Voxpop #6: “On Variations”
Presented by Sara E. Melzer
Voxpops are experiments or interviews in which abstract photographers related to the abstract photography community of Hintology either have their work engaged with specific audiences or come to discuss particular topics with regards to their artistic practice.
“[Photography] has little to do with the things you see
and everything to do with the way you see them.”— Elliott Erwitt (1928–2023)
For this vox populi, I have decided to explore the theme of variations on selected objects of photography. This topic emerges from a rich tradition across art forms: In music, Rachmaninoff composed “Variations on a Theme of Paganini” and Bach his “Goldberg Variations.” In visual arts, Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral over thirty times, and his haystacks twenty-five times, portraying the same subject from different perspectives, in different lights and weathers.
Photography naturally lends itself to such variations, if simply because of the speed and ease of shifting the camera’s frame or exposure. Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham, Michael Kenna and countless other photographers have experimented with making multiple images of the same subjects by varying their camera’s lens, focal length, exposures, and so on.
My own experience of producing photographs has also borrowed this path. While some of my variations arose out of fear — the fear of not getting the focus “right” — most emerged out of curiosity and experimentation, envisioning various “what ifs.” This impulse especially crystallized during an assignment I had in a class with Annie Appel years ago: we were to pick any spot and make twenty pictures, all without moving our legs — we could change our camera frame, lens, angle or settings, but not our feet. During this exercise, once my conventional choices ran dry, my vision expanded to perceive a more creative range of possibilities.
The spirit behind this tradition and that assignment echoes through the photographic journeys of the following six artists, who share their work here and reflect on how variations relate to their creative process.
TABLE OF CONTENT
[ 1 ] Beth L. Buelow / @bethbuelowphoto
[ 2 ] Craig Royal / @halfblindphotog
[ 3 ] Robert Hecht / @roberthechtphotography2.0
[ 4 ] Ivona Majewski / @ivonature_moods
[ 5 ] Howard Grill / @howardgrill
[ 6 ] Michael Gordon / @michael.e.gordon
[ 1 ] Beth L. Buelow / @bethbuelowphoto
There are few things architecture photographers love more than a good staircase. To my eye, they present endless possibilities for not only abstraction, but for storytelling, even in the absence of people. Staircases are liminal spaces. They are not destinations themselves, but they move us between levels, literally — floor to floor — and figuratively. Consider any number of dramatic movie scenes that involve a character navigating stairs, with either transformative or horrific consequences. They are the urban equivalent of climbing a mountain, offering a sense of accomplishment and a new perspective on the spaces we occupy.
As a photographic subject, they suggest movement and direction. These three images capture the graceful lines of the staircase designed by Shaw Metz & Associates in 1962 and located in the Morton Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a quieter, gravity-defying structure that grows more interesting the more it’s explored. I’ve visited this staircase with my camera five or six times over the past few years, and each time, I see new ways to interpret it.
For this latest visit in April 2025, I had more time to spend finding variations on the straightforward captures I’d made in the past. It’s always a welcome challenge to find new ways to photograph a familiar-to-me location. The simpler the scene, the better, as that pushes me to keep “working it” past the point where I think there’s nothing new to discover. It’s just when I am about to give up, I look down or behind me or take just a step or two in a different direction, and another variation shows itself.
My photography has evolved over the past few years from creating single images to thinking more in terms of series. Perhaps it’s my classical music training, but I find myself intuitively creating abstract “variations on a theme.” Musically, a simple theme is introduced in its most basic form. It is then transformed in a series of variations, each exploring the theme through changes in mood, tempo, key, rhythm, instrumentation, and ornamentation. The theme is clearly discernable in some variations; in others, the theme is whispered, abstracted, felt more than heard.
