The Persephone Series
Part II
Additional Photographs
1975-76 / digital versions, 2019
1975-76 / digital versions, 2019
Introduction
The 40 photographs you will be seeing below are digital versions of original silver gelatin prints made in 1975 and 1976 for my Persephone Series project. They are being resurrected here with the intention of complimenting and extending the 13 images I included in my 2011 online project, The Persephone Series. If you have not seen the online project, and if you have not read the introductory texts to that project, I encourage you to do so before viewing these additional images.
I strongly feel that all 52 images need to be seen together--as a visual whole--in order to gain the fullest appreciation of what for me was--and continues to be--a most important project. Similarly, the introductory texts to the 2011 online project will provide you with important background information that will help you gain a more complete understanding of these additional images.
After viewing the photographs below, I have provided some additional thoughts I'd like to share with you, including how, in January 2019, I came to the decision of publishing this Addendum to the initial online version of the project. ~ Welcome to The Persephone Series, Part II.
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The Persephone Series
Part II
Additional Photographs
1975-76 / 2019
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1975-76 / 2019
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1. Gloria is pulling a tissue from the back of Shaun's pajamas (It's January, 1976, and everyone in our house has become sick)
2. Shaun and Jessica, entangled in their play fantasies
4. Demeter is trying to fight off Hades as he tries to take Persephone, her beloved daughter, away from her
5. A visual fantasy: Persephone's nocturnal journey down to Hades' "Land of Death"
6. Prisoners in the Underworld laboring--in darkness--to push a water-soaked log up a mountain.
5. A visual fantasy: Persephone's nocturnal journey down to Hades' "Land of Death"
6. Prisoners in the Underworld laboring--in darkness--to push a water-soaked log up a mountain.
8. Persephone, locked behind bars, in Hades' Kingdom
9. The winged feet of Hades, who is looking down upon Persephone, his captive Queen
10. Persephone, half-buried in the dark sands of the Land of Death, her vision obstructed by the hand of destiny
11. Persephone, struggling, surrounded by dark figurative shadows
12. Hades, behind his totem-animal, confused and frightened by his aggressions toward his Queen
13. A anguished portrait of Persephone in the Underworld
14. A Fantasy Landscape: the Land of Death,
15. A Fantasy Landscape: Winter, the season of Persephone's yearly descent into the Underworld
20. A Fantasy Landscape: Persephone's longing to be reunited with her mother upon Earth
24. Persephone, Queen of the Land of Death, being held down by Hades
27. Persephone, with her protective shield; and Hades--lurking in the background--keeping watch over her
28. Shaun being consoled by his mother after an argument with his sister
29. Jessica experiencing the impact of bacterial mutation i
31. Persephone, in the Underworld, waiting for Spring to arrive on Earth--when she can once again return to her mother
35. Hades, King of the underworld, crowning his Bride, Persephone
36. A Visual Fantasy for the Persephone Story
38. Shaun, swinging on the front porch with friends
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Some additional thoughts
I decided to bring these 40 rather dark and emotionally charged images made in 1975-76 out of their storage box and into the light of day in January 2019 while I working on The Bathers project. I had remembered a couple of photographs I made of our kids, and my wife Gloria, in our old bathtub in Milwaukee at the time I was working on the Persephone Series (though I had no idea at that time about Persephone and the Greek mythologies associated with the seasons). I had wanted to experiment with flash-off-the-camera (a new technique for me) in addition to multiple-exposure-in-the-camera and local solarization of the silver gelatin prints, which I had used in two previous projects (click here), and I decided to try using my family members--Gloria, and our kids--plus their neighborhood friends as my subject matter for the experiment.
As I looked through the storage box that contained well over 100 silver gelatin prints--each mounted on a dark gray mat board--from the Persephone Series, I did eventually find one image (#37 above) that was appropriate for the Bather project. But more importantly, as I looked through the complete collection of Persephone images I was struck by the impact of the totality of their visual power, their intuitive-creative energy, their unconscious unveilings of archetypal-mythic dramas, and most importantly, the personal meanings which the complete collection of images held for me.
