(from blogextracts.txt) The core of my interest in photography is a continuing search for revelations and epiphanies, and they seem to keep coming in great variety, both in my own practise and via extensive reading in photo books. A succession of discoveries, indeed a lifetime of them, has come out of (seemingly) nowhere; each might be a springboard into a new Project/fascination/realm of discovery, and I never know when another will announce itself. ... For me, images are integral elements in stories, which I've been satisfied to manage and distribute in digital form. Whimsey seems to be a prime mover for me, but sometimes poses difficulties for viewers of my creations (what on earth does he mean? where did that come from?). Often an image's identity emerges during post-processing, and spawns an allusive (and often idiosyncratic) name that attaches it to a nascent narrative. This one seems to be, or to invoke, Gilgamesh: ... A recent example of emergent but still inchoate narrative is the series of tree wounds now accumulating as a Flickr Album. I certainly had no idea there was a story here when (almost 8 years ago) it occurred to me that this capture ("Shrieking Tree Creature") could be read as a tree in extremis: and it was only a couple of weeks ago that I started to notice and accumulate and then go looking for more instances of the phenomena of arboreal damage and self-repair. I don't know if this thread will ever grow into something grander than a small heap of images, now loosely linked by an anthropomorphic conceit, but here's the thing: I'm now interested in looking into what arborists have to say about the lives of trees, and Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World and ecologist Suzanne Simard's research on arboreal communication have a salience I hadn't previously imagined. That sort of outward-bound connectivity thing happens a lot, and is one of the primary joys. And one of the reasons UPS keeps showing up in our driveway... ... a large stable of Fearful Symmetries, within many of which lurk creatures. The question is: did the mirroring transformation allow existing creatures to manifest, or are they simply figments of the viewer's imagination? Pretty much everybody seems to enjoy the search, and rarely do people see exactly the same creatures. ... My notions of 'simple/simplicity' seem to center on clarity ("to the point"), balance/equilibrium (often emphasized in composition/framing), minimal visual distraction from the central element, the intuitive (appealing to personal and subjective understanding: grokkage), and the direct and the succinct (not requiring elaborate explanation). The form of Simplicity I'm most interested in courting these days is the "it's just a..." (it's just a rock, just a cloud, just a river, etc.). It does seem that surface simplicity often has hidden depths, into which I'm happy to dive. The kicker for me is the story, the explanation, the reveal that lies behind what looks pretty simple and straightforward but contains magnificent complexities. Human minds love to construct interpretive stories, often anthropomorphizing the phenomena or otherwise rendering them vital (stars interpreted as mythological beings, clouds seen as creatures, faces appearing to appear in rocks, trees, etc.). The momentary form we capture via film or sensor is often a process apprehended. A cloud is just water vapor pushed by the wind; a rock is just a slowly-disintegrating fragment of terrestrial crust; a river is just a flowing column of water, but in each case the 'momentary form' we can observe encodes processes and dynamics of great subtlety. Another pathway toward Simplicity is simple/simplifying action: symmetrical mirroring is a simple transformation, which often makes a coherent [ordered? simplified?] something out of a jumble of apparent disorder. Inversion (white to black, black to white) is another seemingly simple transformation that can disclose unanticipated realities. And abridging the visual spectrum (as in infrared photography, or via desaturation to black-and-white) simplifies, as does blurring or defocusing. Some see these as gimmicks, distortions of a supposed objective reality, but they appeal to me as means to extend the range of my eyes and nudge perception into new territories and modalities. ... I've made a number of blog postings about tessellation (Simplifying, symmetry, the Elder Gods | A Sow's Ear | Inversion, conversion, reversion) and the chief element has been the discovery of hidden creatures, released by symmetrical transformation or unfolding along an edge. The conceit is that the liberated creatures were hiding, but the almost as remarkable fact is that we are so perceptually attuned to symmetry. There may well be survival value in that, and there's surely great social value when it comes to recognizing people and remembering faces. I'm fascinated by the joy people take in hunting for creatures in my constructions, and pleased too by the great variety in what they discover. They don't all see the same things, and often don't see the features that I privileged as the key to creating a name for each image. So is this mostly a frivolous pursuit, a game (though without winners and losers)? I see it as one of the (many) arms of my explorations of