Exposure
"In the beginning, when the Lord created heaven and earth, the Spirit of God moved over the abyss. There was light. God divided light from darkness." -- Thomas Merton.
Gratitude
Could it be that in waiting for the dawn of day we become more grateful for the light which renews us -- for the colors of the sun to make us appreciate the world in new ways?
The sun rises and we turn to face its warmth and we are grateful. The long night passes, yes, but even then, in the darkness, we can find beauty. The duality of life -- heaven from earth, and light from darkness -- serve as reminders of the fleeting nature of our existence.
Out in the county, small streams freeze over trapping rocks in an embrace of ice. At twilight the world sighs. Here, on these quiet back roads life holds a thousand mysteries. Stopping along a small bridge I walk to the north to discover a dog had died there without ceremony. It's head was covered in leaves, the body in decay. I thought of the owners, if she or she had owners. When a dog is lost or dies, there is grief and longing. I made a few pictures, but I am not sure why, because I can't imagine ever showing them.
Photography is impulse.
The evening sky settles softly on rolling hills. Painterly light swashes over the Missouri -- scarlet crimson and magenta; tinged pillows of orange and red on the horizon. Cottonwoods bend like gates holding back the night.
On the farm, cattle move somberly across the south 40 toward a tree line dense with Hackberry, Mulberry, and Hedge. Geese sound the alarm of impending darkness. To the northeast, some thirty miles away, the lights of St. Joseph, Missouri begin to blink on the horizon. Trucks carrying loads of grain to the mills hum along Kansas Highway 7. The air is scented with freshly plowed fields of hay, soybean and corn. The road leading up the quarter mile to the farm is a dusty jaunt.
Out of sight out of mind.
In an age of email, tweets, Facebook, and all over the web, we are bombarded with information. In reality, however, there is probably more information, more to learn, in a single square foot of earth on the farm than there is on the entire Internet. Although the premise appears preposterous, if we really took the time to examine the more mundane bits of life our opinion would most likely change.
The square foot of land I imagine is hard-packed earth, which is covered with the dry grasses of winter. At one corner there is a rotting old beam with a few nails poking out. In the center, there is a single print from a passing deer.
Millions of organisms over millions of years have occupied this space. Floods, fire, drought, and human enterprise have shape it unique qualities. This patch of earth, on the surface appears simple but the processes that it bears witness to are beyond comprehension.
My imagination leads me away from the physical properties of objects, plants, and animals and toward the intangibles of what all these things, taken collectively really mean in relation to life. The conditions for knowing something are impigne on by emotion and sentimentality.
In the 6th century St. Benedict wrote “The Rule” as a primer for monastic life. Looking at my square foot of earth, I seek to understand some of Benedict’s most cherished values: simplicity, stability, and humility. The rationale mind, the human intellect, seeks to keep order when the chaos of distraction assaults us from every angle. But how can we look at a patch of earth and find simplicity, stability or humility? Can we apply human behavior to an observational process that requires objective intelligence?
Living in an abstract asymmetrical relationship with the world reduces experience to the lowest common denominators of knowing. We see the grass, the beam, the hoof print, and memory seeks out comparison. That blade of grass looks like any other, and that hoof print is something I've seen before. An abstract means something has been reduced to its most basic form. The photograph is composed of dots, lines, shapes that underpin the forms representing reality.
There's a gift of living every day anew.
The camera is an extension of my presence. When the lens is pointed out into space with purpose, then; there is just that one moment. My friend Garth jokes with me about an Annie Griffith Bell quote I use so often.
"A photography is a moment of truth touched by light."
Some people use words like saccharin -- just to sweeten things up -- but the thought of an image as "truth" resonnates within me. I can't apologize for that. Truth, for me, is bound by my awareness of the world around me. I see truth in humanity as I see it in nature. Truth is being in touch with self so that we can respond in a deeper and more meaningful way.
There was a time when I took making images more seriously than need be. Everything my photographed had to connected to telling stories about some event or about some person. I did recognize the "art" what I did, but the content -- the decisive moment -- always seem to come first.
Time has changed the way I see the world. There's been a transformation of sorts. Things happen, people change. It's okay.
Coming to the office at sunrise I pick up my camera to record the rising light -- a beautiful sky. In that moment I realized that I had forgotten to change the settings off "self-timer" mode. The camera click and streaked of light appeared. For a few minutes I began to doodle with the camera -- that curious release of energy we do when we are sitting in a meeting that has gone on a few minutes too long.
