Photographs
Home, Vermont & Milwaukee
October, 2022
~ A "Studies" Project ~
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Introduction
The 24 photographs presented below, in four sections, were made in Canandaigua, NY, Gilford, Vermont and Milwaukee, Wi. I divided the Canandaigua photographs into two groups for reasons which I will explain in my commentaries following the photographs.
Most of the Canandaigua photographs were made in October and a few were made in the past two months; the Vermont photographs were made on October 9, 2022, and the Milwaukee photographs were made during the week of October 19-25. Before moving to Canandaigua in 2008, my wife Gloria and I lived in Milwaukee for 33 years. Our daughter, Jessica, her husband Paul and our grandson, River, plus many of our friends still live in Milwaukee. The photographs in this project made in Milwaukee were taken in Paula and John's house (Paula is a dear friend of Gloria's from way back), and we visited our friend--Marsha--who has an office in a large building that overlooks the city.
Gloria's older sister, Phyllis, and her husband Jim live in Gilford, Vermont; and Gloria's younger sister, Florence has a house in Vermont across the road from Phyllis and Jim. On the way to Vermont we stopped in Hurly, NY to visit Gloria's cousin Mary who has been like a sister to Phyllis, Florence, Gloria and their parents. Mary had been battling cancer for some time and was very low on energy when we visited her October 7, so we spent just a few hours with with her.
We visited Mary again a month later (just days before I published this project). She had begun receiving Hospice Care in her house less than two weeks after we visited her. Close relatives and friends, including Gloria's sister, Florence, were part of a loving team taking care of her in addition to the excellent professional Hospice care she was receiving from people in the Hurley, NY area. (I took some photographs during our second visit. I am considering publishing some of them as a project.)
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If you are familiar with my work over the past three years you will already know that I have seldom ventured out of our house in Canandaigua to make photographs during the Pandemic. The one exception is the beautiful Meadow behind our house, with its two ponds and the wonderful tapering woods adjacent to its farthest South and West borders. I have photographed the meadow often in the past three years, either from our back deck, which is 12 feet above the ground, or from our back yard which interfaces the east border of the meadow. Though I brought my camera with me on the recent October trips to Vermont and Milwaukee, I did not expect to make even a single photograph. I feel content with the photographs I have been making inside our house and of the Meadow, and feel no need to look elsewhere for subject matter at this stage of my life (77 years old) and the continued threat of newly unfolded Covid Variants, etc. My enthusiasm for travel and photographing away from home has reached an all time low. Introversion? (I had a talk with a friend about misanthropy, but as a student of Siddha Yoga, that is not an option for me). Perhaps with the aging process I just lack the energy for getting out into the world with my camera like I used to. I wore out many pairs of shoes walking around in the world looking for things and places to photograph.
(I liked Dorothy's comment in the Wizard of Oz in which she stated: "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.")
I welcome seclusion, am comfortable with it, and in fact I need it because of my (and my wife Gloria's) practice of Siddha Yoga Meditation. Needless to say, then, it was a major undertaking for me and Gloria to drive to Vermont, and then less than two weeks later drive to Milwaukee during the month of October, 2022. I hadn't visited relatives and friends away from our home in Canandaigua, NY since late October, 2019 when Gloria and I flew to Milwaukee to attend the 2019 annual meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the Society for Photographic Education in which I was was chosen to be that year's Honored Educator. (click here to learn more about that event, see the talk I gave about my life in photography and teaching, and what happened after I presented the talk.)
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After the presentation of the photographs, I have included a collection of yogic textual excerpts with commentaries on those texts by the late modern day yogic saint and founder of the Siddha Yoga Path, Swami Muktananda. Then I offer some some commentaries on a selection of photographs included in this project, and conclude the project with a visual Epilogue. ~ Welcome to the project.