photography, a sort of antithesis of abstraction (concretion?), in which a narrative order emerges from material that might even verge on the chaotic, before the hinge creaks open to reveal one or more figures. The feedstock is often quasicoherent (or perhaps just 'interesting') patterns in rocks or wood, but the effect of symmetrical construction is, rather paradoxically, to simplify by disclosing a pattern or design that was latent. My ability to foresee what an unfolding will produce is very limited, and I'm usually surprised and delighted by what appears on my screen when I join symmetrical halves. At the very least I produce a mirrored design, often expressive of a graphic coherence that's worthwhile to spend some time exploring. More than a few have then been named "design for..." on the basis of some discerned allusion or possible application. But it's the animals and anthropomorphic beings who evoke the greatest glee and provoke onomastic flights of fancy. As my friend Max Nigh was wont to say, "Name It and Nail It", but also "Just because we've named it doesn't mean we know anything about it." If one of the objectives of photography is to produce (create, liberate, disclose...) graphical objects of interest, things that capture our interest or engage our minds, symmetrical constructions surely meet the criteria. But are they Art, or merely Whimsy? That may come down to how they are encountered and experienced. In my Flickr photostream they may be "oh god there he goes again...", but fancy printing on grand scale and placement on gallery walls might change the perception. Or they might be turned into laser-cut jigsaw puzzles. A special form of diptych? Possibly folding screens, or fabric, or dye-sublimated tiles. ... After a very fruitful day of exploring the Public Alleys of Boston's Back Bay, during which I had rather frivolously gathered a series of 'urban ensōs' from detritus and debris underfoot, I awoke with the phrase "objects of contemplation" in the mental foreground. The words were linked to the Chiarenza photograph, to those ensōs I'd harvested, and to the series of doors I had walked by (but not photographed) on Beacon Hill, after the Public Alley adventure. I got up and wrote down a cascade of linked thoughts: two-bit epiphanies, of the form | hm. never noticed that before. alright then. | kyber epiphanies: those which steer you incrementally 'door' as polyvalent metaphor, including liminality, passage, may open, barred/locked, disused, welcoming... "speak friend and enter"... rites attending passage... knockers, handles, knobs, hinges... sometimes a cigar is just a cigar By morning it seemed clear that objects of contemplation needed explication. What follows may be tl;dr for some, but I have to summarize in order to be able to move on to the next thing, whatever that turns out to be. So: objects of contemplation are touchstones; contemplation connects the viewer with the complexity (or sometimes the simplicity?) of ideas and emotions that are implied by, linked to, understood as entangled with the object. Thus a literal door may address many different quiddities of doorness (passage, openness, liminality, barrier, transition, metamorphosis, etc.); an ensō is indeed a circle, but any particular instance may evoke recognition of complexity in the nuances of its execution by the practitioner who limns it. An incomplete (open) ensō, or one which departs from perfect circularity, may be invested by the producer or viewer with meaning, or with mystery. And any new instance of circle or door may lead the viewer to re-collect the insights and conundrums of previous encounters with images of circles or doors. I'm trying not to mystify or over-invest in the symbolic content of circle or door, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but once one has the idea that a simple object may entrain complexities, it's likely that one will come to savor the variety of those complexities, and thus to seek out further examples of circles and doors. And so the next day we went back to Beacon Hill and began a collection of doors. I'm not sure where that might eventually lead. Of course there's lots more to say about ensō in the context of Zen, and these passages are a nice beginning, not irrelevant to a photographer's odyssey: Creation of an ensō symbolizes a moment in time in the life of the artist when the mind is free to simply let the spirit create through the physical body. Ensō is a fascinating expression of individuality as expressed by variations in ink tones, brushstroke thickness, shape of the circle and even the positioning of the single point where the circle begins and ends. ... This is a Zen symbol of the absolute, the true nature of existence, the duality within life and the imperfection of all things. It is a symbol that combines the visible and the hidden, the simple and the profound, the empty and the full. The very imperfections and contours of the ensō, which must be painted by human hand rather than constructed as a mathematically correct circle, make the ensō a manifestation of perfection. It is perfect just as it is, even in all its imperfection. Ensō suggests to the student to stop striving for perfection and allow the universe to be as it is. Abandon the idea that there is a one size fits all