3/18/22

Faint Photographs (revised March 2022)


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.


Faint Photograph,  Fading photograph


           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. 


Faint Photograph,  The Hudson River
 

           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



 Pompeii 



Yosemite Half Dome



Grasshopper




Fisherman




     
Portrait of a woman with her fingers around face




   
A man holding a dead man



  
Two Geckos







Afterword
_______March 17,2022_______

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


*

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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3/16/22

Postludes (Photographs in black space)



Postludes   

      Photographs surrounded         
   and suspended in Black Space     



Introduction 
The Postludes are visually related to the Thing-Centered Photographs (surrounded and suspended in black space)  which were made in 2006, inspired by digital version of the Garage Series photographs which I had made in 1999-2000 as part of the Studies Project (1994-2000) which were miniature silver gelatin prints (3.5" square).  When I made the digital versions of the Garage Series the inkjet prints were 18" square; the images were much smaller, surrounded and suspended in black space.  I applied one rule to the series:  there had to be a way the black of the space surrounding the object image or the rectangular image could enter into and merge with the black within the object or rectangle.  

I made hundreds of Thing-Centered Photographs (surrounded in black space) and in the process of making the work itself shifted in multiple ways away from the more pure idea of the Thing-Centered photograph.  Those images stayed in my collection of Thing-Centered Photographs for many years.  However, in March 2022, as I was sorting through all of them I realized that many of the photographs needed to be sorted out and collected as a separate but related body of work.  I named that work Postludes, a title the great composer Valentin Silvestrov used for some of his compositions.

(I have written about Silvestrov and his music in several photography projects.  Please visit: Studies X and click here to visit: Symmetrical Snow Photographs : Homage to Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White, the Equivalent photograph, and composer Valentin Silvestrov)

The Postlude photographs are not really about things (that is to say, a thing's essential nature, its living, divine consciousness).  Many of them tend to have an aura of meaning based perhaps in narrative, or transformation; they can be rather abstract or non-representation.  I used many of them in my Visual Poems.  In short they are product of the intuitive, inventive graceful spirit of my Creative Process.  I allowed it full rein; anything goes so long as the image is visually interesting and generated in me a kind of meaning that transcended intellectual understanding.  

The way the black works in the image is important; I always thought of the black as a form of light, in the same way the Silvestrov spoke of Silence in his musical compositions.  The merging of the black of the surrounding border of the image with the black inside image has something to do with my idea of the Symbolic Photograph, an image radiant with grace which has merged or united or conjoined inner world imagery with its outer-world corresponding counterpart.  

I have so many of these images I found it difficult to select but a few for this blog presentation.  I wish you could shuffle through the box of prints yourself.  The prints have a remarkable matte surface that gives the blacks a silky, silent depth and presence.  


   Postlude Photograph, Condensation on window, cup  18x18"inkjet print



Postlude Photograph, Venetian Blinds behind a storefront window  18x18"inkjet print



   Postlude, Fulcrum with lines   18x18"inkjet print  (negative image)





   Postlude, Man, Child and Florescent Light    18x18"inkjet print




  
    Postlude, Boy with bat and ball  18x18"inkjet print (negative image)





   Postlude, Hand and Glass of Lemonade  18x18"inkjet print 




  
   Postlude, Nude bathing in the midnight sun  18x18"inkjet print 



     Postlude, Man climbing ladder  18x18"inkjet print  (negative image)






   Postlude, Swan and diamond  




     Postlude, Wood fence shadow red stripe 




  Postlude,  The Hand  18x18"inkjet print




  Postlude,  Elephant 18x18"inkjet print



 
   Postlude,  Spray-painted electrical plates  18x18"inkjet print




     Postlude,  The Suspended Bicycle Rim  18x18"inkjet print




     Postlude,  Arm raised figure (out of focus)  18x18"inkjet print






     Postlude,  Tinsel   18x18"inkjet print





      Postlude,  Figure by tree   18x18"inkjet print





     Postlude,  Two hands over face   18x18"inkjet print





     Postlude,  Gloria, Moon, River   18x18"inkjet print



This project was announced on
my blog's Welcome Page
March 16, 2022


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.















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