The Photographs
October, 2022
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A Studies Project
Home : Canandaigua, NY
Image #1 The Birthday Picture our Grandson, River, made for me in 2021 (cut-out drawing; size: 6x7.5 inches)
Image #2 Mr. Blue's scratch pad
Image #3 Morning Light, Office Window, jade plant
Image #4 Bedroom Lamp, with my photograph, framed, in the background
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Image #5 Foggy morning view of the N Meadow and pond from our back deck
Image #6 Foggy morning view of the N Meadow from our steamed-up picture window--with tear-- and our unused deck hook
Image #6 Sunset, South meadow & pond
Vermont
Florence's House in Gilford
Image #7 Early morning view of the woods beside Broad Brook before the live stream yoga program honoring Swami Muktananda
Image #8 Florence's back deck, immediately following the live stream yoga program honoring Swami Muktananda
Image #9 Late morning view of the woods following the live stream yoga program honoring Swami Muktananda
Milwaukee
Paula and John's House
Image #10 Blue Bird (outside view)
Image #11 Dining room: Bird shadow, wall lamp, light reflection and framed photograph, aslant, inside shadow
Image #12 Bathroom series: Bird shadow, Japanese print & reflection, venetian blinds shadows & light streaks
Image #13 Bathroom series: Bird Shadow, venetian blinds, light
Image #14 Bathroom series: Bird Shadow, venetian blinds light streaks
Image #15 Dining Room : Two bird shadows, wall light, straightened framed photograph, Hopper painting poster, back of chair
Milwaukee
View from Marsha's Kilbourn Building office window
Image #16 View through Marsha's Kilbourn Building office window (and venetian blinds)
Home Again
Canandaigua, NY
Image #17 The 2022 Birthday Picture our Grandson, River, gave me during our Milwaukee visit (drawing size: 5x5 inches)
Image #18 Sunset, South Meadow
Image #19 Our front porch, with fall flowers, in bright morning light after a rain storm
Image #20 Bird in flight, light reflector, illuminated smudge on our picture window looking out at the South Meadow
Image #21 Ceramic animal with snoot
Image #22 Basement : A "snake" lying on the ping pong table
Image #23 Grate-less gas stove top burners, knobs, blue reflections on stainless metal front
Image #24 Veil of blue
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Commentaries
by
Swami Muktananda
on Selected Ancient Yogic Texts
As I have often written in other projects, I consider my creative process in photography a form of meditation, a way of channeling the spontaneous moments of grace that seems to originate from my yogic practices and awaken me to a very interiorized kind of perception which generate images that are often radiant with creative energy, often unsayable meanings . . . images which function for me as True, living Symbols.
Sometime the photographs I make are the fruit of an ongoing subtle process of contemplation, a process through which visual imagery provides me intuitive understandings of certain yogic teachings that have particularly resonated for me. I have provided some examples of the kind of yogic texts that energize me and insist on further, quiet contemplations. When I photograph my mind does become very still, very quiet and the images have a way of speaking to me in a silent kind of way.
The text excerpts I often include in my photography projects deepen my understanding of the mysteries of yoga and of life in general, and at the same time the photographs that emerge in response to those texts provide me with fascinating new perspectives in regard to my photographic practice. ~~ The yogic texts, and the commentaries on them I have selected below are from Swami Muktananda's book Nothing Exists That Is Not Siva, a publication of the SYDA Foundation. Following this section I have presented a series of commentaries on selected photographs included in this project.
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The entire universe is a sport of universal Consciousness.
Spanda Karika 2.5
Muktananda comments:
"The fact is, this universe is not a universe. It is not an illusion . . . It is neither the void nor atoms nor nature nor a modification of some basic substance. Though it appears to be matter--appears to be earth, water, fire, air, and ether--it is only the play of Citi [Shakti] and the sport of Kundalini. It is the blissful self-unfolding of Consciousness. It is the play of the many from the One and the One in the many. . . It is the nondual becoming dual and reveling in that play. Differences lie not in the objective universe but in the veil that covers the eye that sees. The lotion of the Guru's grace rends that veil and gives the yogi the eye to see the truth."
(Note: see my photography project Maya's Veils of Illusion & The Truth That Lies Behind Them)
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The senses are the spectators.
Siva Sutra 3.11
Muktananda comments:
"The senses are the spectators who watch the Self stage the drama of the universe in the theater of one's own being. . . The King of yogis who has received the Guru's grace while watching the drama of the universe being rolled out attains Self-realization when he turns inward. His inner experiences teaches him that the whole world springs from his own Self. His sense of differences dissolved, he rises to the awareness 'I am Siva.' " ['I am God,' 'I am the divine all pervasive Self']
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Salutations to supreme Siva who ceaselessly carries
on the sport of the five grand processes [creation, sustenance,
dissolution, concealment, and grace]. He continually
reveals the true nature of the highest reality.
Pratyabhijnahrdayam ~ Invocation
Muktananda comments:
"God is Consciousness and bliss and ever one with His nature. Still, He assumes the five processes for sport. Similarly God, in bondage as the embodied soul, always carries out the five processes on a small scale."
"The Svacchanda Tantra says that God's nature, even in the state of bondage, is Consciousness. The Lord . . . manifests the same objects outside that flash in His awareness within Him. He performs the five processes in a limited way with limited power. When God, acting in the outer world through body, prana, and senses, perceives different objects in different instants of time and at different points of space, that is creation. . . . To vibrate once again as pure undifferentiated light, after manifesting as diverse objects, is grace or revelation."
