AUTUMN PATH: This photographic work by Frank Sauer is from his exhibit “Mountain Lakes: A Lens on the Seasons,” which will be on view at the Arts Council of Princeton through April 30. There will be an artist talk with the photographer at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 1.

Watching snow flurries from the south-facing rear windows of our house a day after the opening of Frank Sauer’s exhibit, “Mountain Lakes: A Lens on the Seasons,” I seemed to be seeing his photography again in the white haze of distant trees, the way limbs and branches were sharply defined and at the same time fluid in the fallen and falling snow. I could also see ghostly glimmers here and there like the ones in winter scenes Sauer captured with his Sigma-Merrill camera on one of his walks around The Billy Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve. These remarkable color and black and white photographs will be on view at the Arts Council of Princeton from now through Communiversity, April 30, with sales benefitting the Friends of Princeton Open Space.

Something Magical

When art happens, you forget yourself, you don’t want to say or hear a word that might mar the connection between you and what you’re seeing. Since the opening of an exhibit means people milling about talking, sipping, socializing, you may be distracted and find it necessary to break the spell to say something to somebody. But then certain works won’t let you go. The one I kept coming back to is shown here, though there’s no way to do it justice short of going to the Arts Council to see it in person. And all I can do is try to explain what drew me to it.

In Autumn Path the extraordinary clarity of the image creates something magical by establishing a reality heightened to the nth degree, focus an absolute, everything widely, deeply open, making an image that looks large enough to walk around in, from a solid foreground of stone and stream the color of metal through a minutely detailed terrain of autumn leafage to a misty background where distant trees have a spectral quality. You’re in the photographer’s moment, as if held in his consciousness, the frame like the binding of the book containing this illustrated page.

Looking for the Path

When you see the title, your first thought is what path? Because you’re already for all purposes inside the image, you’re thinking of path in the here and now. So you find yourself on ground level with the photographer as if you were watching him at work in the field. At first you’re thinking maybe it’s his way of adding a touch of ambiguity, since even if there were a path, that fallen tree in the middle distance would be blocking it. Or perhaps he’s merely urging you to follow the path of sight, the invisible line leading your gaze into the mist of a forest world that seems to go on forever.

When I saw Autumn Path in person I wasn’t reading anything into it. It was pure imagery. Now I find myself rewriting the title after realizing I’ve just experienced the saying about not seeing the forest for the trees because what the title says to me now, here in the comfort of my home with Tuesday morning’s rain falling as another season takes its turn, is that this is the path left by autumn on its way toward winter. What I’m seeing is Autumn’s Path.

The Ode

All it takes is that shift in meaning and I’m thinking beyond the image to poetry’s autumn, the one described almost two hundred years ago by John Keats in his ode to the “season of mists.” Such is the “path” that’s taken me back to the poet’s moment, “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day/And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” It’s Keats’s season for all time. He “owns” it, as surely as William Wordsworth “owns” Westminster Bridge, a fact of poetic life recently and widely acknowledged in the aftermath of a terrorist’s violation of “that mighty heart.”

How Does He Do It?

I’ve asked myself the same question at photography exhibits by Ansel Adams and Emmet Gowin. A classically trained pianist, Adams explains what happens in the dark room by comparing the negative to the score and the finished print to the conductor’s interpretation of it. In a note accompanying an exhibit some years ago at the Princeton University Art Museum, Gowin describes “bleaching the silver out of an Agfa gelatin silver paper and coating the surface with a light-sensitive solution.”

Frank Sauer’s email response to the question is that “with digital imaging nowadays, you are already looking at a performance when you display your image on the screen. The image needs to be optimized in brightness, tonality, you do some digital dodging and burning to enhance balance or emphasize certain parts.” It’s also important that you employ “a camera that supports the fine resolution across the whole frame” and “a tripod to avoid losing details to motion blur.” The craftsmanship of printing presents “a physical artifact,” bringing “to life what you have in the image.” In his note accompanying the exhibit, Sauer writes: “I am meticulous about preserving this image quality in archival quality prints. I am using an Epson P800 with UltraChrome HD inks and Canson Infinity paper, printing the color photos on Baryta Photographique and the b&w photos on Edition Etching Rag. I love how the photos look on these fine art papers, and the inks have a very high permanence rating.”

Beyond the technical aspect of the process is the importance of, in Sauer’s words, “change and chance.” It’s not just that you may have missed or overlooked something and feel you have to go back to the scene, it’s that “every time things look different. The season is different, the weather is different, the light is different, the plants are in a different phase of their yearly cycle or their life cycle, grass has grown or has been mowed, trees have fallen, leaves cluster in a different pattern on the pond.”

The Element of Surprise

Jazz has been called “the sound of surprise.” Translate the idea into imagery and you have what happens in another Frank Sauer vision of Keats’s season, Autumn Crown, though you may not “hear” the sound the first time around. Someone had to point it out to me. Frank Sauer explains what happened: “I had just set up to photograph the tree ‘as is,’ attracted by its graphic structure. Then the bird showed up and stayed for less than a minute … Luck.”

Art happens again in Winter: “I took four exposures not being sure what I would get. Three are unremarkable. The fourth one became one of my favorite images, with the particular pattern of the snow (including the one snowflake close to the lens) overlaid onto the forest scene. Luck.”

Not To Be Missed

Since the color photographs were upstairs with all the festive opening night action, the black and white works in the lower gallery received less than their due. By the time I got to not to be missed wonders like Life and Heron and An Encounter, we’d already changed a restaurant reservation to a later hour, and along with art, hunger was happening. To hurry past Heron, however, was like skimming an ode by Keats or a story by Hemingway. Heron is a storybook image, Life a truly visionary work, and An Encounter the most surprising moment in the show, if you’re patient and curious enough to keep looking. Bearing in mind that these works must be seen in person, you can see them online here:

https://franksauer.smugmug.com/Nature/Mountain-Lakes-A-Lens-on-the-Seasons-Color

https://franksauer.smugmug.com/Nature/Mountain-Lakes-A-Lens-on-the-Seasons-BW

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Prints from the Mountain Lakes portfolio are being offered in a special sale benefitting FOPOS, the Friends of Princeton Open Space. As a non-profit organization, FOPOS maintains and enhances the Billy Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve for all to enjoy. The prints are offered in four different sizes to fit different spaces and budgets. For further information, visit www.fopos.org/announcements.

There will be an artist talk with photographer Frank Sauer at the Arts Council, 102 Witherspoon Street, on April 1 at 2 p.m. Prints of the works can be purchased to help support the Mountain Lake Preserve.