In the visual language of photography, this means an idea or object — in this case, stairs — is our recognizable “theme,” but it is through the variations in tonality, mood, perspective, line, inclusion and exclusion, cropping, lens choice, abstraction techniques, and post-processing that it comes to life. One can turn a theme and variations into a small series, a project, or an entire portfolio. In my personal creative development, seeing this way has resulted in my most significant artistic growth. It’s the gateway to creating a larger body of work that encompasses multiple ideas sharing a throughline while presenting a variety of perspectives.
In the case of the Morton staircase, it was the first time I’d photographed it using a wide-angle lens (28mm). While slowing down in a space always helps one to find new angles, a different lens certainly broadens possibilities! Looking through the viewfinder, I experienced the swoop of the stairs to be slightly exaggerated, and curves converged and interacted with the gallery space in previously unseen ways. The contrast of darker natural and lighter painted concrete offered a chance to create shapes within the shapes.
Across these three variations there is similarity in how the curved lines end up in triangles, either as a “Y” or a “V.” This makes the subject of the images not the stairs or balcony, but the relationship between textures, tonalities, and curves. I envisioned them in monochrome and experimented with high- and low-key interpretations, as well as more balanced tones. High-key helped to defuse distracting textures in the floor and concrete. Low-key added mystery. The balanced approach added in some realism while still allowing for a non-literal viewing. As a set, these three have resonance; there’s an exploration of down-below and up-top viewpoints, taking different components of the space and creating a visual echo that pulls them together.
This is what makes my heart and soul happy about abstract photography: there are limitless ways to interpret the ordinary and extraordinary. We have the potential to reveal an unseen-but-felt essence of a scene or object. Just as people are more than what they externally present, so is everything around us. Abstraction challenges us to see our world in a deeper way, looking beyond the thing and into the meaning, purpose, and energy of a thing. It’s also just plain fun! Whether my intention is to tell a deeper story or offer a playful, surprising take, the joy of creating alternate realities will never grow old.
[ 2 ] Craig Royal — @halfblindphotog
My fascination with variations comes out of the limits of my visual reality. I was born with a significant vision loss due to a congenital form of optic atrophy. And yet, I’m drawn to photography. My camera has become a visual aid that helps me to see in ways that my own natural-given eyes cannot.
Since birth, my peripheral vision has been so blurred that I miss out on a lot of detail. In 1992, my central vision became additionally obscured by a white blind spot in both eyes. It’s like having to stare at a light that I can’t turn off, even with my eyes closed. If I were to stand 4 feet from you, your head would disappear.
This gives an abstract quality to what I see, making much of it impressionist or surreal. In my best moments, I have embraced this abstraction with fascination, and transformed it into art — all with the remarkable technological assistance of my trusty digital camera and editing software.
With the camera as my eyes, I can rely on its auto-focus instead of my own. I experiment with a slow shutter speed, which reveals a different visual reality — and one that most people are not accustomed to. When I’m back in my editing room with Photoshop as my companion, I blow up the image with a 4x telescope, similar to what surgeons use while operating — and there I can operate on my own images to my heart’s content. There I zoom in on amazing details that suddenly become visible in an incredibly small space. I can see what many sighted people can see at times, but don’t take the time to notice. And other times, they cannot see it because it is not available to the naked eye. The camera unveils an unseen artistry of nature that can only be captured through photographic abstraction. For me, this is the joy of creation and I have a childlike wonder at its beauty.
My reduced visual reality has inspired me to experiment with variations on the same basic elements — the intersection of light, water and wind. I often limit my photographic forays to particular locations where light, water and wind are most likely to meet — such as under a bridge. For the three images in this article, I positioned myself under a four-lane bridge in Tampa, Florida that has an open space in its middle. That opening lets in light and creates bans of reflected light on the water’s surface. I photograph them with a slow shutter speed at 1/6th of a second. I come often to this bridge and stand in the same spot for hours. Or for days. Or years (dare I say, not continuously!) The images are never the same. Everything is always changing. Each time, I take multiple images in rapid succession, with 6 frames per second. I play with different variations, especially since I cannot see if my images are in focus until I return home to my computer where I can magnify them. There the variations astound me.
