Growing Light
~ Spring of 2022 ~
Dedicated to my wife Gloria & offered in homage to Valentin Silvestrov and all the people of Ukraine
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Introduction
The photographs in this project were made in the early spring of 2022, mostly during the month of April, and a few in early May. My wife Gloria, an enthusiastic gardener, indoor plant lover, and devoted protector of Mother Earth, decided to buy some special lights this spring to help start the growing of plants from seeds inside our house. So this year, in addition to the usual seeded peat pots and pellets that Gloria places near many of our windows, there appeared unexpectedly in our house a glowing thing --like a self-luminous jewel-- which provided some welcome magical light to the dark corner of the foyer by our front door.
(Note: for the past two years, and more, because of the Coronavirus Pandemic, I have been photographing only the things and spaces inside our house--or infrequently the meadow, its two ponds and the woods directly behind our house. Visit this link to see my collection of Pandemic Inspired Photography Projects.)
Gloria rigged up three wire shelves, one above the other, each filled with flats containing little seeded peat pots and pellets. Above each of the shelves she suspended a grow light. The top shelf received the one grow light that produced "daylight"only (though the light appears to be more "early evening golden" than "white"). Above the other two shelves are grow light units that offer a choice of three options: 1) white with blue light; 2) white with red light, and 3) white with blue and red light. (At first Gloria tried white with red light, but then later decided that the white, blue and red light combination was the best choice for starting plants from seeds--the directions that came with the box were pretty vague).
Three-tier self with white grow light on top, white and red light below.
The arrival of this unusual photographable object in our house echos a similar situation that had presented itself to me a few months earlier, in January, 2022, when we hired a contractor to build a utility closet around the sump pump we had installed the moth before in the the corner of our large finished basement room in which I store my archive of photographs, my stereo and CDs, most of my art books, and a ping pong table. We decided the pump should be hidden from sight and protected from possible damage. (Our two grandchildren, Claire and River, and our adopted grand daughter, Leah, love to rough-house with me in that room and on the ping pong table when we get together.)
Our grand daughter Claire picking green beans in our garden, fall 2020
January, 2022 Basement room with plastic sheets covering everything.
The night before the contractor began construction on the utility closet he came to our house and covered everything in the room with sheets of plastic. He would be making lots of dust during construction and wanted to prevent the dust from settling on out things in the room.
(Note: in the image above, the dark square shape on the left, in front of our basement windows, is one side of the ping pong table which was set in its upright position to make more floor space for the contractor's tools and supplies).
After he left that night I went downstairs to see what he had done; I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the room had been transformed into something like an amusement park funhouse, or a sculptural art installation.
Early the next morning, before the contractor arrived to begin construction, I made some photographs in the room. The early morning light from the two basement windows gave everything covered in plastic a beautiful, mysterious glowing presence. The sweeping shapes of the plastic appeared to be walking ghosts, and the objects hidden beneath the plastic had become fantastical living creatures. The entire room had become a surreal light modulator. I was able to photograph for about half an hour before the contractor arrived that first morning; and I photographed again the following morning. The best of those photographs were used in my photography project entitled Maya's Veils
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After I began photographing Gloria's grow lights and the pellets and pots beneath them, I thought I might as well photograph the other potted plants she had placed on or near our window sills. Then later it occurred to me it might be interesting to photograph her house plants as well. I sensed a photography project emerging, but did not think much about that. I just kept photographing whatever interested me. I also made a few photographs of Gloria's Still Life arrangements of objects she had lovingly collected and often placed in relation to her potted house plants.
In other words, essentially I allowed myself to photograph whatever attracted me, in any way that seemed might yield an interesting image. The project before you now simply emerged from all the photographs I had been making over a five or six week period in the spring of 2022 with no particular agenda or conceptual framework in mind other than the grow lights that initiated the first photographs.
This experiential-experimental attitude of photographing was very similar to how I approached my earliest Studies Project which spanned nearly seven years, between 1994 through the year 2000. I walked everywhere, anywhere, and photographed whatever presented itself to me as a picture possibility. The Studies work was freely exploratory, intuitive, inquisitive and spontaneously inventive . . . It was for me, at that time, a liberating way of working, because the preceding years of working had been based in a fairly structured, disciplined way in regards to subject matter and visual-conceptual project themes.
