Falling Water
a 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT
~ Published June 1, 2024 ~
~ Photographs made at Niagara Falls State Park ~
Introduction
The photographs in you will see here were made on August 20, 2018 within a three-four hour period. The five symmetrical photographs included in this project were constructed later and first published on November 11, 2018 under the title Falling Water, the third part of a nine-part blog project entitled WATER Photographs.
I had been unexpectedly invited--by my son Shaun, my daughter Jessica and my two grandchildren, Claire and River--to join them for a visit to the Niagara Falls State Park, which is a two hour drive from Rochester, N.Y. The images you will be seeing here are 12x12" (square) versions of the horizontal-rectangular images published in the earlier blog project.
There are 16 photographs in the earlier blog version of the Falling Water project and all of the images remain very powerful for me, both in terms of their subject matter and the Iconic, sacred nature of their imagery. But I had always felt that the project deserved more visibility on my blog; it's being part of the larger nine-part WATER project has in way kept it more hidden within my blog as a whole than it should be. So I am very happy to bring your attention to that earlier project through this new revised 12x12" version of the project. (Note: the photographs published on my blog in November, 2018 were never before printed.)
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My experience of making the photographs at the Niagara Falls State Park was surprisingly dynamic. I was constantly being drenched in drops, sprays and a fine mist from the falls; I could hardly see where I was going or what I was seeing photographically because my glasses (and the viewing screen on the back of my digital camera) were always covered in water. I responded intuitively & spontaneously to something essential within me that I was feeling and hearing as well as seeing all around me. I felt the spirit of the Place was absorbing me into its pure, cleansing, natural wildness.
When I completed the project I was moved deeply by the final results. The images seemed to have came from some "other" place than me personally. I felt the symmetrical images, especially, had come as gifts to me from both the photographic medium itself and the grace of my Creative Process.
I took images at various locations in the Park, but most of the project images were made during our Cave of the Winds tour which consisted of a series of stairs and platforms that we had to climb up and down which provided us with varying, close-up dramatic views of the Bridal Veil Falls, the water that fell from the Falls onto the rocks below, and then moved gradually downward, from one level of the gorge to the next, until the rapidly moving water made its last fall down into the mist-filled Niagara Gorge where it joined the water from the other surrounding falls within the park and the Niagara River.
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The idea for this 12x12" inkjet print PROJECT came after I made a couple of 12x12" inkjet prints of two images from the 2018 blog project. I was going to include theme in my Ninth 12x12" inject print Book* project. However, I liked the two prints so much I decided to make a few more. When I ended up with a total of twelve 12x12" prints from the Falling Water blog project it became quite clear that I needed to create an inkjet print PROJECT* dedicated to the Falling Water photographs.
(*Note: I distinguish my 12x12" inkjet print "Books" from my 12x12" inkjet print "PROJECTS" by the thematic nature of the images included in the PROJECTs. For example, in this PROJECT all the images were made of falling water at Niagara Falls State Park. ~ The "Books" are collections of favorite images I select, rather arbitrarily, based mostly on my strong response to the mages and my commitment to creating an inkjet print Archive of my most favorite images from the many blog projects I began making in late 2010--and continue to make to this day--and in most cases had never printed before. ~ The blog versions of the inkjet print projects serve as an Online Catalogue of all the inkjet prints I have made for the Books and PROJECTS and other project beginning in February 2o23 to this present moment. Visit my complete listing of the 12x12 Book, PROJECTS & other larger inkjet print projects at my blog page: The 2023-2024 Inkjet Prints Projects. ~ The major stipulation I have placed upon myself regarding the inkjet print projects is that the images for the Books & PROJECTs must work (perfectly) as square 12x12" images--and not all of my photographs can pass that test. For those that needed to be printed larger and in a rectangular format, I have blog page for them: The LARGER Inkjet Prints.)
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I have not included here the texts I had written for the 2018 blog project, Falling Water in part because of the larger conceptual context I was involved with while creating eight other water-related projects for the WATER project. I encourage you to visit the project for its expanded text material and to see the longer horizontal-formatted versions of the images. For this project I created 12x12" inkjet print versions of twelve of the blog images and excluded four imamges from the earlier project.
