Lose thoughts – Page 5 – Dietmar Tallroth

Mourning Leonard Cohen

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

This might be somewhat off-topic, but then maybe not. The news about Leonard Cohen’s death this morning have left me a bit shaken. When Dylan was announced winner of the Nobel Prize I thought that was well deserved; still I had to think that Cohen would have been an at least as worthy recipient of that prize as he has made poetry again tangible for a whole generation.

“Suzanne” was one of the anthems of my teenage years, a song that we listened to over and over again and that became part of our emotional fabric. We couldn’t really figure out what the song was about (even though “touching your body with one’s mind” sounds very appealing to teenagers). But what was the point with tea and oranges coming all the way from China, or what had Jesus being a sailor had to do with anything?

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Scent Of Smoke

November 4, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

One of the pleasures of autumn is starting to use the fireplace again. A few days ago, when I lighted up a fire suddenly a wonderful aroma sipped into the room. An aroma I actually had forgotten to know so well and memories from my childhood dreamily invaded my mind.

This begs explaining.

Firewood in Finland is mainly produced from birch trees. Birch is one of most ubiquitous tree species in Finland. Its wood is dense and has excellent heating value, so it provides the most common firewood. The smoke from burning birchwood has a distinct leathery scent and one soon comes to identify this aroma with how smoke smells in Finland. Only, that I hadn’t known this smell at all before I moved to Finland.

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Lucky Accidents

September 15, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 1 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Sometimes I am being asked, whether I plan my shots or whether I just find my pictures while roaming the outdoors. The truth is: both. Most of my photography is indeed a result of careful planning and sometimes involves returning to places often. Some pictures therefore took months to make. But there is no denying that lucky accidents happen. As it was with the picture above.

I was returning from a shoot at Kuusinki river in the Eastern part of Kuusamo, Finland. The weather had been cloudy and rainy all day, but now in the early evening the cloud cover was breaking. I was driving on the road near the little village of Virkkula when I was literally stopped in my tracks by a sight besides the road. I stomped on the brake and looked for a place to stay the car. Don’t try this at home! The empty roads in Northern Finland are among the only few places where such a maneuver is safe – and yes, I looked in the back mirror first.

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Wood Wide Web

July 28, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

In a recent TED talk forest ecologist Suzanne Simard explained the science that shows that forests are not mere collections of trees but living, interacting networks of plants and fungi. With its nodes, hubs and interconnections, this network indeed has a lot of similarity with the Internet and thus the term “Wood Wide Web” has been coined for it. The research further shows, that through this network, trees support their offspring, share resources or communicate dangers and insect attacks.

You might wonder, what this has to do with photography. Well, for me learning about the Wood Wide Web a couple of years ago was one of these defining moments when the view of something familiar changes in profound ways. These are true watershed moments in our lives, where darkness in our understanding is suddenly lit up by insight. While in darkness we couldn’t imagine that there is light and once our mind lit up we can’t go back or even imagine our darkness-worldview anymore. The genie out of the bottle can’t be put back.

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On Influences

July 21, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

I am a rock. I am an island.
Paul Simon

The line from Simon & Garfunkel song is full of irony. As we all know, no one is an island. Our ways are the sum of our education, learnings and experiences. We all stand on the shoulders of others. Still, many photographers seem hesitant to talk about their influences, maybe from fear that their own contribution is undervalued or that they are accused of unoriginality. But as one might have noticed by now, I like to reflect on why and how I do things. So let’s talk about influences.

Always a good start is to give an example. My own decision to focus on black & white photography only, comes from mainly two sources. The first is the monochrome ink landscape painting, which is subject of the series A Tale about Five Painters. But in photography it is the work of Ansel Adams that convinced me of the power of black & white in showing the non-obvious in a landscape.

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Minimalism

July 7, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 1 Comment

In Art & Photography / Lose thoughts

Photographer Thomas Peter recently published a project at Reuters on the Japanese minimalist movement. There are some interesting photos there, even though the project as such suffers from “explainitis“. That means, the photos hardly hold their own without the text.

What intrigued me, though, was the movement itself: people reducing their belongings to 100 items. I find it fascinating how certain ideas (good and bad ones) cross centuries and cultures during human history. The “less is more” idea spans from religions (Buddhism, Christianity, St. Francis, Gandhi) to psychoanalysis (Erich Fromm: To Have or to Be). Curiously, modern minimalism seems to have circulated from Zen Buddhism to Steven Jobs and from him back to Japan…

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Attitudes

June 30, 2016 By Dietmar Tallroth With 0 Comment

In Lose thoughts

Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.
Chinese Proverb

There isn’t a problem that couldn’t be rendered unsolvable by elevating it to a higher level of abstraction. I know. I have been guilty of doing this countless times. Unfortunately, a certain class of problems needs this approach as all more localized, specialized solutions are just patches, not fixes.

What I am talking about? I talk about problems rooted in attitudes. Like, all environmental issues on the table (pick here your favorite horror, from global warming to tar sands and mass extinction). And when I write attitudes, I mean all our opinions about the world, we didn’t know we have. There is for example this deeply rooted narrative in the jewish-christian tradition, that man is the crown jewel of creation with a calling to conquer nature. The view that man is a higher life form and everything else is hierarchically of lower value.

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