path that ends at some specific point, place or time. When you believe that you have arrived at some final destination on your path, ensō reminds you to start again exactly at the point where you are now and to embrace and enjoy your unique experiences on life's journey. (https://www.modernzen.org/enso/) ... Yeah, well, insight happens. It happens all the time, sometimes gets written down in screeds and maunderings, sometimes is "catch and release" and doesn't get recorded, often provokes projects, purchases, hareings-off in new directions... The last month or so of thinking about and preparing for the workshop has occasioned an especially intense immersion in my photography library and in photographic expeditions, and thus a lot of reflection on my own issues around being a Photographer. And those lead naturally and directly into meta-ish insights that overflow the boundaries of 'art' and 'photography', which is a Good thing. Here's this morning's caffeine-fueled summary of that mare's nest of thoughts: Much/most of Insight is Realization and articulation of what one already knows, so it's internal at least as much as external "bolts from the blue". It's talking to oneself and listening to what one says, or as the writing across the curriculum folks used to say: ?how can I know what I think until I see what I say? which is a pretty good recipe for the [never-ending] construction of understanding. And so much is connecting up stuff, enjoying the explorations of the Indra's Net of all-connected-to-all, adding more connections, attending to more allusions, weaving/knotting in more patterns. The metaphor of evolving knowledge as macramé seems really apposite. BUT the question of what it's all FOR is still out there. I used to have the answer of generating material for teaching (I learn stuff so that I can teach better, and being seen to be a perpetual learner is a lesson in itself), where the audience was classrooms of [supposedly] eager ears. That was an illusion on several levels. But now there's no target audience beyond an amorphous Posterity. I realized that I really don't need any external validation for my photography. I'm not engaged in any contest, not trying to appeal to any market or audience, not trying to create something saleable, or even to inform or persuade anybody of anything. Those are mostly the freedoms of age, retirement, even disengagement, where one chooses to do whatever it's pleasing to do, and damn the torpedoes. ... I tend to get caught up in the stories that link photos, rather than in appreciation of the individual photographs as free-standing aesthetic objects, and the possibility of self-produced books seems the best outlet for those stories, once they've reached critical mass. My business model (give it away) sidesteps many of the entanglements faced by those who need to make money from their creative work, but sometimes I admit to myself that I'd like to hear a bit more adulation. And then there's the experience of being bowled over or run under by the first encounter with a photographer whose vision and depth of technique is far, far beyond my own. It happens all the time (indeed, in looking at the marvelous work of others in our little group), and puts me through the same ignoble and invidious samsaric washer-cycle again and again. Envy and Awe and Insecurity make brief appearances on the stage of the psyche, cock their familiar snooks at poor little Ego, and depart, hooting derisively at Ego's inadequacy, pretensions, and dreams of photographic glory. A deflated Ego picks himself up and seeks solace in yet another Amazon order... On good days, Ego realizes (yet again...) that the above drama is all imaginary and has precisely nothing to do with the reality of sunrises and sunsets and the glorious opportunities each new day brings. On less-good days, Ego may hatch plots to repair those supposed inadequacies (another workshop, improved technology, transport to some distant and more glorious locale...). The vexatious part is the seemingly inevitable recurrence of this little karmic drama. And the recognition that it has its parallels in my musical life and also dogged my academic life too. The fault, dear friends, lies within. ... About 2 miles from our house is a public beach that stretches for more than a quarter mile. I have photographed there quite often, always finding new things to explore and enjoy. I noticed that Low Tide would be at 6:30 AM, and that sunrise would be at about the same time, so I arrived at the beach at 6:00, in almost complete darkness, and started sauntering. The first thing I noticed, almost immediately, was that my mind names things and then carries on a dialog with itself. I can't shut that off, indeed I don't want to shut it off, even experimentally. As Betsy points out to me, it's Witness Mind that attends the thought stream we might identify as monkey mind—not a separate sensorium from Conscious Mind, but in a sense that both Goethe and Bateson would recognize and applaud, an integral part of a gloriously complex Me. Perhaps I should have tried to let the monkey mind yammer in the background, but it's my lifelong habit to make Notes to Oneself in writing, these days in a pocket-size Moleskine, so I started writing in the dark, just aide memoire phrases and