Time in the Woods - Day 9

Camping out here at night has certainly foregrounded my unease in being alone in the dark in the woods.

There's not much of a rational arguement behind my fears. This is the country but it's also private property, so the chance of those Deliverance guys showing up is low. All of the animals here -- porcupine, deer, ground squirrel, birds -- are totally harmless. I had a close encounter with a porcupine one night in fact and he seemed more curious than anything. I broke my stay of silence to shoo him away, not knowing until the next day that porcupines cannot throw their quills. Even the black bears in this area have no brook with human beings. Still, hearing a deer crashing through the woods at night gives me the metallic taste of fear from not knowing from what, or from whom, it is running. This area would be ideal for alien abductions after all. There are big open fields for landing and only country folk with fuzzy video cameras for dubious support of their claims.

Rather than dream up the plot for the next X-Files movie, I decided to try and incorporate the creepier side of the woods into my photography. The image above is one example. Shooting at night is another. The days are pretty evenly split between daylight and night this time of year, so being in the dark comprises a large part of my time here. The intervalometer cameras are shooting 24 hrs/day, but at night the exposure isn't slow enough to capture any detail. A few days ago I decided to light the subject of one of the cameras and hopefully capture some of the duality I feel here, between the creepy unease at night and the beautiful calm during the day.

My intent in doing so comes back to what Sugimoto said about how he tries to represent light's authority. In the black of night, one flashlight can have a lot of authority. I hope I've been able to capture some of that through my work.