But there is another reason I am mentioning the Studies project here: the inspiration for that early work originated in my love of listening to recordings of miniature (brief) piano compositions--often identified as etudes, or studies. As I was thinking back on that earlier body of work it occurred to me that for the past year--and probably longer--I had been listening to practically nothing but recordings of the brief piano pieces composed by Valentin Silvestrov.
(Note: I can't explain how it works, but I do know that the music I listen to does impact my creative process and the photographs I make. I invite you to visit this link to my Music Inspired Photography Projects.)
Valentin Silvestrov & Putin's Invasion of Ukraine
As I was writing this introduction I was stunned by the surprising realization of an unconscious and yet profoundly meaningful synchronistic coincidence that existed between my love of Silvestrov's hauntingly beautiful piano music and the despair I was feeling about Vladimir Putin's devastating invasion of Ukraine and his deadly attacks upon the Ukrainian people. I had forgotten that Valentin Silvestrov was a Ukrainian composer! He was born in Kyiv in 1937, and had lived and wrote all of his music there . . . that is, until February, 2022 when, at the age of 84, he and his daughter and grand daughter were forced to evacuate Kyiv.
(Note: a brief history of Silvestrov's music: his early 1960's avantgarde style of music, which was getting international recognition, was under pressure to conform to official Soviet restrictions, and so he removed himself from Kyiv's music scene and began to compose very quiet, private, intimate forms of music. Later, after 1991, with Ukraine's independence from Soviet rule, he began composing works of a spiritual nature. In 2004, with the Orange Revolution and then in 2014, with the Maidan protests against Russian influence, Silvestrov did write some political or protest music, including Prayer for Ukraine which was recently performed at the Met in the United States and other top musical establishments around the world. In a recent interview Silvestrov stated that the war with Russia was "a continuation of the Maidan. Only the Maidan revolution was only in Kyiv, and now all of Ukraine has become the Maidan.")
After I came to the startling realization that I was responding to Silvestrov's quiet, beautiful, often spiritual and always melodic piano music while simultaneously I was making photographs in our house and responding in horror to Putin's destructive attacks against the people of Ukraine, I searched the internet in hope of learning something about how he was coping with the horrors of Putin's war. I especially recommend the NY Times article by Peter Schmelz: "Ukraine's Most Famous Living Composer Is Now A Refugee" (click here).
At the urgings of his daughter and grand daughter Silvestrov evacuated Kyiv together with them in February, 2022. They traveled, with great difficulty, across Poland and arrived in Berlin in early March. (Silvestrov's grandson stayed in Ukraine as a volunteer soldier.) Schmelz interviewed Silvestrov after he and his family arrived in Berlin: "'We're more or less OK,' . . . but [Silvestrov added], he remains in shock about the war. 'I don't know how we lived to see this.""
Shortly after he arrived in Berlin Silvestrov wrote two elegy's: the first recalls Ukraine's folk music; the second, written nine days later, gives expression to his mourning. And since the war began several of his earlier compositions, such as In Memoriam and Maiden-2014 have been performed by major orchestras and well know soloists around the world. Silvestrov told Schmelz that he feels strange, even irritated, "that this misfortune needed to happen for [orchestras and musicians around the world] to begin playing my music." ~ "Does music not have any value in and of itself without any kind of war?" ~ At the end of the interview he told Schmelz: "It's very obvious that this is not a problem of Ukraine and Russia. It is a problem of civilization."
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For the past two years I had been feeling very sad about all the lives lost due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, and accordingly my photographs had been mostly dark and (with the exception of a few meadow photographs) limited to domestic objects and spaces inside our house. Now I am feeling very sad for Silvestrov, his family, and all the Ukrainian people who have had to suffer the awful traumas of Putin's heartless violence over the past few weeks. When I contemplate some of the new photographs in this project, all of which have been made during Putin's war on Ukraine, I can feel in some of them a subtle, but undeniable elegiac presence. I thought I had been making images that honor and celebrate the arrival of Spring, Its resurrecting light, and all of Its new living growth . . . but, of course, life is much more complicated and layered in meaning beneath surface appearances.
