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Seeing in the Light
October 2008
the Snake River and the Grand Tetons, September 2008
Watched the movie August Rush tonight, a movie about a musical prodigy. I had no idea it was so magical, so musical a film. It contains a lot of ideas that I know to be true about music. Things that speak to me directly, that I have always known. I can see my own experience of music in the lead character’s discovery and knowing.
I want to get back to the music, the art, the creative work. I want to reclaim that part of myself that I let get lost, just to make other people happy. It’s my life now, and my time, and I can do it. I can leave what doesn’t serve me anymore far behind me, and I can move ahead.
I am getting back to the creative work. I looked through yesterday’s photos from Devil’s Lake State Park, in south central Wisconsin, and there are many that are stunning. The photos keep getting better, and I feel like I’m not doing anything. It’s just magic: they keep getting better, more infused with the spirit I can feel in each place I choose to photograph, and I can take no credit for it. I’m just the tool of what sees itself in the light. That’s how it feels. I lose myself, my sense of self, I lose my sense of self as separate from everything else. I lose my walls. They evaporate into the light, and I see what’s there.
I feels risky to be so naked, at times. When other people are around, it can change the mood. Usually it doesn’t bother me. I can pull people into the light that I’m feeling. Just by being true to my own feelings, my own intuition. It seems to spread like ripples in a pond. Things change towards the light. This is what Heaven must be like: everyone lost in the awe and ecstasy of everything that is God, and everything is God.
I passed a milestone, going up and down the Bluff yesterday. I hurt today, but less than I thought I would. This is a milestone of self-confidence, or returning strength, of knowing that I can keep going, now. I can keep going. I can make it back. I can get it all back. I passed a milestone, and now I know what’s right, and I know what I want to do. No more lost and blowing in the wind. I know I have a place in the world, now, and I know what to do with it.
I am also absorbed in reading Ansel Adams’ Autobiography, his last major book. I’ve needed to come to some sort of reconciliation with him, with Edward Weston, with these B&W art photographers who are my forebears. I’m finding a lot in it that resonates with me. I find we have more in common than I knew. It’s very synchronistic, similar, simpatico. I understand him better than I thought I would. This process of reconciling myself to the great photography masters is taking me to that next level, too. I can do as good as they. I can feel no limits, right now, today. It’s interesting to me that Adams and Weston were authors, were good writers who could convey their artistic intentions in words even as they displayed them in their photos. We have that in common. What I didn’t know was that Adams was also a musician, and a dedicated one, early in life, who practiced both music and photography equally. I feel the photography masters encouraging us, teaching by example. Leading me on by tacit encouragement.
I stood on that same overlook above the Snake River in the Grand Tetons that Adams took that famous photograph from, and sixty years later, I repeated his photograph. The moment repeated itself. It’s no wonder I felt his presence all day, there, and that I started shooting in B&W. The connection and the ecstasy I felt all day, and into the evening. The Tetons are my place, as Yosemite was his. Yellowstone, as lovely as it is, is not my place; just as the Atlantic Ocean, as lovely as it is, is not my ocean. I’ve learned these truths in these recent months of travel. Being there clarified my thinking as well as my perception. Sometimes it was a struggle, but sometimes you have to suffer before you can pay attention.
My ocean is the Indian Ocean, my ancestral home, and the Pacific Ocean. Of course, it’s a water planet, so it’s all one ocean. But you feel connected to certain places more than others; that’s the luck and destiny of personal history and of the muses calling to you. Some places put you in that space where you can hear the music much more clearly. You can always hear the music; it’s all around you; all you have to do is listen. The magic of the world is all around us: all we have to do is look, and see it. There it is, waiting to be seen. The world wants to be seen by us; wants to be seen in its glory and ecstasy. It is generous. It gives us everything we need. The world doesn’t go anywhere; it’s we who think we’ve become separated from it; it’s we who went out for a walk. The world is always waiting to welcome us back.
In the Sea Lion Caves, in coastal Oregon, those dark and wet places in the fog and rain, the waves crashing hard against the walls, I felt this awareness of the force of life being present. And when I got to the tops of the cliffs, there were three sea lions in the water below me, just for a second; just long enough for me to see them, and feel the connection. Then they went around the corner of the cave’s promontory, and disappeared back into the ocean.
In the warm light on the ledge at the Devil’s Doorway, above the lake and the sea of colored trees below, at Devil’s Lake, the light enfolded me, and everyone who was there. The magic was there. It only left when it was time for me to go. Some other people were there, and their energy changed the energy of the place. They were all young men, not wanting to connect with their elder, me; even though one of them had a tripod, and two of them were climbing on the cliffs. Little did they know that their judging created that wall between us. You could see a hint of a smirk. And then it was time for me to go. Because my time there, the hour and more I spent there, the time I was supposed to spend there, was done. it was time for me to go. I didn’t linger, and I didn’t look back.
