We’re not talking deep art or mind-blowing images here today. Some might even call these photos mere snapshots, and I’m not going to take offense if they do. Photography serves more than one purpose; sometimes it’s about documentation, sometimes it’s about beauty or art, and sometimes it’s just to preserve a record of something we saw and wanted to remember. Having now written that, I’m thinking it does all go back to documentation in the core, but with different intent.
For these images, I didn’t have any deep artistic intent – I merely liked what I saw, enough to raise the camera and make an image.
I like the PA State Park Boundary signs, their design and style, their simplicity of form and message. This is a boundary. A statement of fact. At this point, one thing ends and another begins. I wish more of life was so clearly, so simply delineated, and I have to imagine I’m not alone in that wish.
Likewise with the second image of the trail marker. These days, and probably always, it sure would be nice to have a cheerful yellow arrow pointing the way. But boy isn’t the tree a metaphor here, eating it away bit by bit, year by year, erasing it from the path and from the world.
Trees are incredible, and far too little understood or appreciated, not the least for their ability to shape the landscape around them, and to erase us from that landscape. I have seen photos of trees engulfing fences and signs, and even old rifles and bicycles left against them, and that feels wholesome.
From a hiking standpoint, I am conflicted; aesthetically, I like metal signs like this better than painted blazes. But I weigh that against the fact that blazes don’t require putting a nail in a tree. And while blazes can fade, they don’t fall down or rust away, and can’t be stolen by the unscrupulous, and are therefore probably the more durable choice.
Still, nothing about a smear of paint says anything.