My photographs, especially those images which function for me as True, living Symbols, frequently reveal to me how my heart can be far ahead of my mind's limited ability to grasp and understand the deeper, hidden, intuitive-ineffable meanings of what I have been feeling and experiencing.
(I wanted to share with you my favorite CD albums of Silvestrov's piano compositions: Nostalghia by Jenny Lin; Handsome Skies by Alessandro Stella; Melodies of Silence, by Tomasz Kamieniak on the Brilliant Classics label; Touching the Memory II, on the Naxos label, Alexei Laubimov, piano; Elisaveta Blumina's Piano Works, on the Grand Piano label; The Messenger, on the Deutsche Grammophon label, performed by Helen Grimaud; and if you would like to hear Silvestrov play some of his own piano pieces check out ECM's Bagatellen und Serenaden.)
Gloria's Natural Touch
Gloria has filled our house with plants, sprouting seeds, dried flowers, and little still life arrangements of favorite personal objects, such as framed photos, toys, crystals, etc. placed in relationships with her plants. In 2013-14 I created a large project entitled Still Life in homage to the great Italian still life and landscape painter Giorgio Morandi. Many of the photographs I included in that multi-chaptered project are of Gloria's spontaneous "still lifes" which I found scattered around and throughout the house. And many of my recent Pandemic Inspired Photography Projects contain images of Gloria's arrangements gracefully formed with her natural touch and loving caring heart.
(Note: one of the ten chapters in my Morandi inspired Still Life project is entitled Flowers and Plants. I consider most of my interior photographs made since we moved to Canandaigua, NY in 2008 a kind of unspoken, silent-visual dialogue between Gloria's intuitive creative process and my own.)
Before Shaun and Jessica were born (1972 & 1975) Gloria made wonderful ink drawings and oil paintings; and she majored in ceramics in college. After the kids got old enough, she went back to school (1085-87) and got a graduate degree in School Social Work in order to help others and to make additional money to help get our kids through undergraduate school. Now, in our retirement years, she has not yet been able to get back to her ceramics in the way she had hoped because of so many other things that compelled her to attend to first, like gardening, protesting issues related to climate change, and personal health issues.
I am dedicating this project to Gloria and her graceful loving caring spirit which flows out to all that her life touches, but especially the entire natural world, the planet itself, and our children and grandchildren. I also want to pay homage to Valentin Silvestrov and his wonderful life of music in Ukraine. I am sending blessings to him and his daughter, his grand daughter and grandson, and everyone in Ukraine who has made such a brave, determined effort to stand up to Putin in order to live their lives in freedom.
The Space between the Photographs
The meaningful relationship between my photographs in this project and the music of Valentin Silvestrov may be too personal to be appreciated by most others; and the meaning of the photographs themselves may at times seem either too obvious (mere records of fact) or, in the opposite extreme, so cryptic that one's intellect may find the images incomprehensible. (Indeed, many of the photographs appear to be nearly abstract.) In any case I encourage you explore not only the individual images but also the space between the photographs for I have carefully placed the images in a sequential order that encourages the photographs placed next to each other to engage in a silent-visual dialogue. There is a way one can "listen" to this dialogue if the images are functioning for you as True, living Symbols. And by establishing a silent-visual dialogue with the individual images, one can access their deeper hidden inner meaning. In this regard I invite you to check out my project Contemplating Symbolic Photographs.
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I have begun my presentation of photographs below with a sequence of 49 straight photographs, then the project concludes with a visual Epilogue consisting of two symmetrical photographs which are images constructed with four identical straight photographs conjoined in such a way that each image is mirrored in one another above & below and left & right. The symmetrical photographs are (for me) images which represent the Oneness of Being, a transcendent Truth which, in its Imaginal Symbolic form, offers the possibility of a revelation of meaning that takes one beyond the mere (mirror) appearances of what was photographed.