comments to abet later reconstruction and help me think about how to realize the underlying issues of photographing at the beach. And then I decided that the iPhone was sort of a sketchpad, and the slippery slope of "without your camera!" was breached. So that hour of engagement with the beach and the tide and the sunrise and the sounds and smells of the dawn opened out instead of narrowing down, and produced a heap of images (see Dawn: an hour at Drift Inn) which I think of not so much as free-standing photographs as sketches to help me consider how I might actually make intentional photographs with big-time equipment, considering exposure and aperture and lenses and so forth. The hour was enormously productive for me, awash in profound discoveries in a territory I thought I knew pretty well. I was fully engaged with and awed by the physical processes around me: the wavelets arriving and collapsing, the water advancing and retreating, the clouds and sky changing color, the formation of the ridges in the sand, the catenary curves at the interface between land and water, the emergence of rockweed as the tide retreated, the flow of time... You just can't buy that sense of immersion in the natural world. Whether it's possible to capture such epiphanies in a Bayer array sensor and turn them into distributable images is an open question, and one that I wouldn't have thought to ponder if I hadn't invested that hour in today's dawn. ... The world of George DeWolfe's decaying leaves is all around us here in Maine. There is a profound Simplicity in the vast variety of leaves, something Goethe would have understood: organs of plants, collectors and transducers of solar energy, oxygen producers. Every species has its distinct morphology, unique coloration, habit of decay. They crunch and squish underfoot, and shelter all manner of small living things. They eventually decay to humus, and so ultimately feed living vegetation. And it's OK to photograph leaves. They are inexhaustible, and the same is true of other natural-world materials—waterfalls, spider webs, rocks, etc.—approached as Objects of Contemplation. For me this comes as a powerful realization, satori of a sort. ... A haiku came to me (as they sometimes do) just as I was drifting off to sleep, so I got up and wrote it down: all ensōs are alike no two maple leaves the same draw and photograph ... I've never felt it difficult to find the "calm center in my own deepest self" where dwells "mindful receptivity", and entertaining "alternate perspectives on reality" has been both professional perspective (cultural relativism is baked into anthropology) and personal standard operating procedure, and the very root of my affection for whimsy. Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (from Through the Looking-Glass) ... Perhaps what I need is a different vocabulary for those intermediate steps, something to replace "workflow" that's more descriptive of what I think I'm engaged in while using Lightroom. A couple of days I woke up wondering about modulation, a concept that I first bounced off of at an early age as I tried [unsuccessfully] to grasp what my electronics genius brother was talking about when he tried to answer my question about the difference between AM and FM (I was probably about 6 or 7). The word came up again a dozen years later, in the context of light modulators, when I was introduced to photograms in the introductory photography course in 1963, so I had a practical (if hazy and imprecise) working knowledge of what 'modulation' might involve when applied to photography. And of course modulation shows up in music, referring to progression from one key or scale (or raga or maqam) to another. The senses of 'varying' and 'transforming' are what stick best for me, and seem directly relevant to describing what happens in the processing of RAW images in Lightroom and Photoshop, as presets are invoked and sliders are moved to produce the desired subjective qualities in the digital image. The various controls are discrete enough to facilitate a subtlety of tweakage far beyond what my (former, utterly obsolete) darkroom skills allowed, but my approach is mostly ad hoc, and really too sandboxy for comfort: I try settings until the results please me, without really understanding what 'luminance' or 'clarity' is in terms of what happens to the pixels. I could repair that ignorance, but I'm having too much fun with seat-of-the-pants processing. This morning I woke absurdly early and wrote down the cascade of thoughts that rumbled through: Our perceptual apparatus [our wetware] is analog in nature, but we have learned to model and approximate its operation with digital tools. Thank you Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, William Shockley, ... Bill Gates, Steve Jobs... It's a distraction to art to inquire too deeply into how the [digital] magic works, how the code was written and assembled to create and sustain the illusions of digital-to-analog magic. We modulate the values of parameters within a grid of pixels; the sliders are the handles that facilitate algorithms acting on arrays of pixels. We perceive analog shifts on our screens, because the digital changes take place below our threshold of resolution. We are engaged in a grand game with our