Autumn Musings

“Bring images to share that are your favorite Fall, Hallowtide, or spooky edits.”
It’s funny how a simple sentence like this can become the spark that inspires a new project. Starting out with the sole purpose of putting together images for a hangout with a group of friends, I quickly realized while digging through my archive that those of my landscape images that move me the deepest and most lasting are, almost without exception, taken in the fall. Does this now mean that autumn is my favorite season?

At least from the photographer’s perspective, it seems so. In any case, all the pictures have in common that they capture a mood that I only perceive in autumn and that captivates me. Only in this season do the motifs unfold a fascination that goes far beyond the superficial aesthetics of what is shown. No, here it is about more than the motif or the composition. Instead, it is about what is between the lines, about the more, which goes beyond the sum of all parts.

The fallen leaf, brown and yellowed on the damp ground; the partly bare branches, all these are superficially not particularly beautiful motifs. But, nevertheless, they trigger something in me. And when I photograph them, it is not with the descriptive intention of showing what they look like, but to communicate what I feel in autumn: A sweet melancholy, combined with the realization that even the process of decay can have its own beauty as part of the annual cycle.

Silent Conversations as autumn meditations

In this post, I want to share some of my older fall images. Some have already appeared on FlickR, others I show here for the first time. In the next post, I share then some photos of younger dates.
Even though I’ve said way too much here now already, these images invite more than usual what I call Silent Conversations. The mood of a photograph needs time to unfold. As a viewer, you have to be willing to engage with the image, to feel your way into it. It is precisely this process that I describe as “Silent Conversations” with the photograph.