Note: I invite you to compare the square images in this project with their source images which are published in the 2018 blog project. I enjoy the process of transforming the rectangular images into squares (when its possible; when the transformation works. In general I prefer the square versions, or like them just as well as the longer versions. And because the symmetrical 12x12" digital prints were made with large digital files, they can be make much larger than 12x12" when necessary.)
After the presentation of the images, below, you will encounter a continuation of this Introduction. If you are looking at this project with a desktop or laptop computer, I encourage you to visit this link regarding: How to Best View My Online Blog Images.
Twelve
12x12" Inkjet Prints
from the 2024 blog project:
Falling Water
Niagara Falls State Park
Image #1 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water (Niagara Gorge Falls)
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Image #2 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water - Bridle Falls
Where is reality--in the sky or in the depths of the water? Infinity
in our dreams is as high in the firmament as it is deep beneath
the waves. ~ Here at its juncture, water grasps the sky.
Through dreams, water comes to signify that most
distant of homes, a celestial one.
Gaston Bachelard, chapter 2,
"Deep Waters" from his book Water and Dreams
Image #3 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water
Image #4 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water
The rock--upon which water from the Falls was falling--was quite large; I was fascinated
by the miniature water falls created by the water spilling off the side of the rock.
Image #5 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water
The water from the falls continues tumbling down to the Niagara Gorge
in this image and in the next two images, #6 & #7.
Image #6 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water
Image #7 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water
Image #8 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water Symmetrical Photograph "Splashing Water Icon"
Image #9 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water Symmetrical Photograph
The five symmetrical photographs are big surprises! I never could have
imagined when I took the source images--with which I constructed
the five symmetrical images--that they would have such a
powerful Iconic and at times surreal, dream-like quality.
Such was the very nature of my personal experiences
of the water falls in Niagara Falls State Park.
Image #11 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water Symmetrical Photograph
To learn more about my symmetrical photographs, including
the techniques I use in their construction, I invite you to
visit this link: The Symmetrical Photographs
Image #10 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water Symmetrical Photograph
In this image water is falling both upwards and downwards.
This image in particular has for me a special quality
which I refer to as "Angelic Presence."
I experienced falling, once, in which I felt I was falling upwards.
See my Personal Story: The "Fall Upwards" in Part III of my
seven part blog project: The Angels (Part III)
Image #12 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT Falling Water Symmetrical Photograph
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There long remained a tradition [in the Eastern Church] of the Icon as a
sacred window onto the invisible world. The religious art of the West
was about meaning. The Icon [of the Eastern Church] is about being.
Henry Corbin was deeply attached to this interpretation of
the Imagination Tom Cheetham: All the World an Icon
Introduction (continued)
I wrote earlier about the Iconic nature of the symmetrical photographs in this project. The Niagara Falls State Park contains many kinds of natural wonders, wonders of True Iconic stature. When I am faced with such powerful subject matter, and I feel overwhelmed by the idea of picturing my experience of That . . . I just try to surrender to my Creative Process and accept whatever happens . . . and . . . whatever doesn't happen.
I can say in all honesty that the photographs "I" took came out of my experience at Niagara Falls and its surrounding wonders. I take very little credit for what I consider to be the surprising results; I can only say I made an effort to photograph what was happening to me, and inside me, and what (then) seemed impossible to photograph. The images I have presented in the two versions of Falling Water were gifts of grace, gifts of my Creative Process. And this is where the idea of the ICON becomes such an important reference for me in this project.
Back in the later part of 2014 I began work on what turned out to be an eight part blog project entitled The Photograph as ICON. All if the images in the project are symmetrical photographs. A few years earlier I had created my first symmetrical images after my wife and I visited Turkey in the spring of 2011. During the tour I had several deeply moving (and at times visionary experiences) of many of the forms of Islamic Sacred Art I encountered during our two weeks of traveling throughout much (not all) of Turkey.
When we got back home from our trip I spent two years contemplating my experiences there and studying about Islamic Sacred Art. It occurred to me, I had no idea of what Sacred Art really was, what the term truly meant. As I delved more deeply into my research following our visit to turkey, my plans for publishing a travel blog project turned into a huge project (with twelve chapters) entitled "An Imaginary Book" which became for my my first "official" Sacred Art Photography Project, and it contained my first symmetrical photographs which had been inspired by all that I had seen and experienced in Turkey. The following year, in 2012, we extended our experience in Turkey further by traveling to Spain which also has some of the most important and amazing examples of Islamic Art and Architecture in the world.