senses, which are extended and amplified so that we can see more and deeper and further, via algorithmic magic carried out on human perceptual apparatus. A lot of our supposed perception is Maya, illusion that we happily accept as real. And we are mostly content to marvel at the changing display on the walls of the cave, without needing to inquire too deeply into how the magic is done. Do we really want to see the manipulations of the man behind the curtain? ... The I is playful, wry, in search of paradoxes, epiphanies, essences, curiosities, ambiguities, amusements, the occluded, the improvisatory, stories. I've forever been a collector, a constructor of narratives, of verbal and visual macramé into which new bits and interconnections can always be knotted. My photographic oeuvre is not so much a Body of Work as a gallimaufry of open-ended projects and beginnings: abandoned ancestors, tessellations that reveal creatures, the lives of rocks and trees, beloved landscapes, enigmata of all sorts and no sort, explorations. What's it all for? Whither is it headed? Unclear. Blissfully so. ===== Yesterday I took a couple of iPhone photos that provoke some ruminations. I was crossing the bridge at Mosquito Harbor, near the end of a 10-mile walk, and stopped to look at a dramatic cloud pattern. I took out the iPhone and did a quick landscape shot: That image captures some of the drama, in a landscape mode that’s quite familiar to me: distant horizon, something significant in the foreground. I lowered the iPhone to set its exposure in the foreground (to try to get more of the detail in the reflection), but inadvertently hit the button and captured the near foreground of cobbles, the margin between stone and rising tide, and the reflected sky: Note that this exposure was entirely accidental, composing itself in spite of what I thought I was doing. It wasn’t until I was looking at the results of the day’s shooting on the computer that I recognized the power of the inadvertent image. My immediate thought was that it was reminiscent of the marvelous work of Jerry Uelsmann, whom I’ve been following for 40+ years (see this profile), in which one order of reality glides into another. I got Uelsmann Untitled: a retrospective from the shelf and read Carol McCusker’s essay: Interesting things happen on the margins of landmasses… his imagery, in which nothing is assured or known and layers of contradictory realities coexist… (pg. 8) Uelsmann has always worked in black and white, and entirely with analog media (sandwiching negatives, performing a dance of movement among multiple enlargers, masking, dodging, burning…). I converted my color image to black and white: and I can’t decide which version I prefer. ... I’ve been reading Robert Adams’ Why People Photograph (Aperture 2005) and so been challenged to try to articulate my own reasons for the focus of attention and energies in this nexus of technology and aesthetics. Here are some of the current realizations: The lure of fame and fortune has nothing to do with it. I have a lifetime of ongoing mental projects, many of which have visual components. I enjoy both the pleasures of exploration and the assembly of findings into complex narrative structures, as tokens to pass to like-minded others. I’m forever on the hunt for the magical frisson of “that’s it!” as my gaze shifts. False positives abound, and opportunities are missed. Catch-and-release is a better strategy than regret for lost opportunities. My photography is mostly concerned with things and their stories, and not with states of mind, consciousness, or abstraction. I see that as a limitation of perception and vision that I’d like to address via the Ilachinski workshop. The images I do capture trace my twisting and branching pathways in time and space, and are like breadcrumbs dropped to mark my path on the way to the Minotaur’s Lair. ... I recognize that you can’t really escape the derivative, especially if you’ve studied others’ work extensively, and so absorbed elements of their modalities of perception. It seems appropriate to settle for an acceptance of acts of homage when you recognize someone else’s vision in your own work. To become aware of and to acknowledge your sources, inspirations, debts is an exercise in intellectual honesty. We do, after all, learn to see by having things pointed out to us; gratitude is always appropriate. And our understandings are augmented by explanation and backstory. Edward Weston’s Pepper #30 is a potent example: learning that Weston achieved the necessary depth of field by making an f240 diaphragm and then exposing the film for 4-6 hours greatly broadens our realization of Weston’s mastery in this single image of an everyday object. One never sees peppers with the same eyes after seeing Pepper #30, but there’s no need to repeat Weston’s procedures, nothing added to the epiphany by retracing his steps. But absorbing HOW he achieved the luminosity of Pepper #30 into one’s understanding of the glorious history of image-making is likely (however subliminally) to contribute to one’s own perceptual palette, and pretty sure to enlarge one’s future comprehension of others’ work. ... I’m reading Guy Tal’s More Than A Rock: Essays on art, creativity, photography, nature, and life and Richard Zakia’s Perception