Swamp pictures
Summer 2007

This series of digital photographs was taken at three swamps in Cook county, Bluff Spring Fen, Horse Collar Slough and Cramer Slough, in June 2007. The photos were all taken with a Canon 30D, using a homemade lens-box placed in front of the camera. The lens is from an x-ray machine, and projects onto a 3x5 piece of ground glass. The focus of the lens can be adjusted using the little handles on the sides of the outer box. I made this lens contraption to use in a landscape film I am planning. The lens is currently being rebuilt in a wooden cabinet with a better focus-adjustment mechanism. The digital photographs were cropped to emphasize swamp textures and lens distortion.

While I was sloshing around in these sloughs, trying to keep the camera and tripod from sinking too far into the mud, one thing I was thinking about was that swamps lack convenient photogenic features, like a mountain or a lake or a cliff, and instead are murky allover textures, like muck and weeds and moss and water. It's hard to take pictures of a swamp so that it looks swampy and not just like a bunch of weeds and water. I kept thinking about the convicts slogging endlessly through the swamps in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law, and how it's unhelpful of the landscape to lack convenient landmarks.

Prints of these photographs were shown at Roots & Culture gallery in Chicago as part of Bert Stabler's "Brown River" CCR-themed show in July 2007.



Images of an in-progress version of the lens-box. The camera screws onto the board behind the ground glass with an attachment.