Ellen Morris Bishop

But why do this? The question was raised, and answered, by abstract photographer Arthur Tress, whose images interpreting The Tao of Physics graced the National Academy of Science’s exhibit hall in 2004.

Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery. - Arthur Tress - [cited in: Creative Camera March 1968, p. 94]

What Tress is saying is that photographs of abstract patterns alone mean nothing. But photographs of abstract patterns that tell a story—these are worthy of capture.

Such images may reveal the intricacies of a fly’s compound eye or patterns of a leaf’s veining that mean it’s an oak and not a sycamore.  In much of nature, a macro lens is a necessity for abstraction, especially in Tress’s utilitarian view.

But to find abstractions, to detect pattern in the geologic landscape, there’s no need to dig deep into your camera bag for the macro.  Pattern is a fundamental property of stones and outcrops and mountains, rivers, deserts, and cliffs.  In pattern there is usually tectonic significance. There is story.  There is, as Tress would say. “A wider significance in purely textural imagery.”

Patterns can be found at almost any geologic scale.  They are everywhere.  Just look.  (See previous post on Scale….) Favorite hiding places include road cuts.  This is why it is unwise to be a passenger in a car driven by geologists down interstate highways with big, barren road cuts. We keep looking at the road cuts-not so much for rocks, but for the tell-tale patterns of faults or stratigraphy, intrusion or upheaval, that we can glimpse in a fleeting second at 65 mph.

Faults provide exquisite abstract patterns. (My favorite is the Moab Fault, pictured above, and fortuitously exposed in road cuts near the entrance to Arches National Park.)

Ditto for igneous rocks, sedimentary strata, erosional badlands, lava flows, metamorphic bands, jointed outcrops, and so on.  Those glowing slot canyons that we are all growing weary of?  Geology.  The raucous stripes of the Painted Hills? Geology. 

While you are seeking, finding, and photographing, it may help you to learn about the genesis of these patterns.  The Moab Fault tells the story of crustal extension. Understand that, and it will inform your eye.  Cross-bedded Navajo sandstone? Dunes produced by ancient Jurassic winds that ruffled the feathers of Allosaurus.

There are patterns at arms length, and patterns you will find only from airplanes. Patterns that can catch the eye and hold it in the frame, and patterns that reveal past and future motion.  Observing, understanding, and capturing these is a project that Arthur Tress –and all of geology-- would applaud.