As soon as World Spectators was safely launched, I exchanged my New Look dress for jeans and a flannel shirt, my high heels for rugged hiking boots, and my elegant walking stick for a shepherd’s staff, but I had a crise de conscience à la mode when it came to hats. I tried to reconcile myself to a plinth hat or a sou’wester, but a UV Explorer Hat in Bluish Teal with a 7” legionnaire flap and a 3.5” front and side brim was as far as I was prepared to go. After a quick look in the mirror, I grabbed my rations and camping gear, and headed off for the land of Photography.

It was tough going. The terrain was uneven and densely overgrown and the few pathways into what I assumed to be its interior ended abruptly, leaving me stranded. And since there were no road signs indicating where Photography begins, and where it ends, I never knew for certain if I was actually “there.” After a few days of looking for a place that I could not describe in a land that I would not even have been able to locate on a map, I abandoned my search. I comforted myself during my return journey, which was as long and full of mishaps as my outward journey, by reciting a mid-nineteenth century doggerel poem describing the directional difficulties of early plein air photography:

“When’er the wind is in the East,/Use twice the seconds at the least,” its author wrote, “And if the East incline to the North,/Take not the wretched sitter forth./Come cloud electric, or of hail,/Then every picture’s sure to fail./But with light zephyrs from the West,/In scarce five seconds ‘t is imprest”/And if the West incline to South,/In three you have eyes, nose and mouth” (Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography).

(Please cite kajasilverman.com when reproducing this passage.)