Conveying Essence
June 8, 2026
My friend and talented painter Nora Akino recently showed me this article about another painter. Most artistic discourse is distracting nonsense in my opinion, but occasionally I come across something that is genuinely informative. I find I often learn more about my photographic practice from artists working in other mediums that I do from photographers. Though the tools and techniques may vary, any form of creative expression is more similar than it is different to every other form of creative expression. When I’m not familiar with the details of another medium, I’m not filtering through habitual ways of thinking about photography. The specific techniques they are discussing fall away and it becomes easier to pick out the core thing they are talking about. Also, if a photographer offers a great piece of insight, it becomes easy to accidentally copy exactly what they are doing. When Rick Rubin the music producer or Rainer Maria Rilke the poet share their wisdom, there is no copy and paste option as a photographer. I then get to figure out how to bring the core thing to my work in a way that is still very much my own.
The lines from the article Nora showed me that most stood out to me were: “specificity—of perception and also of the marks themselves—is everything; the generic is the enemy of art. To draw is to search for the essence of a scene, and a detail used well is a visual synecdoche, a part that can stand for the whole…. The constructedness of it is both there and not there.”
When I’m in a landscape, especially if using a long lens but even if I shoot super wide, I am inherently making choices about what to include and exclude from the frame, and how to arrange what does make it into the frame. The place is vastly more complex and contains far more sensory information than could ever be included in a two dimensional visual representation of a single moment. Perfectly realist depiction is impossible. Construction is inherent. Yet, by finding parts that can stand for the whole, I think the passage above points to how to construct in a way that still faithfully points to the essence and specificity of the place or my experience of it.
Three years ago I wrote this essay about playing with visual polarities to convey the essence and emotional qualities of a place. There I suggested to “get to the location well before the interesting stuff starts happening, forget any bullshit compositional rules and other formulaic approaches, and simply become attuned with the landscape and light. Approach with an attitude of reverence. Become surrendered and impressionable. Spend weeks, months, or years there if possible. Listen carefully to whatever language the landscape happens to be speaking and let that permeate inward and offer guidance. If there is a foreground that enhances the harmony of the composition, consider including it. If there are no such foregrounds, try to find a way to remove the foreground from the composition entirely. And be decisive when hitting the shutter button. There’s no need to be polite or shy when deciding how to convey a scene. Be bold enough to attempt to drill down right to the essence of the scene in a single frame.” I’m now seeing how the passage from the article Nora showed me, particularly the concept of the visual synecdoche, adds another layer to basically the same thing.
