Nature – Page 31 – The Inner Frame

Preying (South Tyrol I)

In 1997, my then-girlfriend and I spent two weeks in the village Rasen-Antholz in South Tyrol. Besides a famous and truly stunning landscape, this region has many surprises. As it is protected on all sides by tall mountain ranges, the climate is milder than one would expect for a mountain village, and allows for the existence of the biotope we are visiting below.

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This ominous boardwalk lures the visitor into an unexpected terroir: Instead of harsh mountain meadows, we encounter humid swamps.

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Here thrives the sundew, the only carnivorous plant found in South Tirol. Other predators have similar goals.

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What better place to spend an early morning in the fog to listen to Giacinto Scelsi’s Preghiera per un’ombra for solo clarinet?

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Jackson Pollock? (Iceland III)

In Óskar Jónasson’s film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, a painting by Jackson Pollock plays a marginal but hilarious role.

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The pictures in this post are inspired by drip-art and action painting.

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They are not quite up to Pollock’s standard, but I must say I like them.

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Of course they are not paintings, but landscape closeups taken off the coast of Westman Islands.

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The artist? Hard to say, but at least partially responsible are the doves.

Hoping for Cooler Weather

Visiting Turkey Run State Park in winter after snow fall is an expedition I often think of in the hot summer days of Indiana. The snow covered slopes of Sugar Creek look pleasant enough.

But the temperatures drop significantly after entering the Rocky Hollow canyon. This vertiginous view of Wedge Rock is due to the fisheye lens I used here.

Proceeding further, the walls become covered with icicles.

Ascending into the narrower parts of the canyon and navigating the ice covered walls is impossible without proper gear.

But the way back offers sun shine and hope for warmer days, which is what we came for, isn’t it?

Cracks (Iceland II)

We usually think of a crack as a blemish. A cracked window needs to be replaced. The cracked patina of old paintings is reluctantly accepted as a proof of age. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe has turned the crack in a wall into a bad omen of the worst kind. Roman Polanski did likewise with cracks in concrete in his film Repulsion. Are cracks really that bad?

In geologically active regions like Iceland, cracks happen more often than elsewhere, and on a much larger scale.

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The cracked wall above is from a house on the Westman islands that was half covered by the lave flow from 1973 and is kept as is as a monument.

Cracks appear everywhere. In individual rocks,

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in the ground like here near a lava tube,

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vertically, splitting entire mountains,

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or here, where the crack is literally between the American and European continent.

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Monotony (Iceland I)

This post is the first of many trying to put the 2000+ images I took this summer in Iceland in some unconventional order.

Let’s begin with the simplest aspects of the landscape. In contrast to Hamlet, very often there are fewer things in heaven and earth than you would expect. In fact, you might just see a flat gray plane all the way to the horizon, and above it a similarly gray sky.

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One travels in this landscape on roads that dramatically increase the complexity.

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What is striking is that all this must have been moved and put in place at some point. Enormous volcanic eruptions
have covered this landscape with lava and ash.

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Slowly growing moss patiently tries to withstand the ubiquitous erosion, caused by wind and meandering rivers.

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It is hard to believe that most of Iceland was covered with trees, until the Vikings needed the wood for their boats, houses, and fires.

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Yosemite in Winter

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In 1993, when it still rained in California, winter was a desperate time for weekend backpackers, because the Sierras were packed with snow.

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On the other hand, if you dared, you could have places all for yourself that would be packed with humans in the summer. But don’t let this snow free picture of Yosemite Valley betray you.

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A little further on, the vast granite plains were slush covered, and even further, we there was deep snow and no trace of the trails.

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Higher altitude cleared things up a bit (assuming good weather).

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The peace was treacherous. Picking this spot below as a camp site and ignoring the pretty clouds below was a dumb idea. The night became the second stormiest night of my life.

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The Event Horizon

When you go back in time to explore your (or any) past, there are natural barriers. I have done the explorations here with the aide of pictures I took, mostly digitally since 2000, but relying on scanned film negatives for earlier years.

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I started keeping these negatives since I got my first DSLR, a Nikon F801, in 1989. So the images in this post are from that year. Going further back will be an interesting challenge. There exist slides that I took with a pocket camera and little ambition. My serious interest in photography only developed when I got into arthouse film.

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The first two images were taken at the early morning at the Rhine river near Bonn. The next one is from the botanical garden in Münster. Begin at the bird and its reflection in the center, and work your way through the emerging reality of a seemingly abstract image.

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This one is a dead tree trunk in the center of a dried out fish pond.

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Let’s end peacefully with a floating leaf – a motif that has become a favorite.

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Swamp

The images of this post were taken in 2002 in Sweden. They were among the very last I took with my little Fuji Finepix 1400. This is not because she stopped working or I didn’t like her anymore, but because she was stolen on the way back.

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What we see here is a swamp. The cold climate limits the little pests (bugs) and the larger pests (alligators) to the acceptable.

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Instead there is an abundance of mosses and lichens with which you can scrub your back in the sauna.

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Walking on it feels kind of funny, in particular when there is suddenly water underneath.

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No wonder they have trolls there.

Little Things

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When hiking the rugged trail at the bottom of Clifty Canyon, you are in the shade most of the day.
This might make you miss the little things on the way, like this offering of leaves on a ledge of the canyon wall.

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Often, wood and rock combine to natural still lives.

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Or rocks make shelter for the little people,

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offer drawing tablets for future artists,

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and resting grounds for the elderly.

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Big Things

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Clifty Falls State Park in eastern Indiana, at the border to Ohio, features a large canyon with several waterfalls, about 20 meters tall.

This allows for views that are not very common elsewhere in Indiana. Usually, when your view is not blocked by trees, it is an endless plane and an endless sky, cut in half by a perfectly straight horizon. At Clifty Falls, you can look across, giving you back a sense of size.

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Or, if you dare, you can look down.

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It is somewhat ironic that the only reason lonely trees have a chance to grow this tall is the protection of the canyon they are trying to outgrow.

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