"In the moment of perception we create the object; its appearance in our mind is its creation therein. . . . Whatever throbs in our mind comes into existence."
"When, after hearing and seeing many different objects, we suddenly become aware of their identity with Consciousness, we accomplish the fifth task: grace. Grace is nothing but seeing objects as one with self-luminous Citi, even though they may appear to be different."
"The seeker who becomes aware of his own authorship of the five acts achieves the divine state. [He] regards this cosmos as an expansion of [his] own Self."
(Note: visit my essay regarding my personal experience of . . . Seeing the Grand Canyon)
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[The supreme Lord]
[Siva] is the perceiver of all sense objects.
Bhagavadgita 3.15
Muktananda comments:
"Both the seer and the seen are the same supreme Consciousness. The relationship of the senses and the sense objects is this: while the senses perceive, delight in, and act on their respective objects, Siva is the experience and Siva is what is experienced. One who plunges into the inner Self with this knowledge and with a still mind becomes God."
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Even a single particle of dust of the Guru's feet
forms a bridge strong enough to cross the ocean of
change. One should seek to attain Lord Guru.
Gurugita ~ verse 55
Muktananda comments:
"After a seeker has taken refuge at the Guru's sacred feet, those things that bound him before to birth and death, to pleasure and pain, now brings liberation. The world begins to appear as it really is--a visible image of the inner spirit. Worship the Guru as the inner Self."
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Commentaries
On Selected Photographs from this project
I made only three photographs in Vermont, all on Sunday morning, October 9, at Florence's house (Gloria's younger sister). The first, a picture of the woods next to her house, on the other side of a beautiful brook, was taken just before Gloria, Florence and I participated in a Live Stream Siddha Yoga Video Program in honor of Swami Muktanand's Lunar Mahasamadhi, the full-moon day, October, 1982, in which this great modern-day yogic saint and founder of the Siddha Yoga Path consciously departed his body.
Florence had introduced Gloria and me to Siddha Yoga in 1987 by treating us to our first two-day meditation Intensive with Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. (Note: see my photography project Photography and Yoga.) Although our trip to Vermont was not planned with this very auspicious day in mind, we were thrilled to be together and experience the video program in which we remembered and honored Baba Muktananda, Gurumayi's beloved teacher, and chanted and meditated together with Gurumayi on this very sacred day.
This, the second photograph I took in Vermont, was made immediately after the video program ended. I had walked out onto Florence's back deck to look at the woods and the brook. On the deck I saw a chair, turned up-side-down, inside a circle of light. Without thinking, I took the photograph (above) and then the third Vermont photograph, similar to the first, and yet different.
The chair photograph reminded me of the tradition in which a student of yoga bows before his or her Master or Sadguru with great respect and gratitude. The bow (called pranama) is done by placing one's heart (wherein lies the inner Self) above one's head (one's ego). When I took the photograph I was simply filled with and motivated by the shakti, the grace of the program; I hadn't thought about the chair associated with the idea of the pranam. However, I believe now that the making of that photograph was, for me, a visual form of pranaming before Baba with great gratitude. It was his grace that made it possible for me to experience Gurumayi's grace in that first Siddha Yoga intensive with her in 1987.
The third photograph, of the woods, was a response to the luminous vertical form of golden leaves that seemed to float and shimmer before me like a magical apparition, a living image of the creative energy of the universe known as shakti.
(When I was nearly finished with writing this text the idea to transform the first woods image into a symmetrical photograph emerged. That image is presented as the project's visual Epilogue.)
All three photographs (actually four, counting the symmetrical image) feel to me as if they contain Gurumayi's grace, the grace of the live-stream video program, and the sacredness of that day commemorating the extraordinary life and passing of the great yogic saint Swami Muktananda who transformed so many lives throughout the world with his teachings and his gifts of shaktipat.
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During our visit to Milwaukee in late October we stayed with Gloria's good friend Paula and her husband John. I was fascinated by the "birds" they had taped onto their large windows that look out over their back yard, and the light streaming into their house that projected shadow images of the birds everywhere inside the house including our own private bathroom.
The paper birds, which were placed on the windows to help prevent real birds from flying into the reflections of outside space on the glass, have been a familiar theme in my Pandemic Project Photographs. And just in the past few months I have created several projects that focus on windows as one of the recurring themes that have appeared in my work over the past several years. (Visit my project Window-Meadow Photographs)
I have included two similar dining room photographs in the collection of images made at Paula and John's house. Their titles give the clue as to why I chose to present them separated from each other within the collection. Image #11 and its title places emphasis on the fact that a framed photograph was hanging a bit aslant on the wall within a shadow. I had given the photograph in the frame, from my project Images of Eden, as a gift to Paula and John. It hangs near the corner of the dining room next to some large curtains that John and Paula pull over their large windows at night for privacy. The frame had been accidentally knocked off center.
