Acts of Seeing: Burnt Bridge Piles

Inkerman Lake, 2022 (Photo by John MacDougall)

In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic. 

I begin with a picture I took on a recent trip to New Brunswick’s beautiful Acadian Peninsula. It shows a line of charred posts – all that is left of the wooden walking bridge that used to cross Inkerman Lake. The morning light illuminates the burnt piles perfectly. That’s one aspect of the scene that appealed to me – the golden autumnal light on the blackened posts. Another is the way the piles follow one another in a gradual fade toward the opposite shore. I love that receding perspective. Ruskin did, too. In his great The Elements of Drawing (1857), he said,

Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity is by giving some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less similar. And this succession is most interesting when it is connected with some gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus the succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting when they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in the distance: so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another, on the flanks of the valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther and farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed order.