1) My Shadow in Firelight on Rock Formation Beneath the Milky Way Galaxy 2) Campfire 3) Inyo Mountains Deep Swirl 4) Moon Emerging from Annular Eclipse of the Sun, May 20, 2012 5) International Space Station in the Trees Who am I? The singular me; the seven-billion we; the one-hundred-seven-billion all (we humans who have ever lived).
Sky Earth Human Being
1) My Shadow in Firelight on Rock Formation Beneath the Milky Way Galaxy
2) Campfire
3) Inyo Mountains Deep Swirl
4) Moon Emerging from Annular Eclipse of the Sun, May 20, 2012
5) International Space Station in the Trees
Who am I? The singular me; the seven-billion we; the one-hundred-seven-billion all (we humans who have ever lived).
I know that I am fire & rock, stars and space.
I’m at home among the trees, and I am of the soil, and I’m gazing at the sky.
I am inquiry and exploration, molten and glowing.
Fully enlivened by the sun
awakened by starfall
and afraid at the time of dusk, not yet ready to be eaten.
I am pointed and together, wherever,
and safe.
I am exploded, atop a long-dreamt-of rocket.
and I am warmed and whisked at the hearth.
Photography itself is a primordial medium, what with its core being the simple binary of light and shadow. Its profound harmonic is, of course, its magical discovery of relationships between the seer and the seen. (The camera’s very existence as a human-made eye is a manifesto on the active nature of seeing.) Photography is a method for seeing sight itself, and for making everything intimate.
When I began to make pictures with the awareness that doing so is always an act of self-portraiture (and of exposure), I began to open into compassion. I began to encounter my sensitivity and my grandeur.
In a sense, the photographic endeavor and the human journey are both willful explorations of dynamic range - hearty swirls of both subtlety and intensity - and I’ve lately taken on that exploration with intention. Living at a time when many have begun to question the sustainability and stature of current civilization, and challenged by the heart-filled commitment of nature-focused mystics such as Muir, Watkins, Adams, Minkkinen, Turrell, and Goldsworthy, I have begun to engage some of the more ancient aspects of what provokes me as a being. I’ve been sitting in winds and warming on rocks, and flexing, and shifting, and sharing, and savoring, and building a studio, and taking pictures, and listening, and learning, and leaning in, and laying down, and owning up. For me, self-portraiture begins at this neolithic level. It opens up from here.