Image #15
In this second photograph, (#15) which includes the framed poster of a famous Hopper painting, the framed photograph is now in its straightened position (though the angular light and shadows make it hard to see that the frame had been straightened). I took this photograph minutes after I watched John adjust the frame after he too had noticed that it had been knocked off kilter.
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While in Milwaukee we of course visited our daughter Jessica, and our grandson, River (Jessica's husband, Paul was out of town deer hunting). River gave me my (belated) 2022 birthday drawing (see Image #17 below) while we were with him. I was fascinated by the ways that the picture related to the birthday image he had made for me last year for my 2021 birthday.
#17 River's 1922 Birthday Drawing of a cake with landscape on its side
#1 River's 2021 "Cut-out" Birthday Drawing of a cake 6x7.5"
After drawing his picture of a birthday cake with candles River then decided to cut the image out. When I received it in the mail I immediately taped it on a cabinet door. One day I was attracted to the light reflection on the cupboard door, next to the drawing and the shadows behind the cut-out candles and decided to take this photograph of it. (Image #1 above)
This year's picture, of a similar cake with candles, is much smaller but has more saturated color, and of particular interest to me, River drew a landscape onto the side of the cake. His landscape reminded me of the kind of landscapes I had often drawn as a child, and which is very much like the rolling Bristol Hills that surround the town of Canandaigua and the beautiful Canandaigua Lake.
Marsha's office window view
We also visited our friend Marsha at her current office in the Kilbourn Building in downtown Milwaukee. She was in the process of packing everything up because she had decided to move to another office space, in a different building on Kilbourn Ave. She was very upset about the circumstances that had led to her decision to move, and explained in detain the whole fascinating, frustrating story. As I was listening I became aware of the view out of her office window. The view, transformed by venetian blinds which broke the image up into rather abstract shapes and spaces, seemed to carry the feelings and fragmented complexities of all that Marsha was telling us about. After she finished her story I asked permission to take the picture, immediately above.
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All the stories I have just shared regarding the images made in Vermont and Milwaukee and the two drawings made by River have something to do with the concept of synchronicity which the great depth psychologist Carl Jung wrote about late in his life. The concept became the center-point of my MFA graduate thesis The Symbolic Photograph, The Means to Self-Knowledge. Synchronicity is about the spontaneous recognition of a meaningful coincidence or acausal union of corresponding interior (psychic) and outer (physical) that occur simultaneously in time and space. Jung's definition of Symbol is a similarly about a unitary reality that comes into being through the union of corresponding inner and outer imagery. Through my study of these and other Jungian ideas my understanding of the Symbolic Photograph gradually emerged and took the of my 1972 MFA Thesis Paper . . . and those ideas continue to resonate for me today.
Indeed, many of the photographs in this collection resonate for me with a certain feeling of mystery or numinosity that is typical of True, living Symbols. They flash with spontaneous, unexpected, startlingly unknown kinds of meaning that at the same time awakens an ineffable, silent kind of recognition, an inner awareness which activates a kind of "unveiling" of some extraordinary, perhaps spiritual reality that belies surface appearances.
In yoga this kind of reality has many equivalent names: divine presence, Consciousness, the inner Self, Guru. Images that are radiant with this kind of presence are usually functioning for me as True, living Symbols, images, Symbolic Photographs. The ease and spontaneity with which these images often come into my creative process has had some meaningful associations for me to the musical concept of the Study or Etude. I consciously began making Studies photographs in 1994 through 2001 and as you can see here, in the photographs I have included in this project, the spirit of that earlier work continues for me today. I invite you to check out my Studies work by clicking on this link: The Studies Projects.
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Image #7, Vermont Woods
I am concluding this project with a visual Epilogue consisting of a symmetrical Photograph constructed with the above Vermont Woods image using a "four-fold process" in which the image is repeated four times and conjoined in such a way that each image is mirrored in each other above & below and left & right and often appear to originate from a single, central point. (For more information about the symmetrical photographs and how I construct them, visit this link: The Symmetrical Photographs)
Visual
Epilogue
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Four-fold symmetrical photograph, constructed with Vermont Image #7
This project was published and announced
on my blog's Welcome Page November 12, 2022
Related Project Links
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.
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