Etymologically, the word “photography” means using light to draw or write. I build on this meaning because I play with very long exposures, such as .6 or longer. The idea is to let in more light so that it, the light, along with the wind, enables me to draw with them as if with paint brushes. The water becomes my canvas; the reflections become my pigment. The reflections expand and take on different shapes as they move across the water and gain a three-dimensional quality with a slow shutter speed. Together, all the elements form an abstract ephemeral dance of reflected light. For me, it’s like a dance of a thousand veils that creates a wispy effect, as the light shimmies from, towards, around, under or through undulating lines of the reflections. Like a Rorschach test, these images can suggest something beyond themselves and can express in a surreal, abstract way something very deep about our world and our relationship with it.
The variations I chose are two sets of black and white inversions of the same image, with a third set that’s an inversion of similar shapes but with colors preserved. Although the changes I’ve made are very simple, their impact is surprisingly large. It affects our perception so that we foreground and background different elements of the same image. And this changes the emotional impact on the viewer. For me, the lighter images border on a sublime or transcendent feel with their delicate forms wafting in a light filled Infinite space. By contrast, the dark images engender a more somber, mysterious quality that emerges out of the darkness. Other viewers will no doubt have different reactions. We are all differently sighted!
[ 3 ] Robert Hecht — @roberthechtphotography2.0
Dorothea Lange advised photographers to: “Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion.” Isn’t this what Bach did with his Preludes & Fugues, creating variation after variation through all the keys? Or Edward Weston with his vegetables and rock abstractions? Or Michael Kenna with his solitary crepuscular forays? (In none of those cases, by the way, did the artist ever show signs of artistic exhaustion!) Without initially setting out to do so, I have been doing just what Ms. Lange suggested — for more than thirty-five years now — with one very particular subject. I have been photographing car reflections since 1989. The first occurred upon pulling into a parking space in San Francisco, by chance glancing to my left and seeing a series of interlocking reflections in the windows and surfaces of the shiny black car parked next to mine. It was unexpected and thrilling and I was proud of the resulting image. (Fortunately, I had my trusty Leica with me.) I figured it was a one-off.
But then over time I began seeing other such scenes — in fact, a seemingly endless, incredibly rich panoply of reflections on metal and glass surfaces. I realized at some point that I had struck a rich vein of imagery, a myriad of pictures simply waiting to be perceived. They now comprise my ongoing Auto-Reflective series. Ironically, I am not a ‘car guy’ at all, but give me a good reflective “canvas” and I usually see the possibility of interesting photographic visions.
My eyes have become acutely sensitized to such visual possibilities. In the first of the three images chosen for this article, I was driving through an intersection in Portland when I noticed out of the corner of my eye what looked like an unusual configuration of car reflections on the side street. I immediately found a parking spot and walked back to investigate. I’d been right — a parked car and a parked tall van behind it were responsible for a unique arrangement of tree reflections. The windshield of the parked car in front reflected the trees upside down; the windshield of the large van parked close behind it reflected the same trees but right side up. Variations on a theme within a single frame.
The second of the three images was also the product of a serendipitous event. I had parked my vehicle in the little village of Nicasio in northern California, intending to shoot some oak trees in the rain. However, upon exiting my car, I saw instead this multi-panel arrangement of oak tree reflections in the raindrop-speckled metal and glass of my car. I was enthralled by how the reflections related across the different segments of the car, like a through-composed musical composition with eight distinct variations — again, in a single frame.
The third image was presented to me in my grocery store parking lot. As I pulled into a parking space, I noticed this scene reflected on the adjacent car. The white circle appears to be a car ‘design feature’ but I prefer to think of it as the moon balancing on a branch. A ready-made triptych.
Each of these three images was created during the past couple of years, following a succession of hundreds of others from the past several decades. The good news about this long-term visual obsession of mine is that while working it perhaps to exhaustion, as Ms. Lange suggested, neither I nor the subject has as yet reached that point! Both the subject and I still remain open to yet more variations.