Despite all the immediate appearances that we humans have totally messed up our sacred world--ourselves, our civilizations, the natural world, the planet itself . . . nonetheless another Spring has arrived, with its light of renewal, its blossoming flowers and trees which bring us News of the Universe: that ineffable living transcendent presence which lurks behind every surface appearance.
It is in this regard that I Welcome you to this project: Growing Light.
The Photographs
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1. House plants across from the three shelves and two sets of grow lights in our foyer.
2. The three tier shelf, each with its own grow light, in the corner of our short foyer near the front door.
3. White and red grow light.
4. Green band of light under the second wire shelf.
5. Second wire shelf empty with a red grow light just below it.
6. Top golden-white grow light.
7. Top of the three tier shelf; hanging golden white light; mirror image and a framed picture of birds.
8. Mirror on wall behind the shelves reflecting wires, ropes, and part of our front door.
9. View of top shelf, mirror reflection, picture window, deck sliding door & other windows in the background.
10. A night light can be seen in the wall outlet behind and below the taller tomato plants.
11. Looking up past a white and red grow light to the plastic covered bottom side of the wire shelf above.
12. Plastic with reflections of the white and red light above it
13. A mountain-like form of plastic sheeting under a white and red grow light.
14. Early morning, before the grow lights were turned on
15. View of shelf, and in the background a distant wall illuminated by the blue light of dusk from the windows.
16. Seed pellets, a plastic cover reflecting the golden white grow lights, dark side of a hanging rope.
17. Drops of moisture under the plastic covering the seeded peat pots illuminated by the golden white light
18. Plastic sheets and wire shelf under white, red and blue grow light.
19. Plastic sheets and tray of seeded peat pots under white, red and blue grow light.
20. Plastic sheets and uncovered tray of growing seeded peat pots under white, red and blue grow light.
21. Sprouted seeds under white red and blue grow light
22. Sprouted seeds under white red and blue grow light (corn can be seen growing in the mirror's reflection)
23. Growing plants under white red and blue grow light
24. Plastic sheet, drops of moisture underneath, touched by sprouting green leaves, white and red grow light
25. Sprouted seeds under the golden white grow light (daylight is coming through the front door window)
26. House plant by a basement window that looks out over our back yard, the meadow and woods beyond.
27. Gift basket of plants (which Gloria received many years ago and has loving cared for ever since)
28. Young plants in peat pots lined up on the picture window sill.
29. Tomato Plants by the smaller widow (next to the picture window)
30. Tomato Plants, some time later, after some good growth, next to a house plant and rain stick.
31. House plant and rainmaker
32. Tomato plants, house plant, and rainmaker in the warm light of the setting sun
33. Flowering house plants next to a lace curtain in the golden light of the setting sun.
34. House plants next to my framed symmetrical photograph of leaves, reflection of the setting sun.
35. House plant in warm light and its reflection in a dark window
36. Sunlight and shadows on a pink plastic vase
37. House plant in ceramic vase with a warmly lit thermometer and picture frame.
38. House plant next to red plant-patterned couch and a red plant-patterned rug in the background.
39. Close-up view of a house plant.
40. Prism on a blue cloth between two potted house plants.
42. Hanging plants over the wall leading down to the basement.
43. House plant on a colorful cloth and a wooden toy tiger's tail.
44. Our cat, Mr. Blue, curled up on the rocking chair by the picture window and growing plants
45. A bird flying over a house plant.
46. Potatoes with spring sprouts.
47. Still Life with Gloria's tea pot
48. Bedroom, early evening light, the meadow turning green.
49. Sunset, with pink sky and tomato plants in the foreground.
Epilogue
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50. Symmetrical Photograph with deep red center: House plant in a ceramic pot.
51. Symmetrical Photograph with sky blue center (constructed with image #3)
This project was announced on my blog's
Welcome Page May 15, 2022
the Lunar Birthday of Swami Muktananda
Related Project Links
"Ukraine's Most Famous Living Composer Is Now A Refugee" (NY Times article)
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog, which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's. You will also find on the Welcome Page my resume, contact information . . . and much more.
