Not necessarily the devil in the details, but something is.
It’s a season of mixed weather so far in Svaneti, as across much of Georgia. Sometimes sunny and warm, sometimes enough to make you add layers of clothing during the day and an extra blanket at night. Rain and cloud, mist too, sweeping in. Half of our own land is now scythed by neighbors, the other half waiting until rain stops so it can also be cut and then dried on the ground for hay. My wife hoes and plants in the garden; I add borrowed cow manure around most of the fruit trees for extra nourishment.
And I watch the mountain wall across from us, on the other side of the Enguri River. Quick cloud motion there can transform sections of it in an instant. While I rush to grab my camera, what I saw changes; although what it becomes may at least be as alluring. Wisps of white snaking among the forests and mountain faces, pushing everything into firm three dimensions, adding depth. The longest lens I have, 70-300mm, is perfect for isolating these frames. I’ll later enhance contrast in Photoshop, and convert what are nearly colorless images anyway to pure gray tones.
A savage leering face appears in melting snow just to the left of what, next month, will become the annual revelation of the Dancer, about whom I have written a fantastical whole story already. This face I must add to the tale. Others slowly come and go in the changing snow, some comical, most disquieting at best, nightmarish at worst, like this one. Cloud changes are instant, or nearly so; shadows shift over hours if not many minutes; snow melt is much slower, taking days, unless there is a rockfall or avalanche bringing sudden collapse and possible permanent change to the usual annual beings I see and record. Rock only changes over a lifetime or longer, unless snow melts into it and then freezes, which can crack it apart suddenly. These are the timescales of the menagerie around me, now that I am attuned and alert to it all. It took years and years living here for this to happen.
The day after the cloud/wall drama, I am asked by a client to drive his car to neighboring Becho while he guides his two hikers across the Baki Pass. I agree, and of course take my camera, not at all expecting to see even a glimpse of mighty Ushba, but you never know. Indeed, I am rewarded by several glimpses as I drive, watching and ready. I stop suddenly, jump out with the camera, and get my precious, fragmentary, momentary, moody shots.
And that same evening, as the clouds lift just enough off the mountain wall, new SNOW is revealed on the heights. In mid-June. I quickly shoot a video, and the frames of a stitched panorama, from upstairs. No wonder it’s been so cold.
The landscape here was always beautiful to my foreign eyes (although much less so to the local people dwelling here: partly from being used to it, partly from fearing the deep winter or the caprices of weather as farmers). As a photographer, I was always going to look for beauty; but here whole new levels of surprise eventually entrusted themselves to me, past what I was usually seeing. I say surprise, because much of what I now see is not only beautiful. It does bring other much less happy emotions too; but I would not change the quality or nature of the vision at all. Let it come.
I could have left the things I see to come and go; but I chose, first, to photograph them, to make them permanent instead of transitory, in part to show other people. Then, having asked some questions (“Is there a story, legend, or history behind this?”), I decided to write, either something quite new or a setting down of what someone told me. A coherent whole emerged, connecting Svaneti’s towers, its flora and fauna, its denizens of cloud and rock and shadow, and finally its people, together. Fantastical, indeed, but based on actual photographs of things which exist for a moment or lifetimes.
Noticing such things, called by the Greek word pareidolia, is available perhaps to anyone who takes the trouble to slow down and look, with expectation, for them. I grew up photographing from age 11, and writing from grade 1 in school too. So I suppose I’ve been primed my whole life, but it’s never too late to start to see. Anywhere. Anytime.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