[ 4 ] Ivona Majewski — @ivonature_moods
I picked up my first camera in 2006, right after leaving Poland — my home, my creative nest, and the place where I worked as a graphic designer for an international women’s magazine. Moving to Israel meant more than changing countries; it meant letting go of a whole identity. I found myself cut off not just from my homeland, but also from the familiar worlds of graphic design, painting, and metal arts. I felt like a tree pulled up by its roots.
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Then photography found me.
I got a macro lens, curious more than anything else, and began wandering through Israel’s forests, mountains, and fields. I was captivated by the unfamiliar textures and shapes of this new land. That lens, with its wide aperture, didn’t just let in light. It opened up an entirely new way of seeing.
What I once saw as “a flower” was now fractured into its tiniest parts — each petal, filament, vein, suddenly becoming its own world. It was like peeling back the surface of things to reveal a secret geometry underneath. Shapes, lines, and textures emerged like whispers from nature’s deepest vocabulary, its most elemental forms. I wasn’t just looking anymore — I was seeing.
Through that tiny lens, I unlearned the visual language of categories and sameness our culture teaches. I began to notice what lies beneath: the fluid, abstract forms that defy neat definitions. Mother Nature, I realized, is the most brilliant graphic designer of all. She recycles the same basic elements — lines, spirals, curves, patterns — but never in the same way twice. She’s constantly remixing, reinventing, improvising.
Her spirit of endless variation became the heart of my work.
Each arrangement, each subtle shift — a curve bending this way instead of that — can spark entirely different emotions. That’s the magic of variation. It lets us feel the contrast between forms, and the feelings they evoke. Most of the time, we don’t even notice how much a slight change in shape or direction can stir something deep inside — until we see the alternatives side by side.
As I explored these ideas through my lens, I remembered the writings of S.I. Witkiewicz, the Polish artist and thinker who believed that the role of art is to awaken metaphysical feelings — those big, cosmic emotions of connection and wonder. His philosophy had once seemed abstract. Now, it felt deeply personal.
Witkiewicz helped me see nature not just as subject matter, but as artist — and I, as her witness. That’s why I photograph the natural world as I find it. I don’t manipulate it. I make only the smallest edits. To change it too much would feel like a betrayal of the beauty that’s already there.
And the more I looked, the more convinced I became: nature isn’t just beautiful, she’s ingenious. Human innovation often traces its origins back to her. Velcro? Its inventor was inspired by burr seeds and their tiny hooks that cling to clothing and fur. Even Tokyo’s rail network has an interesting parallel: long after it was built, scientists discovered that slime mold naturally forms networks that mirror its design, balancing efficiency and resilience. The world is more connected — and certainly more creative — than we often give it credit for.
Take the humble dandelion, considered a mere weed. But I’ve photographed it dozens of times, and yet every single image is different. The same basic form — the parachute-like seed head — reveals new moods depending on the light, the angle, the dew on its feathers. Whereas I see it as a parachute, others see an umbrella, or cathedral dome. For me, it’s a shape that repeats in nature like a lullaby, soft and cradling. It’s comforting, like counting sheep before sleep.
In this series, I offer three versions of the dandelion, each capturing a different emotional tone. Depending on how you see it, the form might feel open or closed, delicate or alien, peaceful or electric. What do you see? What do you feel? That’s the beauty of it — it changes depending on you.
Each photo expresses my way of saying thank you to this endlessly inventive world. Looking at the ordinary from a new angle is like turning a kaleidoscope: same pieces, infinite forms. My hope is that by sharing these moments, others might also pause, look again, and rediscover the awe hidden in plain sight.
Because sometimes, in seeing differently, we begin to feel differently. And maybe, just maybe, we begin to feel more deeply connected — to nature, to each other, and to something larger than ourselves.
