2022: Twelve Significant Images

Something happened in 2022. Something’s clicked, or maybe distractions fell away. Whatever it was, there’s a stylistic consistency that’s emerged, the photos I enjoy all having a similar feel. It’s not easy to articulate exactly what it is, but hopefully it’s conspicuous visually.

The success here is that the work feels more intentional. The risk is that it’s myopic. It also almost certainly has less mass appeal, but I’d trade that for more resonance with a few.

By the numbers, absolute production is down yet again, by about 20-25% by most metrics. The one exception is the number and proportion of images I’m especially happy with - what I consider standalone print-worthy. That’s gone up for the first time, likely a reflection of the increased intentionality.

What all this means, is that I feel like I’m standing at the beginning of a very big and challenging project. A project to go figure this ‘feel’ out, and see where it takes me.

I’m curious how far I’ll be in 12 months.

I’d love to hear what you think about the images. Please share your feedback in the comments, or contact me @arthurkaneko on IG.

Here’re my 12 personally significant images from 2022:

Image 1: Mesquite Arch

Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss 80mm f/2.8, Fuji Provia 100F

The less that needs to be said about an image the better, I think. And there’s very little I can say about this one.

Image 2: Where bighorns rest

In an unnamed location, between two oddly colored hills, lies a shallow ravine, protected from the wind and the blazing afternoon sun. I have no idea how this bighorn ended up here, but I find comfort by thinking it had a choice in the matter.

Image 3: Debauch

There’s something grotesque within the delicate, dewy exuberance of these coastal plants.

Image 4: Sonoma Coast

Between fog, sea spray, sea cliffs and the warm sunrise from the east, it would take years, maybe decades to replicate this moment of perfection.

Image 5: Ancient Oaks

The location is unquestionably special, and it single-handedly motivated me to focus intensively on woodland photography for a few months, the results of which you can see here. It was this period in which I learned the most this year, and I’m certainly happy with some of the images.

Not only that, this image won a commendation in the World Landscape Photographer Award in the woodland photography category.

That said, a confession: especially in retrospect, I don’t particularly like this image. It’s the one photo of the twelve that doesn’t capture that “feel,” and I think that inconsistency bothers me.

And so, with all its mixed implications, this is probably my most significant image of the year.

Image 6: Red Eclipse

Photography is a lie - at least by omission. Just out of frame are piles of construction dirt, chain link fences and the pungent odor of a stagnant SF bay. The warmth in the wispy clouds: light pollution from orange sodium streetlights.

Image 7: A Pier in Aptos

Unlike the Ancient Oaks image, I really like this one. More than any other this year, this is the one image I hope people can make sense of aesthetically.

Image 8: The River Starts Here

Thunderstorms are spectacular in the high Sierras, even more so while walking the Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. You’re up close and intimate with the flashes and grumbles, and uncomfortably exposed.

The river, the Tuolumne, flows from this meadow down time-worn granite into the Hetch Hetchy dam - an area with dignified, sheer, cliff-faces that rival Half-Dome and El Capitan, but mostly submerged since 1934. That water then travels a further 160 miles through aqueducts and pipelines to eventually provide pristine drinking water to San Francisco and its suburbs.

That river starts here.

Image 9: Distant Rain

The artist Agnes Martin said that “a definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions.” I think her works of highly intricate, repetitive, square canvases are incredibly successful in achieving this.

I think there’s important wisdom there for us landscape photographers. We work to maximize the potential of our subjects, and tend to end up making concrete just the big primary color emotions. But they’re a lot more colors in-between, and we should be working to capture them too.

Image 10: Still Stands

Bristlecone pines are old, arguably the oldest trees in the world, with some estimated to be 5,000 years plus. Among the living ancients are the bleached, bare, and magnificent remains of the once living, still standing, and getting older, but without age.

Image 11: Seaweed Rolls

Rolls of seaweed washed up on shore, on a gray misty day.

Image 12: Pale Pink Blue

Dusk light in the desert is intoxicating. Its otherworldly physical colors are beautiful of course, not to mention the glow it gives to landscape and people alike. But it also invokes a melancholy, addicting as any other intoxicant. Like the desert itself, you know you can’t stay there long, but I can’t help dream of the pale pink blue.

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