The Ij (Amsterdam harbor) at sunrise

Robert Altman, the filmmaker died today. Ever since I began seriously pursuing photography I’ve been greatly influenced by movies–perhaps just as much as by still photography–and Altman is one of the American directors I’ve most admired. I can’t remember what movie of his I saw first. It could have been M*A*S*H or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The latter featured the songs of Leonard Cohen, another artist who I greatly admire. It was Nashville, however, that really captivated me stylistically with characters moving in and out of frame, overlapping dialogue, and crisscrossing storylines. Later on, I was terribly enamored of Shortcuts, his adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, a seemingly impossible task. Like Nashville it weaves together stories that are otherwise seemingly disconnected. Although my photography is not so much about people’s narratives, Altman’s landscape of random juxtapositons is the same one I wander across with my camera.