Leaving the camera on self-timer with a long exposure, I moved around making images of a large Christmas tree in front of the journalism department.
The image is a "truth" - it is bound by intent and memory. The truth can be found in the discovery of self, the act of self-expression, and the realization that we have gifts to share with one another.
There's a gift of living every day anew.
[[posterous-content:pid___0]]The camera is an extension of my presence. When the lens is pointed out into space with purpose, then; there is just that one moment. My friend Garth jokes with me about an Annie Griffith Bell quote I use so often.
"A photography is a moment of truth touched by light."
Some people use words like saccharin -- just to sweeten things up -- but the thought of an image as "truth" resonnates within me. I can't apologize for that. Truth, for me, is bound by my awareness of the world around me. I see truth in humanity as I see it in nature. Truth is being in touch with self so that we can respond in a deeper and more meaningful way.
There was a time when I took making images more seriously than need be. Everything my photographed had to connected to telling stories about some event or about some person. I did recognize the "art" what I did, but the content -- the decisive moment -- always seem to come first.
Time has changed the way I see the world. There's been a transformation of sorts. Things happen, people change. It's okay.
Coming to the office at sunrise I pick up my camera to record the rising light -- a beautiful sky. In that moment I realized that I had forgotten to change the settings off "self-timer" mode. The camera click and streaked of light appeared. For a few minutes I began to doodle with the camera -- that curious release of energy we do when we are sitting in a meeting that has gone on a few minutes too long.
Leaving the camera on self-timer with a long exposure, I moved around making images of a large Christmas tree in front of the journalism department.
The image is a "truth" - it is bound by intent and memory. The truth can be found in the discovery of self, the act of self-expression, and the realization that we have gifts to share with one another.
There's a gift of living every day anew.
The camera is an extension of my presence. When the lens is pointed out into space with purpose, then; there is just that one moment. My friend Garth jokes with me about an Annie Griffith Bell quote I use so often.
"A photography is a moment of truth touched by light."
Some people use words like saccharin -- just to sweeten things up -- but the thought of an image as "truth" resonnates within me. I can't apologize for that. Truth, for me, is bound by my awareness of the world around me. I see truth in humanity as I see it in nature. Truth is being in touch with self so that we can respond in a deeper and more meaningful way.
There was a time when I took making images more seriously than need be. Everything my photographed had to connected to telling stories about some event or about some person. I did recognize the "art" what I did, but the content -- the decisive moment -- always seem to come first.
Time has changed the way I see the world. There's been a transformation of sorts. Things happen, people change. It's okay.
Coming to the office at sunrise I pick up my camera to record the rising light -- a beautiful sky. In that moment I realized that I had forgotten to change the settings off "self-timer" mode. The camera click and streaked of light appeared. For a few minutes I began to doodle with the camera -- that curious release of energy we do when we are sitting in a meeting that has gone on a few minutes too long.
Leaving the camera on self-timer with a long exposure, I moved around making images of a large Christmas tree in front of the journalism department.
The image is a "truth" - it is bound by intent and memory. The truth can be found in the discovery of self, the act of self-expression, and the realization that we have gifts to share with one another.
"Things do not change: we change."
As we get older, the difference between meaningful and meaningless becomes ever more clear.
Can a sunset ever be meaningless? A birthday? Perhaps, a marriage that has lost meaning? One day, you wake up and see your partner and think, "when did this all become so routine?"
There is a sense of dread in thinking that I could someday look out the window at a sky full of beauty and wonder and feel nothing.
Christmas has lost meaning as it has become subsumed by shameless consumerism.
What about celebrating the New Year? All those resolutions? Nope. In bed by 9 p.m. and not thinking too much to change the way I am.
When do words become meaningless. "I'm sorry." "I love you."
We say so many things ad nasuem that the import of what we really want to say gets lost.
For something to have meaning implies that we must face the truth.Thoreau wrote, "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it..." LIfe becomes "mean" when we give up on it.
The cynic might say, "It is what it is." What meaning can be found in those words? Very little I suppose. The optimist, on the other hand, might conclude that there is a truth hiding below the surface of this sort of resignation. The optimist might say, "let's get to the bottom of this, uncover the meaning, and make some hard choices."
To Thoreau's imagination, ever the optimist, I seek a deeper meaning in search of knowing the present moment. "The universe is wider than our views of it." observes DHT.
I teach photography, video, new media, and media writing at Benedictine College. I've been an active blogger since 2004.