I had created those images over 43 years ago! and yet I had included only 13 of them when I made the online version of The Persephone Series in 2011. Now I was now seeing this much larger body of work with fresh eyes. I had been a parent when I made those photographs; Jessica was one year old at the time, and Shaun was 3 1/2 years old. ~ I was a grandfather now! As I write this introduction (in January, 2019) Jessica is now a mother--her son, River, is five-and-a-half years old; and Shaun is a father--his daughter, Claire, is almost four years old. (Sometimes, when I am playing with our grandchildren, memories and images will flash before me of playing with Shaun and Jessica when they were our grandchildren's ages; and certain images from the Persephone Series have flashed through my mind as well.)
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The thirteen images included in the 2011 online version of The Persephone Series were chosen for their dramatic visual character and especially for their narrative relevance to the Greek myths associated with the stories of Persephone and her mother Demeter, and Hades, King of the Underworld, the Land of Death. I was very new at making blog versions of my photography projects in 2011, so it may have been a matter of convenience to keep the number of images--and the length of the texts--in those early projects to a minimum. Perhaps I thought, in 2011, that the Persephone images were too intense, too strange to include more than 13 of them in the online version of the project.
That, however, is no longer the case now. When I recently viewed the complete set of Persephone prints I realized that many of the images I had not included in the online project were equally important and no less visually exciting than the 13 images I had used. Those images initially left out needed to be seen as well.
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The 40 images I have chosen for this Addendum to the online project provide a broader and more deeply articulated visual-psychological context for both the archetypal-mythic narrative that belies the imagery. And, simultaneously, the additional images unveil with greater clarity the very real personal-human dramas that existed between my wife and I, and our children, and their neighborhood playmates.
Back in 1975-76, as I spontaneously-intuitively photographed the children playing together, I literally and imaginatively entered into their fantasy world as both a participant in their dramas and a witness. I was able to observe in close proximity some of their intense and oftentimes aggressive interactions with each other. Quite palpable feelings emerged in the midst of their play that had to do, it seemed to me, with such things as sibling rivalry, the bond between mother and daughter, the longing and terror associated with separation, and the anxiety of being dominated, held captive, confined, restricted. Later, when Jessica was hospitalized, Gloria and I were overwhelmed with feelings that we might loose our daughter--that she might die. (In my online Persephone project I have provided some detailed descriptions of our experiences of Jessica in the hospital)
20. Persephone's longing to be reunited with her mother
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I have included titles under each of the 40 photographs. If you choose to read them, you will note that I have tried to use the words to point toward both the mythic and the personal narratives that the work as a whole addresses. I have intentionally titled some of the images so that the words will pull the contemplator out of the extraordinary world of the Land of Death's mythic time and narrative, and into the world of real time, of real children playing and interacting with each other inside our house or in our backyard. For example, in some titles I have referred to images of our son Shaun as Hades, and our daughter Jessica as Persephone and my wife Gloria as Demeter (Persephone's mother); and in other titles I have referred to images of Shaun as Shaun, and images of Jessica as Jessica, and images of Gloria as Gloria.
I find this aspect of the titling quite interesting. Images which function as symbols can "mean" on many levels simultaneously, depending on the capacity and willingness of the contemplator to open to a symbol's vast possibilities. They can function as descriptions of real-life individuals and activities as well as images of transpersonal characters living in the timeless realms of fantasy, and the archetypal worlds of mythology--images that have sprung up from what Carl Jung termed the Collective Unconscious.
Words have power. They can direct us inside, to the Imaginal world--that world which is the origin place of symbols, and words can also direct us to meanings of the outer world. The majority of the 40 images included here delve deep into the intuitive space between the unconscious realm of collective archetypal patterns and the everyday world of "real" personal acts, issues and emotional experiences. Indeed, this is the extraordinary power of symbolic photographs: their ability to merge both interior and exterior realities into a single, visual, psychological-spiritual Unitary reality.
