Images: In our eyes. On our minds. From our memories. Conjured in our dreams. Right in front of us. These days, we all have thousands of images saved on our phones and served up instantly to relive moments, places and stories where we just happen to have had a camera in our pocket.
It has not always been so. And I think of how many memories in my consciousness that would not be recorded anywhere else for revisiting if I had to carry the massive tripod and gear once required to hold the most portable of cameras.
The 35mm format and the beginning of photography in the modern age had its 100th anniversary in the year about to fade into history. The 1925 Leica camera (with rangefinder function in 1932) changed how we see the world.
Spontaneous shots, changing perspectives: The Leica I gives journalism a new language, too. Real photo reportage is beginning to replace staged shots and illustrations — vibrant, human, and on the move. The writing that comes with it also gains more depth, as it can now refer to the image, and no longer needs to describe the scene from scratch. Accordingly, the new visual form of journalistic storytelling conquers both magazines and newspapers at an equally fast pace.
So today, it is images from the camera in my pocket I will share, having no story to tell. Words are hard to find from such a simple cloistered urban-apartment existence that has replaced my former feral rural rambling life among mountains and forests. And so it goes. Life is good but it is not very large.
This image is one of several from a morning solo walk along Jacks Fork of the Current River from an overnight visit back in October. I could not conceive of such folding and layering apart from volcanic effects on molten rock.
I have learned since from a reliable source that it is probably a mineralized stromatolite — a colonial mat of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that represents some of the oldest life on the planet.
LOOKING BACK: How I long to know the full history of this one hard fact in my hand.
LOOKING DOWN: The headwaters of Clear Creek pass through our Lenoir Woods, on its way into the storm water system of Boone County. It’s not much as local creeks go, but enough for the coyotes and foxes, deer and squirrels — and the occasional pedestrian reluctantly content to peer into its lens of sky and token forest microcosm of the greater whole.
Also from recent travels (and evidence that my “new life” has taken me out of town and into the land-and-cityscapes not far from Columbia. This is from the historical town of Boonville, less than an hour away.
I don’t know why I have not written about these travels here. I confess I have not felt very connected with the larger world that blogging and essay writing and public speaking once brought me and my camera into such contact with.
Maybe I can overcome the inertia that has made me mute and robbed me of purpose and the desire to connect — to know and to be known.
Also from Boonville — once the hub of both river and rail traffic in a nation moving west. I am saving images for possible art projects as I continue to dabble in creative media in which I am a total noob. The notion of reproducing yet again images that my eyes and my camera have seen before me is making me SEE the world through a new and different lens. And I need new in my life.
Welcome to my world — the second floor of the Maplewood apartment building on the campus of Lenoir Woods full-spectrum retirement community in Columbia, Missouri — where I am one of 400. Out my door, carpet under foot and ceiling tiles for sky.
It is a comfortable setting where everything a body needs is under one roof. But not everything a soul needs — at least not mine. And so, after 15 months, I continue to feel malnourished, missing the nutrients that, for 30 years, were just outside my door. How blessed I have been to have accumulated so may memories — many of them sealed in light gathered by the cameras I have known.
And I just happened upon this one of the Badlands, South Dakota, circa 2010 from a visit to see our daughter in Rapid City. The wind was blowing so hard I had to kneel to take the three images I stitched into this panorama before it was easy to do. Nikon D200.
It has been a transitional year — a liminal space — not so full of outdoor images and nature to share as has been my habit since 2002. But I’m still alive and well and have hope for a richer 2026 with more words and pixels to come.
Hope to see you there!
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE.
