LIGHT IN THE SILENCE

light in the silence

moments of light

solitude and reflection

in places that see

and hear

and touch

and feel

each place its own selves

its own sentience

its own psyche

each its own feelings and meanings

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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 biogeography. Places, living (earth) land forms and creatures, with spiritual, sensual, perceptual, and metaphysical meanings and ecologies.

Photographed over 12+ years, light in the silence is a "picture book", in both paper and electronic versions. Each page or screen picturing a different place and time, containing two photographs: a (naked) portrait of (landscape) place, and a sand drawing of an individual symbolic being with the embodied energies, sentience, psyche, and spirit of that place. Places that are streams and creeks, water falls, ponds, ephemeral pools, seasonal wetlands, marshes, grasslands, trees, woodlands, old growth forest, mountains, hills, rocks, coastal prairie, sand dunes, tide pools, tidal flats and beaches, ocean. Places where I see and feel the individual presences, selves, homes, and creation and life stories of living earth (land) forms and creatures, and I feel and see myself in them. And those places, living (earth) land forms and creatures, feel and see me. Being my relatives and me being a relative of theirs. Being in and of nature, in and of the more-than-human world, a larger living world with beautifully entangled genealogies.

Places, living (earth) land forms and creatures, that are the original sources of being and consciousness, of sentience, of feeling and meaning, of creativity and living symbolic forms, and of heart-knowing and kind-ness (kinship), Ways of seeing. Ways of being.

Elemental soul-making places near, close to home.

And places where I have collected rocks, found sand and pigments for drawing and painting, gathered seeds now growing in my garden, and in some places made sand drawings.

light in the silence was where I first I appeared in my own photographs, being both photographer and part of the subject/content. The portrayal of both my seeing and being seen, of seeing being seen seeing. Picturing the direct naked elemental physical sensual body presence of a living individual being as an embodied part of place (of place selves). A revelation of living spirit, energies, natural beauty, aesthetic forms, sensuality, and grace of place and of being.

My light in the silence, being our seeing together, metaphysics, in the garden, and in the earth all share meanings and parallel each other in time, with both sand drawing and photography.

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

The self portrait landscapes for light in the silence were photographed over twelve-plus years with a series of different Nikon and Canon film and 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..

Photographing light in the silence had challenges and compromises. Some of the photos are less than perfect from a technical photographic craft point of view. The available light and its 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.

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 electronic picture world (online, on this website), as well as in a complete boxed collection of all the unbound pages printed, and as individual page and separate image prints (all in limited editions).