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In this regard it is worth noting here that when I made the original 1975-76 Persephone photographs in Milwaukee I was still under the spell of my fascination with the writings and ideas of depth psychologist, C.G. Jung. His remarkable knowledge associated with medieval alchemy, mythological archetypes, the symbol and, later, his theoretical writings on synchronicity were at the very center of my 1972 MFA written thesis required by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. (click here to see a summary of my thesis ideas)
I carried those Jungian ideas into my first years of teaching, at Georgia State University, Atlanta, where I taught photography with John McWilliams from the fall of 1972 through the spring of 1975. Then, in the fall of 1975 my family and I moved to Milwaukee where I was asked to create a photography program for the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin. It was during our first winter in Milwaukee that we all got very sick and Jessica nearly died from a mutating bacteria.
Between the years 1975 and 1987 my teaching continued to be influenced primarily by Jungian ideas. Then in the summer of 1987 I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, a Meditation Master and the living head of the Siddha Yoga Path. After experiencing her grace in a series of extraordinary life-transforming encounters, my creative process and my teaching gradually shifted to include both Jungian ideas and the wisdom I discovered in the ancient yogic scriptures, and even more importantly, the modern-day teachings of Gurumayi and her Guru, Swami Muktananda.
Gradually my creative process in photography and my Siddha Yoga practices merged into one. I realized that Gurumayi's grace, or Shakti--the creative and transforming power of the entire universe--had become the most powerful and integral part of my creative process. Just after completing the Persephone Series online project, I encountered her grace multiple times, in 2011, during a trip to Turkey. Those experiences initiated a an ongoing series of new projects entitled The Sacred Art Photograph Projects.
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As I was working on this text for the Persephone Series, Part II photographs, I happened (synchronistically) to read an article published in a Siddha Yoga monthly publication, Darshan, in which Swami Muktananda (also lovingly referred to by others as "Baba") gave several responses to questions asked of him by Siddha Yoga students. I found his comments about "seeing" and "perception" particularly relevant to this project and have decided to offer a few excerpts from his responses as the Epilogue to this project. (The Hindu word Darshan is derived from the Sanskrit, and it has been defined by one Siddha Yoga Swami--see my Afterword to The Bathers project--as "perception that takes place in the Heart, in the space of the innermost Self."
Epilogue
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The words of Swami Muktananda
The universe is just as you see it. It does not have any independent existence. Take the case of an artist who paints a canvas with one set of colors and one brush. He paints all the different objects on the same canvas with the same set of colors and with the same set of brushes. He may paint a . . . . human being, a river or whatever else comes to his mind. . . The painter has only portrayed his own imagination on the canvas, whereas a spectator distinguishes different forms that have emerged from the same imagination.
As long as you do not perceive the Truth, you look upon the universe as diverse and manifold. When one reaches a certain state in meditation by the grace of the Guru one doe not perceive different objects any longer. One perceives only the same Self, one's own Self, pervading everywhere.
Baba then quotes the words of 17th century Hindu poet-saint, Tukaram:
"This world is not world. This world is in fact supreme Brahman, the highest Lord. This world is His expansion, this world is nothing but the light of the Self, this world is nothing but the supreme Being."
Then Baba concludes like this:
The world is as you see it. What you see outside is a creation of your own vision. If your vision became divine the world would not appear to you as it appeared before. . . The truth is that this universe is a play, a sport, of the infinite Being. Published in Darshan, issue #48, "Doorways to the Infinite."
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This project was posted on my blog's Welcome Page
on February 2, 2019.
Other Related Projects and Links
The Persephone Series 1975-76 (The first online version of 2011)
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape website which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.
A technical note:
These 2019 digital versions of the Persephone photographs were made by scanning the 7.5" square silver gelatin silver prints and adjusting the digital files with Photoshop software tools. These digitally adjusted and refined images are more visually articulate in nearly every detailed way compared to the original silver prints. In general they are much richer in tonal depth, and they are certainly much more luminous. And since I have been able to make the digital prints larger (15" square) the black spaces are more open and spacious, more palpably alive with presence. Their greater physicality has also amplified the psychological-emotional-dramatic aspects of the imagery. Without question I prefer the digital versions of the Persephone photographs, but of course they could not have been made without the original silver gelatin prints I made in 1975-76.
The Persephone Series is part of a triad of related projects created between 1974 and 1977. Click here to see the other projects.
