Almost a Season

This was one of the first fogs I ever captured. Perhaps even the very first.

It was late autumn, almost twenty years ago. Early one morning, I was driving past a village spread across the hills along a river when I suddenly saw it like this. The fog lay so thick that it seemed to dissolve almost everything around it: houses, fences, trees, distant hills. It felt less like a passing visitor and more like a part of the landscape — almost a season of its own, one that could begin without warning and then linger for months.

I stopped and took a couple of shots. It was probably one of those moments when you don’t really know why you press the shutter — you simply want to hold on to what you see in front of you. The village was quiet, the fog was slowly erasing the outlines of the houses, and there was almost nothing left to see beyond the river.

Now, when I look at these shots, I like to imagine that somewhere out there, cold autumn mornings like this one still come. Someone gets up, opens the gate, walks through the wet grass, and leads the livestock out to pasture. The fog still lies over the river, hiding the distant hills. And for a moment, it feels as though I am driving past that village again, on that early autumn morning.

Southern Urals, Russia.
October, 2007.
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