Faint Photographs
for the Departing Landscape
Revised March 18, 2022
Two Figures Departing Death Valley
Introduction
These faint images, with their own all pervasive luminosity, which contains an aura of perhaps the celestial, or the horrific, and which require of us a straining to see, reveal a fragile world on the edge of perception: at once there . . . and not there . . . It is a collection of images which together form one project among several others that co-exists under the overarching thematic title, The Departing Landscape.
How do we see and understand such apparitional, dream-like images? Below, I offer a few of my own contemplations on this body of work and some texts I’ve discovered that may shed some additional light on these images.
1) Fading Photographs: The faint images in this project, full of longing and close to melancholy, remind me of the way photographs curl up and fade when overexposed to light--their images progressively leaving us until they burn or bleed nearly into the pure paper base white upon which the image is embedded.
2) Luminous Transcendent Transformation: The late paintings and writings of Charles Burchfield have been an important influence on this work. His landscape images have been characterized by writers as “transcendent” and “luminous - ecstatic.” Some of the faint photographs share in the spirit of Burchfield’s late work, it seems to me. The images, dissolving into light, are not unlike the way autumn leaves transform into self-luminous colors; or how the suspended sounds of Morton Feldman’s music gracefully leave our hearing, decaying, de-composing back into silence . . .
Our world has always been in a state of transition and transformation, circling endlessly in cycles of dissolution and re-creation. Transcendence, finally, whatever form it needs to take for each of us individually, may be the only true event horizon remaining as we now find ourselves living in The Departing Landscape.
A child's figure, walking away, into light
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.
Fredrico Garcia Lorca
Burned mountain, smoke, two figures
4) The Fog of Creation: When my wife and I visited some National Parks out west (2009) there was a forest wildfire that shrouded the entire surrounding area in white smoke. The landscape was only faintly visible, often merely a sensed presence in a mysterious, luminous fog-like atmosphere.
I was reminded of this experience as I read Joseph Koerner’s book Caspar David Freidrich and the Subject of Landscape and he made reference to the “biblical fog of Creation” (Genesis 2:6), and the idea that fog was somehow God’s assistant at the primal moment (p.225). Koerner makes the analogy between the divine origination of the world, through fog, and an artist’s creation of a world through his or her chosen medium.
Faint Photograph, Cloud Forest
Faint Photograph, Limbless Tree, Winter Fog
Departing Eagle
5) The Burning of the Objects of Perception: In a contemporary commentary on one of India’s most ancient yogic texts, Swami Shantananda writes in his book The Splendor of Recognition : “As the yogi gets closer to his or her goal, the flames of Consciousness grow higher and glows with greater intensity forming a circle of luminosity that envelopes the triad of perception--knower, knowledge, and known. The yogi then perceives the entire universe as that luminosity.”
This is known, says the writer, as “the burning of the objects of perception in the great fire of Consciousness.” The great fire is “the light of Shiva, the light of God, the light of one’s own Self.” And this light, this burning leads to the yogic realization: “...all that one perceives is, in totality, one’s own being.” (p.276-278, 284)
The Circle of Luminosity"
"The Light of Shiva, the Light of God, the Light of one's own Self.
Departing Ox
Pompeii Head
Waving Goodbye
Faint Lake and mountains
Four Men in Suits
Goldfish in a pond
Bather
Man in hat, walking away
A Woman's Presence
Afterword
_______March 17,2022_______
~
1. Introduction to The Departing Landscape Project
The faint photographs were made between 2007 - 20012. They reflected my deep concern about Climate Change back in those days, and now . . . ten years later, I am terrified by the passive, delayed response from the most powerful politicians around the world to all the evidence and warnings presented b scientists, in-your-face clear signs of a progressing global disaster that will be destructive beyond imagination. Scientists have tried to speak their Truth, and it has gone on deaf ears during the four years of the Trump administration, and now we are just coming out a two year battle with the Coronavirus Pandemic (though there remain signs of it making yet another comeback). And as I write this Afterword Putin has been savagely invading and attacking Ukraine for the past two weeks. Entire cities are being blown up, set on fire, destroyed; civilian populations, often consisting largely innocent, are being trapped by military action and many children--and their mothers are being killed. It is heartbreak to see and hear the daily news reports. Putin is an obsessed man, playing his part in the unfolding drama known in Hindu traditions as the Kali Yuga.
According to those traditions, we are now living in the fourth--the worst and darkest--of the four "world ages" or yugas in the Yuga Cycle. This fourth yuga, Kali Yuga, is characterized by "strife," "discord," "quarrel," "contention;" it is an age "full of conflict and sin." The presidency of Donald Trump, the rise of White Suprematism, the ravages of extraordinarily devastating storms, floods, droughts, fires, the melting of glaciers, the rising of sea levels, the pollution of our oceans . . . the lack of attention paid to Climate Change, and the proliferation of bold, arrogant, in-your-face acts of lying, corruption, greed and violent meanness, even attacks on Democracy among some of our country's top governmental officials . . . all of this and much more are signs of Kali Yuga.
This fading world has always been in a state of transition and transformation, circling endlessly in cycles of dissolution and re-creation. Transcendence, finally, whatever form it needs to take for each of us individually, may be the only true event horizon remaining as we now find ourselves living in The Departing Landscape. Thus I have decided to pull this project out of its hiding place in the Departing Landscape Project, add some additional photographs and add this Afterword and then highlight as a revised project within my blog's "Recently Created" section on the blog's Welcome Page. Below is the list of hyperlinked titles of all the other projects collected together that constitute the Departing Landscape Project.
1. Introduction to The Departing Landscape Project
2. Faint Photographs
3. Portraits, Faces & Figures
6. Combines
7. In the Woods
8. The Persephone Series
3. Portraits, Faces & Figures
6. Combines
7. In the Woods
8. The Persephone Series
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This project was first published in 2007-08 as part of the
larger collection of projects entitled
"The Departing Landscape Project"
The "Faint Photographs" project was revised
and announced on my blog's Welcome Page
March 18, 2022.
Please visit my Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog/website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's,
my resume, contact information, and more.
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