and Imaging: Photography – a way of seeing, in preparation for the workshop with Andy Ilachinski, and I’m currently embroiled with the vexed question of whether what I do with photography is art. On the one hand, it just doesn’t matter what the answer to that question is, since I’ll keep on doing it anyway, and don’t got to show no stinkin’ badge. But on the other hand, the answer might be NO, in that I don’t choose to wrap my doings in the garments of pretense, or engage in invidious comparison, by staking a claim as an Artist and seeking a public. I’ve been here before, with respect to my identity as a musician (I play mostly for myself, avoid performance, but take pleasure in being recognized as skilled), with many of the same insecurities. ... But if what I do is not art, what IS it? Most of my images have some narrative purpose, or seem to me to evoke stories of some sort; but generally the stories come from the images, or fit into some larger narrative project as exemplars (e.g., all those gravestones, or all those Abandoned Ancestors). Something prompts me to frame and click, and once I see the result in post-processing, a story may emerge that seems to explain something about the image. An example from the Acadia National Park adventure: Lichen on rock. Just an interesting pattern that fit happily within the field of view of a 100mm macro lens, no obvious expository insight in the viewfinder. But as soon as I saw it on the computer screen, the notion of Pursuit couldn’t be unseen: the figure on the left side, sharply defined by a line of white sketching its back, with an outstretched arm showing the direction of movement, is obviously being chased by the marvelously indistinct figure on the right, whose whitish feet (in the lower right corner) are clearly running… T’ang Dynasty, perhaps? Susurrus of silken robes? The art might be in the happenstance of lichen growth on granite substrate [not MY circus, not MY monkeys], or in the accident of my framing [definitely MY circus], or it might reside entirely in the post-hoc tale-making [positively MY monkeys]. It’s difficult to imagine that a print of the image, matted and framed and hung on a gallery wall, would have any salience for viewers without the interpretation. And just why does any of this matter? It’s those daunting but fascinating books, along with a bunch of others in realms of photographic history and aesthetics, that pile up around my reading chair. They keep nudging me to explore further, but also remind me that I’m in search of my own vision. Sure, Stieglitz photographed clouds and made them into Equivalents, connecting them to his own mental states: A symbolist aesthetic underlies these images, which became increasingly abstract equivalents of his own experiences, thoughts, and emotions. The theory of equivalence had been the subject of much discussion at Gallery 291 during the teens, and it was infused by Kandinsky’s ideas, especially the belief that colors, shapes, and lines reflect the inner, often emotive “vibrations of the soul.” In his cloud photographs, which he termed Equivalents, Stieglitz emphasized pure abstraction, adhering to the modern ideas of equivalence, holding that abstract forms, lines, and colors could represent corresponding inner states, emotions and ideas. (from The Phillips Collection) Doesn’t mean I should or shouldn’t photograph clouds, does it? Or see/not see things in them that aren’t “pure abstraction.” ... Some photos seem promising in the viewfinder, but once displayed on the computer screen turn out to be underwhelming. I can see what I was after (but didn’t achieve) with this one, but didn’t process it further in the first round: It was only later in the day, when I was considering possible symmetrical unfoldings among the day’s photographs, that it occurred to me that this one might be a candidate for the GIMP copy-flip-join treatment. I observe that my previsualization of the effects of this procedure is chancy at best, in that I’m usually surprised at what the transformation reveals, and I don’t often make exposures with the intent to produce symmetrical arrays of the resulting images. The products are mostly serendipitous. Anyway, the result of the transform opened a whole new world of interpretation for the image, and my first thought (and hence the title of the image) was “empty wings”. Now, wings don’t usually have the property of emptiness or fullness; they may adorn the backs of angels and mythological beasts, and be integral to birds and bats and insects, and might be glorious or workaday or fluttery or super-aerodynamic, but empty? Not so much. But this pair of wings seems to have a life of its own, their sweep echoed in the snow-like pattern to either side, and they almost seem as if they might be donned, tried on by a wing-shopper for fit and sartorial effect, taken out for a run around the block to assess their loft and effulgency. The image partakes of the myffic, because there aren’t really any wing haberdashers in our world. Looking at “empty wings” we are led to imagine that there might be, and imagine that angels might wish to rotate through a wardrobe of wings for different occasions, and that somehow a photograph has transported us thither. Or the viewer might say “humph, seaweed on the beach, just