[ 5 ] Howard Grill — @howardgrill
Minor White famously said, “One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” I first heard this quote many years ago while participating in a photography workshop. Our group was taken to a stone wall in Oregon’s Shore Acres State Park, where White used to bring his students. We were given an assignment to make a self-portrait using the wall itself, but without putting ourselves in the image. The goal was to photograph “what else” the wall could be. Removing the name of the subject you’re photographing (it was no longer to be considered a wall), and thereby its definition, allows the photographer to become more attuned to line, shape, and light. Ever since that workshop, I’ve found myself inspired to continue making images in this way.
Choosing the photographs for this article encouraged me to think more deeply about what abstraction is. Were my leaf images truly abstract? After all, any viewer could easily tell what they were. The answer to my query, I believe, lies within that Minor White quote. Was I photographing leaves, or was I photographing various shapes and gradations of light? Did I want the viewer to think that the images were of interesting botanical specimens, or did I want them to see wonderful shapes that allowed them to feel something about the essence of nature? The answer was the latter.
I was initially inspired to make these images because of their undulations. The seemingly perfect curves that nature produced intrigued me, as did the way the light played along with the curves. These leaves were in a local botanical garden, but everyone was quickly walking by them without noticing what they had to offer because they wanted to get to the far more showy flowers. I felt like they were missing out, and I wanted them to stop and take notice of what they were walking past. After all, don’t photographers aim to help people to see things they might ordinarily miss; to allow them to see the world around us differently? And don’t photographers aim to encourage themselves to see things they might ordinarily miss? This is why I love variations. They give me the opportunity to go beyond the limits of my initial framing of something, both with my camera’s frame and my own mental frame.
Photographing variations allow me to see my world more deeply. Once you make all the obvious photographs, you must work to understand, as Minor White might say, “how else” you can see, portray, and transmit the feel of the subject. That was definitely the case with the project that these leaf photographs came from.
In this series of images, I was fascinated by the various shapes that nature was able to produce. In the first photo I was intrigued not only by the curve the tip made, but also by the way the two sides of the leaf came together to form the tip. The undulations of the leaf’s edge was an added surprise. I made the second image for a completely different reason. The strong straight lines appeared to contrast strongly with the curves in the first image. Here, there were fine straight lines formed by the veins of the plant, as well as stronger lines that crossed as a diagonal, forming an inverted “V.” This gave a much stronger and rigid mood to the image, which was quite different than the feeling the curves imparted to the first photo. In the final image of this series, I was intrigued by the idea of an “ant’s eye view” of a leaf. When getting down to view the leaf from its underside, I was intrigued by both the light and dark alternating pattern seen where light shone through it, as well as by how the curve at the tip seemed to separate the leaf into two realms of reality; one above and one below.
From a technical standpoint, all three photographs were made using a Canon R5 and a 100mm f2.8 macro lens. An aperture of f4 allowed for a shallow depth of field in the images that accentuate the leaf tips, while f11 was used to assure maximal sharpness across the surface of the leaf in the photograph where it appears en face. When processing these images, I wanted to give the leaves the appearance that they were emerging from darkness.
I hope these images will inspire readers to look more closely at the mundane plants they pass by every day in order to see “what else” they might be. What other variations are possible?
[ 6 ] Michael Gordon — @michael.e.gordon
In this wild looking landscape, I fancy myself as an astronaut — visually stunned by the view but desperately looking for a spot to land my spacecraft. This is metaphorical terra incognita for me and my camera, a small place on earth where I can make photographs that may not look like a place we call home or can even inhabit. But I’m still very drawn to it. Having grown up watching Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and other science fiction of the era, I have no doubt that those were the seeds for concepts and titles I would later in life employ in my photographic work.
These photographs are from an ongoing body of work I call Life on Maars. I love geology, and I enjoy combining both word-play and images into photographic concepts. A maar is a broad, low-relief volcanic crater caused by a phreatomagmatic eruption (an underground explosion which occurs when groundwater meets magma). In Death Valley, California, thirteen of these maars are nestled together. And they resemble another planet, especially in the right light — were it not for the fact that there are plants that are illuminated and distributed all around the craters. The month of the year and time of day play a part in how light unfolds across this landscape. The undulating and unusual topography — differentially lit at various times of the year — the otherworldly theatrical light, and the ever-glowing plants brought these words together in my mind and helped name the series.