The spiritual was always part of my Creative Process in Photography; indeed I developed a relatively mature idea about the spiritual in art by the time I had completed my MFA written thesis and graduated from Graduate School in 1972. (See my blog project which summarized the ideas in my written thesis entitled The Symbolic Photograph.)
Fifteen years later, after I met Gurumayi Chidvilasanada, received her grace, and Gloria and I began practicing Siddha Yoga full time, I was blessed with many experiences of the Oneness of Being, the all pervasive essential, sacred nature of everything in life, including my own Heart, my own Self.
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Getting back to the ICON, now: During those two years which included our trip to Turkey, and our trip to Spain, studying many books about Sacred Art, and particularly the Sacred Art and Architecture of Islam, I came across four books by Tom Cheetham which are essentially contemplations and clarifications on the astonishing body of published essays and books by the great scholar, teacher, writer and (in my opinion) mystic: Henry Corbin.
In my project The Photograph as ICON I explained how I became interested in the concept of the Icon through Cheetham's book All the World An Icon. I especially got excited about the passages Cheetham included about Pavel Florensky, a Russian Orthodox priest who in 1922 wrote the book Inconostasis.
I read Florensky's book and here are a few quotes I particularly like that relates in different ways to my two Falling Water projects and my Creative Process in photography generally:
In the beginning of Genesis--"God created the heavens and the earth"--we have always recognized as basic this division of all creation into two. Just so, when we pray the Apostle's Creed, we name God as "Maker of all things visible and invisible." These two worlds--visible and the invisible--are intimately connected, but their reciprocal differences are so immense that the inescapable question arises: what is their boundary? Their boundary separates them; yet, simultaneously, it joins them. How do we understand this boundary? Florensky, Iconostasis
Within ourselves, life in the visible world alternates with life in the invisible, and thus we experience moments . . . when the two worlds grow so very near in us that we can see their intimate touching. At such fleeting moments in us, the veil of visibility is torn apart, and through that tear--that break we are still conscious of at that moment--we can sense that the invisible world (still unearthly, still invisible) is breathing; and that both this and another world are dissolving into each other. Florensky, Iconostasis
The wall that separates two worlds is an iconostasis. [click here] One might mean the boards or bricks or the stones. In actuality, the iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and the invisible worlds . . . Iconostasis is vision. Florensky, Iconostasis
We never see . . . the flights of angels . . . not even as the quick shadow of a distant bird flying between us and the sun; . . . we can experience these great motions only as the very faintest breathing. An icon is the same as this kind of heavenly vision . . . Thus a window is a window because a region of light opens out beyond it; . . . the window is that very light itself . . . which, undivided-in-itself and thus inseparable from the sun, is streaming down from the heavens. . . If a symbol* as carrier attains its end, then it is inseparable from the super reality it reveals. Florensky, Iconostasis
(These quotes and more are included in my blog project The Photograph As Icon, part I, Window onto the Invisible world.)
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My definition of a Symbolic Photograph* (briefly) is: "an image which conjoins and holds in equilibrium, both visible images of the outside world and their corresponding invisible-unconscious inner world image counterparts. In their conjunction, which can only happen through the combination of self-effort and grace, a True, living Symbol becomes enlivened by grace which can invoke--in varying degrees of intensity, according to a viewer's capacity in any given moment--the experience of the Oneness of Being. True Symbols are alive and breathing with the spirit (or shakti) that lives simultaneously in ALL the things of the world, and, according to Gurumayi and the Siddha Yoga teachings, "within the Heart of every human being."
To learn more about True, living Symbolic Photographs, how I construct them, how they function, how they relate to "Straight" photographs, and to see many additional examples of my symmetrical images and projects, I invite you to visit my blog project: The Symmetrical Photographs.
This project is related to another recently completed 12x12" inkjet print PROJECT, As Above, So Below : The Water Mirror In the Temple & The Inner Voyage. I invite you visit the project and discover for yourself the relationships between the two projects.
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This project was first announced on
my bog's Welcome Page on
June 1, 2024
Related Blog Project Links
How to Best View My Online Blog Images with your desktop or laptop computer.
Falling Water a blog project published on November 2, 2018 as the third part of a nine-part blog project entitled WATER PHOTOGRAPHS.
Please visit the Welcome Page to my blog The Departing Landscape. It 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.