twice as much of it” and pass along to some other image. I’m trying to pull together the vocabulary to think and talk about the effects and affects and applied aesthetics of photography—about how and why some photographs work in the sense of transfixing the viewer with an epiphany, and in the sense of spawning a feeling of unforgettability for the image. We all have our own catalogs of such images, and there’s not necessarily a lot of agreement among appreciators of photography about what truly belongs in the canon. It’s subjective and personal, and that’s basically a good thing, in the many-mansions sense. One of the writers who has put systematic effort into exploring these matters of photographic essence is Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida. I’ve read through the book several times, with each pass assimilating a bit more terminology and Barthian viewpoint, but it’s very French and demands a lot of a North American reader. I am no expert but… Barthes does something very clever, while disclaiming any expertise (or, indeed, interest) in technical photography. He uses 25 photographs (many of them not familiar to most readers) to exemplify aspects he discourses upon. Who, for example, has ever given much thought to this image of Queen Victoria sitting on a horse? (Queen Victoria, photographed by George Washington Wilson, 1863) Barthes uses the image to introduce the idea that the photograph has a clear studium, an aboutness, something that it relates about its subject: it’s Queen Victoria, in the flesh (well, shrouded in a vast black dress) sitting on a horse. That’s what it’s a photograph of, its “historical interest” and identity in the wider world. But Barthes then points out that for him the photograph also has a punctum, an element that grabs the viewer and makes the image into something with a personal and memorable significance. Barthes’ punctum: …beside her, attracting my eyes, a kilted groom holds the horse’s bridle: this is the punctum; for even if I do not know just what the social status of this Scotsman may be (servant? equerry?) [in fact he’s John Brown… and the horse’s name is Fyvie], I can see his function clearly: to supervise the horse’s behavior: what if the horse suddenly began to rear? (pg.57) For me the unforgettable punctum of the photograph is John Brown’s sporran, that which marks him as a Scotsman in full folkloric costume. That’s where MY eye is drawn when I look at the image. So here we have a couple of tools to help us talk about those effects and affects and applied aesthetics of photography to which I referred above. Barthes offers a number of others that I haven’t decoded yet myself, so another pass through Camera Lucida is on the docket. And, going back to the “empty wings”, for me [and for sure Your Mileage May Vary] the image has a punctum in the homunculus that seems to form the point of attachment of this set of wings to our imaginary angel’s back: As so often before, I wonder aloud if the wings and the homunculus were there before I unfolded the original image. Or did I create them? Or are they purely imaginary? When we read a photograph, are we just projecting a personal and idiosyncratic interpretation? Is a photograph a document whose significance is contestable, or maybe even fungible? Deep waters. ... Among the axes of my engagement with photography are projects that work with collections: of purchased studio portraits (Abandoned Ancestors and Bluenose Physiognomy), with family photographs (Forebears, and Who Was Joe Wilner?), and with my own images of cemetery memorials. These efforts mostly deal with strangers who have departed from the living world, and so I keep an ear to the ground for material related to remembering and forgetting. ... I’ve been reading in Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952-1976, a book I’ve had on the shelves for 5 years but always been a bit daunted by. Turns out to be interesting, useful, relevant… even though many of the articles within are 60 years old, and address a photography that was totally not-digital, almost entirely black-and-white, and entirely within the ‘fine art’ realm. Many of the pieces are by Minor White himself, and articulate his personal vision of mid-20th century camera work. That vision was controversial at the time, and White has always been a polarizing figure: a renowned teacher (CSFA, RIT, MIT, private students), a sometimes-impenetrable seer, a wanderer in spiritual realms, a gay person in an era that was beyond uncomfortable with such diversities, a lightning rod for people who thought differently about photography’s quiddities. And a marvelous photographer. Paul Caponigro was one of Minor White’s students. Also among photographers I revere, Carl Chiarenza and Jerry Uelsmann (see Howard Greenberg Gallery show, 2008). Sometime in the late 1960s I got my hands on a heap of back issues of Aperture (1953-1964, with many gaps), but my engagement at the time was with the photographs, and not so much with the text. I had too much of the dancing-about-architecture attitude toward writing about aesthetics, but I was mightily affected by the photographs, and however subliminally I absorbed a lot into my own sense of what [I imagined, believed, thought] photography ought to be doing. But now