Pixiq

“A path is made by placing one stone in front of another.”

This line jumped out at me from an episode of Twin Peaks I was watching a few years back — one of the scenes where the creepy giant visits detective Cooper in his hotel room and says wise and cryptic things to him.

The phrase glued itself to my brain, and I thought, “Wow, there’s definitely a photo in there somewhere." And indeed there was.

While the photo above was inspired by these words  the image is nothing like what I had in mind at first. The phrase, however, perfectly describes the journey from idea to completion.

The image that first came to mind was of myself laying down stones in a path, moving away from the camera, taken from a very low angle, with one stone in stark focus in the foreground. I envisioned the stones as either white or red. Not sure why. In any case, I couldn’t get started until I’d first gathered a bunch of stones. In November 2007 I drove up to my favorite lake, Kleifarvatn, and gathered a number of good-sized rocks. The ground was frozen, so this involved a hammer, sore fingers and some patience. I loaded the 50 or so rocks into my car and took them home. Unloaded them into the garage. Where they sat for a few weeks.

Now that I had these rocks, I was no longer sure my first idea was a good one. And I wasn’t at all sure what color they should be. Finally I decided on bright blue. I bought some spray paint and tediously set about painting them. I was still living with my parents at the time, and my mother was not about to let me get blue spray paint all over her garage, so this needed to happen outside. However, I wasn’t allowed to get blue spray paint on anything outside either, so this was done in a most tedious fashion: I spread a large piece of cardboard on the ground and brought the stones out in batches, sprayed one side, took them back in to dry (being December by then, it was too cold out for them to dry properly), brought out the next batch, and so on until one side of each rock was nice and blue. Then I repeated the process for the other side. This took several hours. (Why I’m explaining this in such detail is a matter I’ll get to in a little bit.)

So now I had a bunch of bright blue rocks, begging to be used in some awesome photo. By now, my brain was drawing a complete blank as to what this photo should look like.  The rocks just sat there, gathering dust and cobwebs, for months. I felt anxious every time I needed to go out to the garage for something, those blue stones lying in the corner, refusing to tell me what I should do with them. 

Finally in June 2008, I had one of those lightbulb moments and knew exactly what to do. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be easy, which made me all the more excited about it. I loaded the stones back into my car and drove up to Kleifarvatn at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning (when normal people were out partying or being otherwise less weird than me). Although I set out under clear skies, it was drizzling and rather windy up at the lake. And cold. I arranged my stones along the edge and in the shallows of the lake and took some test shots to make sure everything looked right. I set the exposure to four seconds, long enough to get a little motion blur in the water, but short enough so that I should be able to remain in decent focus by keeping very still.

Then came the fun part. 

I undressed and put on a skimpy blue dress. Lacking a remote at that time, I set the timer, waded out over sharp rocks to where I’d marked the right spot in my head and struck a pose which I hoped would appear more elegant than I felt. I quickly found out that "keeping very still" is somewhat difficult when one is shivering violently in water around 5°C. I waded back to the camera, set the timer again, and repeated this about 15 times, too cold and in too much of a hurry to bother looking at the screen in between. I tried standing, kneeling and at one point immersing myself all the way to my chest. I just felt like I wasn’t getting the right pose, and I was right. The very last image was the one I ended up using, by which time my feet were completely numb and corpse white, and this had completely stopped seeming like a good idea in any way.     

I quickly tore off the dress and threw on my warm clothes and jumped in the car and put the heater on. When my hands had some feeling in them again, I finally dared to look at the pictures. I was in near panic, thinking I’d have to redo the whole thing, until I reached that last shot — mission accomplished.

I drove home shivering, made cocoa and fell asleep with that contented feeling I only get when I’ve finished torturing myself for the sake of a photo and succeeded.

Now I’ll get to why I described in such detail how I did this. As I mentioned in my last post, there’s been a great deal of misunderstanding about how much photoshop fakery goes on in my work. This image is one of the most commonly misunderstood. Once I posted it online, while the photo was very well received, I was presented with two unexpected questions: “Did you photoshop the stones blue?” (from those who had no idea), and “Why didn’t you just photoshop the stones blue?” (from those who knew I'd painted them).

The answer to the first question has obviously been answered, and as this account should have made clear, the image itself never would have occurred if I hadn't first painted the rocks and let the idea simmer in my brain for a while ... which answers the second one.  ;)

In closing, I'll go ahead and shamelessly mention that prints of this image, and others, are available here.