Everywhere I go I find this same light, this same music. It’s enough to make you weep.
I see it all over. I see it in people, when they let you see it; most don’t, most are afraid to be that naked, that self-revealing. Even the nude models I’ve worked with, for the nudes in nature series I’ve been doing since 2000, often hold something back of themselves. They never completely let go, let go of the self, and merge with the land. When I can find a model who will trust me to witness their letting go into the land, and trust me to capture it, that particular series will reach its zenith, its true intention.
And I’m finding that I’m drawn deeper and deeper into B&W photography now. I can’t give up color—not and do what I did these past few days, in the autumn color changes in the northern Midwest. But there are lessons for me to go more deeply into the artistic aspects of the artificial and manipulated medium of B&W photography. Don’t be shocked that it’s artificial: that’s precisely what Weston said makes it an artform: it’s very manipulation for artistic purposes. This is what set out art photography—creative work rather than commercial work, as Adams divides the two arenas—from photojournalism. I have no interest in the recording of the ephemera and indelibility of the times, of the news, of the world as it is. Photojournalism is a narcissistic art on the species level: humanity regarding itself as the most important thing there is to regard. It leaves out the rest of the world. I’m far more drawn to photographing the spirit of place: what Adams openly admitted about his relationship to Yosemite. In some ways, the land is our most steadfast lover. It does not always take concern for our desires, it is often indifferent to those. We as a species are not the pinnacle, not the highest regard, not even the most fecund or important species on the planet; our own narcissistic self-regard aside, the planet is still much bigger than we. We still die in the natural disasters our world can heave at us, loving us still even as it kills us in numbers. (Why don’t we call those ways we find to kill and maim each other the unnatural disasters? There are certainly a lot of them.)
And so I’m drawn into the textures of form and shape, the pure regard of grayscale, of B&W, of tonal richness which is all about worshipping the light and shadow, without the distraction of the overwhelming information of color. The land looks into the lens, and I am overwhelmed. As Weston indicated, the artistic response sometimes needs a frame of limitations to work within; and the very artificiality of printing a negative on high-contrast paper, of manipulating the printing process to achieve an envisioned and desired result, all this can provide an artistic framework that allows for self-expression in an apparently reproductive medium such as the photograph. Remember, the camera doesn’t choose when to expose the film, the photographer does.
So I want to explore yet deeper aspects of my expression within my creative means: and B&W gives me more of that, right now, than does color. Dodging and burning, adjusting the tones and the contrast, working with the image till it says something beyond the subject matter—often a very subtle shift in tone can make a huge difference in one’s emotional response to the image—till it expresses something that I felt when I took the photo: that’s where this is going. Adams talks about in the Autobiography, as does Weston in the Daybooks.
You often know exactly what you want before you snap the shutter. Weston called it pre-visualization. But that has been misunderstood to mean planning a picture with intent; people think it means art direction by intention, rather than response in the moment. In fact, the music is all around us all the time; all we have to do is listen. Sometimes I feel like an antenna; writing it down is just my why of giving it back. Sometimes making a photo or digital montage or poem is so that I can get other people see and hear what I see and hear. It’s a way of connecting with each other; but it’s also a way of pulling other people into vision, so we can share the vision together. Bring everyone along with you, so they can be part of it.
I often know when an image I’ve taken is just right, and perfect, and will be exceptional. These days, more and more, I know where and when I’m supposed to be, to serve the light, to get the image that was waiting there for me to see. And I do look at the world, and see. I do listen to the world, and hear that music. Sometimes literally, sometimes symbolically. You develop an instinct that comes from practiced awareness, from paying long attention to working with your tools and materials. Your intuition tells you where and when to be, for the light to be just right, and you get there, and the image presents itself to you. You feel like nothing but a receptor for something greater than you, that wants to shine through. It’s a magnificent loss of self, loss of ego, and it’s utterly fulfilling. It’s hard to take credit for it, at first; learning to defend my art has been a long process, and not let it be cheapened or casually abused by those who would drag you down, this too has been a long process. There are so many people who feel themselves to be so little, that they can only understand dragging others down rather than building them up. It’s hard to be supportive of others when you think little of yourself. But the world is waiting to flood in, with that light and sound, and fill you up. And hold you up, and support you. The world is always there, even when others want to drag you down. There are tides in the world: the tides of the moon and sun and planets and stars; and there are tides in the soul, of rising and falling, and being alternately surf and the stones the surf is wearing holes into.
I am passing milestone after milestone. I feel a kind of self-confident self-esteem I can’t remember feeling before; except in brief moments. I’ve graduated from being a beginner, to starting grad school in the arts, and the arts of spirit, and spirit in the arts. I know where my own inner compass is leading me, and I’m not afraid any more. The light is there: all you have to do is see it. The music is all around us: all we have to do is listen.
A Spiral Dance Essay, © 2008 AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.
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