LIGHT IN THE SILENCE

light in the silence

moments of light

solitude and reflection

places that see

and hear

and touch

and feel

each place its own sentience

its own psyche

each a repository of meaning

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"I love all solitary places, where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see
As boundless as we wish our souls to be." - Perce Byshe Shelley

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." – John Muir

"I am a little piece of nature." - Albert Einstein

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." - William Shakespeare

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light in the silence is my natural history, my world geography. Placetimes with spiritual and metaphysical ecologies.

Photographed over 12 years and continuing (2003 > present), and shown only in part here, light in the silence is a "picture book", in electronic and (as yet unprinted) paper versions. Each screen or page picturing a different place and time, containing two photographs: a naked self portrait landscape and a sand drawing.

Self portrait geographies, landscapes, places that are: streams, water falls, ponds, ephemeral pools, seasonal wetlands, marshes, grasslands, chaparral, woodlands, old growth forest, mountains, hills, rocks, coastal prairie, sand dune fields, tide pools, beaches, ocean.

Elemental soul-making places near, close to home. Places that are the sensual sources of metaphor and consciousness and picturing and being. Where I've collected rocks, done sand drawings, collected seeds now growing in my garden. And where I found the stories of rocks, trees, flowing water, light, seeds, sand, ocean, sky. With other living creatures a living part of a larger living world with entangled genealogies. Meanings live in places that are alive, sentient, expressive.

Each sand drawing a storied sign (being) of psyche and place, of transcendent relation between symbolic and embodied thought, meaning and feeling, of perception as participation.

Sensuous experience and imagination. A continuing "assignment from within". A work in being.

There is no fixed screen or page order (unbound pages). No one single linear flow or narrative temporal sequence between all of the moments. No chronology. All the pages or screens seen (felt) together not through time but as one larger many-dimensional composite unfolding now, a life (like my earlier our love).

light in the silence and metaphysics share meanings and parallel each other in time.

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The self portrait landscape photographs for light in the silence were photographed over twelve years with a series of different Canon and Nikon digital cameras with different resolutions, imaging characteristics, and capabilities. All done on a tripod. Some were photographed alone, some with a female assistant or model operating the camera shutter release.

Photographing light in the silence has had challenges and compromises. Some of the photos are less than perfect from a technical photographic craft point of view. The available light and it's direction in places affected depth of field, exposure time, focus and contrast. Weather, rain and/or cold in several places, and even frost in one case, and wind sometimes blurring the focus of foliage (and me).

Sometimes you have to be happy with the picture that actually happened but was not (or could not be) crafted perfectly. For the love and expression of the moment.

light in the silence appears in part in electronic picture world (online, this website), and as page and individual image prints (limited edition small book size prints only).