Telling details signify: black streaks streaming down a rocky, desert outcrop trace ephemeral waterfalls from rare rains, point to a refuge; a stone at the gateway to a forest sanctuary, polished by thousands of touches, reveals reverence. Great artists use detail tellingly. Hans Holbein’s sketch of a marksman shows mainly his face, the one eye closed, the other sighting down the crossbow. The squinting, sighting eye is the darkest, most detailed part of the drawing; the rest is drawn lightly, roughly, as if out of focus. Good photographers are close observers; they choose what to frame, how, and what to place in sharpest focus in order to highlight significant detail. Dorothea Lange kept journals where she jotted the telling details she recorded in photographs: a country churchyard’s acre, its bare soil swept with dogwood brooms, the parishioner’s hand-made gloves (see Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field). Details reveal important truths, an idea as relevant to the scientific study of landscape, to architecture and poetry, as it is to photography. Physical diagnosis, in medicine, in landscape, is the art of culling the significant from a welter of irrelevant detail.
Photograph significant details on your site that are relevant to your research topic or question, details that advance your understanding of your research topic as expressed on the site, to the processes that shape it, the systems that sustain it, that embody or refer to larger ideas or stories. Think of significant details as elements that make visible processes and systems that are otherwise invisible or cannot be observed in a single glance.
Upload all your images to your Miro board by 8AM Monday, March 11. Select 5 photographs for presentation and discussion in class and upload them to Flickr. Put them in an album named Detail on your FLICKR page. Remember to make the photos "public," so others can see them. The 5 photographs are due on your own website Friday, April 5.
Between Monday and 8AM on Wednesday, review all 5 of the selected photographs of other students in the class. To do this, go to the members page for our Flickr class site. Click successively on each member's icon to link to their Flickr page and to access their albums.
Select one image from each student's Detail album and post a comment and/or constructive critique on the photo. Your comments should go beyond an assessment of composition and should address the subject of the assignment: significant detail and the ability of significant detail to stand for a whole (an idea or phenomenon relevant to the research) or to stand for an important quality of the place as an expression of the research topic.