of the photo, a warm, golden sun shines through the spindly branches of the decades-old lodgepole pines. You feel warm in the room, but that’s because of your jacket. There are eight gleaming lines like a star flaring from the corona of the sun; each seems to point to another wizened rock that sits resolutely amidst the small lapping waves. Water drips down your forehead, but you’re just warm because of the jacket. The water is a fantastical shade of milky blue—it feels unnatural. If you close your eyes, you feel like you can hear it and its gentle ebbing. But, as when you raise a seashell to your ear, that’s just the pounding of your blood that you hear. It’s because you’re wearing a jacket and growing warm. The tips of some of the trees bend differently than others, so the wind must be strong; you feel it buffeting up and through your nose and expelling out of your body like a toxin. Despite the warmth, you feel you should be shivering. But you aren’t—you’re too warm. Uncomfortably warm. You’re in a small room with a single white-hot bulb; you’re wearing a jacket and ceci n’est pas une lac.