1 View of the Washington Monument

I started a bit of a photography project a long time ago. I was going to do a series of photos inspired by Hokusai’s 36 View of Mount Fuji. Hokusai made a series of etchings of daily life in Edo period Japan. They depict daily life in Japan at the time, with Mount Fuji’s presence always a part of that life.

My intention was to do the same sort of thing with the Washington Monument, show life in DC with the presence of the monument always part of that life. I took a lot of photos with an old film SLR. Most of them didn’t turn out very well and to my discredit, I abandoned the project. If I had stuck with it, maybe I’d certainly be a better photographer and I’d have project that I finished and could be somewhat proud of.

This is one of the best photos of the series. It’s not a very well done photo; it lacks technical expertise. In other words, I didn’t know what I was doing with a camera, at the time. I think this demonstrates I had some potential, but didn’t work on this. I was intentionally using the points of the tents from the Folk Life to echo the point of the monument.

I think it’s a good idea, giving the viewer a different perspective of the monument, but it’s a good idea poorly executed: The photo is muddy. This was taken at a time when PhotoShop was just catching on as a tool for photography, which gives you an idea of how old the photo is. I was going to be a purest, and not PhotoShop anything, which would have been fine if I knew what I was doing with a camera, which I didn’t.

So now I’m learning what to do. I’ll get to that, later.