When I find a place in the landscape such as this one, fascinating and ripe with photographic potential, I will return regularly to learn the light and hopefully the many photographic possibilities. Although I do not consciously conceive of my process in terms of variations on a scene, I am, in effect, exploring alternative options that best convey the concept I have in mind. I repeatedly visit the same site, searching for or stumbling into variations that seem to conform to the parameters I’ve set for the concept. Often, an idea such as Life on Maars may be born as the result of just a few key images early in the process.
Abstract art, by definition, does not attempt to represent external reality, but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colors, and textures. Another definition is to extract or remove something. I believe that my work here finds a good intersection between both.
My titles often arrive before I even make the exposure. The Arena was carefully composed to include only a portion of a dry lake bed and its steeply inclined rear wall, where small desert shrubs are like “people” seated in the arena. Peace Angel is a geological feature on the wall of a crater; again, with glowing desert shrubs seeming carefully positioned. It is a crater of violent origin, and its erosion is of a cataclysmic nature. But that is in the past and the feeling I now experience is one of tranquility and peace — as if I am floating quietly in space. Difficult Landing features opposing shapes, shadows, and light. As a fictional astronaut in need of a landing zone, this is terrifying terrain. Everything is tilted, there is no flat ground, and some if it looks like a forever trap for my craft.
As a human with a camera and a desire to creatively express such ideas, everything about this beautiful, undulating landscape and its light feel welcoming and perfect to me.
▲ Closing word
…by interviewer Sara E. Melzer
Following in the footsteps of Minor White and Dorothea Lange, these six photographers continually ask two essential questions: “How else?” and “What else?” They have focused their work by returning to the same kinds of subjects over days, even decades, while expanding their vision through these twin inquiries.
“How else?” drives experimentation with technique and approach. This question counters our habits of seeing which lock our mental frame and camera frame into fixed settings, resulting in monotone sameness. It pushes photographers to vary their angle, exposure, timing — reminding us that we have choices in ways and places we might not first imagine.
“What else?” focuses on perception and discovery. When we move beyond our obvious response to a subject, our attention becomes available to notice subtleties initially missed — unexpected relationships, qualities of light, textures that only emerge through patient observation.
When variations are placed side by side, we see how technical changes reveal different qualities in the same subject. These photographers demonstrate that both questions work together to develop a more nuanced way of seeing. We invite readers to experiment with this dual inquiry, allowing these simple questions to expand both their methods and their perception.
A huge thanks to all the interviewees for their sharing their thoughts! If you enjoyed reading them, please consider visiting their Instagram profile and following them for more inspiring abstract photography:
[ 1 ] Beth L. Buelow / @bethbuelowphoto
[ 2 ] Craig Royal / @halfblindphotog
[ 3 ] Robert Hecht / @roberthechtphotography2.0
[ 4 ] Ivona Majewski / @ivonature_moods
[ 5 ] Howard Grill / @howardgrill
[ 6 ] Michael Gordon / @michael.e.gordon
Voxpop conducted by Sara E. Melzer
Article edited by Solav.
…about Hintology
Hintology is an abstract photography magazine project created in August 2020 which strives to create a community where every artists are given a chance to broadcast their voice, the aspiring just as much as the established. We are a small team of volunteers who rely on the passion and contributions of their community to help spread the beauty and diversity of abstract photography. If you share our vision of inclusiveness and inquisitiveness, you can make a difference by tagging your work with #Hintology on Instagram, or by following our page and joining our group on Facebook. If you appreciate our curative work and the interviews we conduct, please do consider donating via this link; all funds will go towards promoting our community. Lastly, if you’d like to contribute to Hintology or join our team, visit our collaboration page.
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