Thorne Clark | The Map Is the Problem

He was standing on a corner with maybe fifteen minutes of usable light left and no clear idea where to go next. The sensible move was back toward the avenue, where the buildings ran taller and the light would hold longer. Thorne Clark, a New York photographer, went the other way instead, downhill into a block he had never walked, because a delivery truck had just turned and he wanted to see what it was blocking.

That is more or less how he works. No route, no shot list, no destination beyond the general direction of somewhere he has not been in a while.

A Route Is a Promise to Ignore Everything Else

The moment a photographer decides where he is going, he has also decided what he is not going to look at. Clark thinks that is the whole trap, and that from the outside it looks like discipline.

A planned walk turns the streets between the start and the finish into transit. Feet keep moving, eyes go soft, and the interesting thing that happens at minute nine gets processed as an obstacle to staying on schedule. He has done it and remembers the feeling, which is the feeling of being mildly annoyed at a city for being in the way.

Without a route, there is no schedule to fall behind. A block that looks promising gets walked twice. One that does not gets abandoned after thirty feet with no sense of loss.

Cars Ruin It, and So Do Bicycles

There is a speed above which a person stops seeing detail, and it is lower than most people assume. Clark puts it somewhere around a brisk walk.

From a car, a block is a color and a general impression. From a bicycle it improves slightly and stays mostly a blur, because the rider is watching for door swings rather than reading cornice lines. On foot at an unhurried pace, a person has time to notice that the fifth building has a different window rhythm than the four beside it, and time to stop, which is the part that matters.

Distance is not the number he cares about. Some mornings he covers four miles. Some mornings he covers eight blocks and comes back with more.

Getting Turned Around Is the Method, Not the Failure

Clark walks himself into unfamiliar territory on purpose, then finds the way out by reading the street rather than the phone. The finding-out part produces most of the photographs.

Being slightly lost puts a person in a useful state. Nothing has become background yet, so the eye gives a fire escape, a hand-painted sign, and a bent parking post the same level of attention. Familiar blocks do the reverse. They get filed as known and quietly stop registering.

He has passed the corner near his own apartment several hundred times and photographed it exactly once, on a morning when construction netting made it briefly strange. The netting came down two weeks later. The corner went back to being invisible.

The Best Frame He Got All Year Was Two Blocks Off Course

Last autumn Clark had already turned toward home, took a wrong left, and ended up on a narrow block where a scaffold had stood long enough that the plywood had gone soft and gray at the corners. Late sun was coming through a gap between two buildings and hitting one panel of that plywood, and only that panel.

He waited about six minutes for someone to walk through the light. A man carrying a folded stepladder finally did, and the ladder threw a shadow across the lit panel that looked like a second scaffold. The exposure took a second. The waiting took most of the value.

That photograph does not exist on any planned route, because no planned route goes down that block. Nobody puts a scaffold on an itinerary.

The case against planning is not that plans are bad. It is that a plan is a prediction, and a photographer who can already predict what he will find has told you in advance exactly how good the pictures are going to be.