I seem to be old enough to approach the writing again, and I’m truly sorry (though not surprised) that it’s taken so long. At the moment, Minor White’s articulation of the discipline of reading photographs is what most attracts my attention. ... I don’t find the typology of Documentary/Pictorial/Informational very satisfactory, because (1) many of my photographs don’t fit comfortably in any of those boxes, but (2) I’m somewhat loath to claim the exalted status of Equivalent for them. And, more generally, (3) where do photographs labeled with the conventional term ‘abstract’ fit? or for that matter, the ‘expressive/creative’ photographs that are by far the majority in the pages of Aperture? What seems most glaringly to be missing in this typology is the vital importance of the stories that accompany and explain many photographs, the narrative context by which they join an oeuvre/’body-of-work’. Thus, Aunt Kate might be judged to be Documentary (seen here stunningly printed on satin): ‘Documentary’ sees her as a free-standing object, simply a photograph to be read for its inherent content, but her presence in my photographic world is polyvalent. She exists because she’s a rescue, a 2×3 wafer of japanned metal with emulsion, color, an inscription. Her context is that I found her in a bin of tintypes in a Nova Scotia junk store, so she participates in a vernacular history of Nova Scotia society and culture and demography—she’s not an isolate, though we can’t provide her with provenance (no way to know her name, except Kate, or her place of origin). Aunt Kate can certainly be read as a Photograph, in isolation, but her importance and significance is as a member of a matrix of other similarly rescued photographs. Bluenose Physiognomy situates her and hundreds of other rescues as best I can, by linking them into an emergent grand narrative. I started to make a list of characteristics of my own photographs, as means of escape from the straitjacket of Documentary/Pictorial/Informational, but quickly found myself treading idiosyncratic water as I bethought this provisional array: distillations (paring down to essence) enigmas (what YOU see is what you get) manifestations (something animate appearing out of seemingly nowhere) occlusions (something hiding) apprehensions of the fleeting (now you see it, now you don’t) encounters with the ephemeral (briefest of glimpses) bijoux (preciosities) ... I decided to subscribe to the modern version of Aperture, primarily for the purpose of gaining access to the archive, all the way back to the first issue in 1952. There have been some problems getting set up, and the interface isn’t all that one might wish, but Pandora’s Box is now at least openable, and it’s worthwhile to keep track of some of my impressions and findings as I explore 65 or so years of high-end Photography. I’ve poked a bit at recent issues, enough to observe that Aperture isn’t focused these days on what I think is photographically interesting, which just means that I have to do some work on understanding the dimensions of my interests, and then start seeking backwards through time for the various turning points and deviations from the Aperture that I knew 50-odd years ago. LensWork is now doing what I think Aperture used to do (and I subscribe to that as well), at least as defined by the criterion of my notions of what’s most interesting in Photography. One of my tendencies turns out to be a species of mouldy-figism, characterized by a strong preference for an aesthetic based in the past, and emphasizing strong composition in black and white (‘mouldy fig’ is an epithet from the Culture Wars in jazz, one brief narration of which is here). Think the pantheon of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Paul Caponigro, Aaron Siskind, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Minor White; and include more recent discoveries Emmet Gowin, Berenice Abbott, Florence Henri, Margrethe Mather… and of course Lewis Hine and Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson and August Sander… and Edward Weston and Brett Weston and (eventually) Robert Frank… (not that they’d all appreciate being lumped together). They continue to define for me the acme of Photography. So where did I get off the bus, and become identified with crusty traditionalism? Might have been sometime in the 1970s, not too long after Vision and Expression, a 1969 show of the “younger generation of photographers” at George Eastman House. I could admit even the most fanciful of those images into my understanding of Photography, and appreciate the directions of the (entirely black-and-white) experiments at the frontiers of image-making. Soon after that I was in Nova Scotia, far from the cutting edge of the arts world, but Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye (1966) and Looking At Photographs (1973) were the personal cynosure and touchstones for my understanding of Photography. And then along came John Szarkowski’s Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, “the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum’s first publication of color photography” in 1976. And the issue that hung me up was probably color. I’ve never quite caught up. ... Just Rocks will include rock portraits and tessellations which disclose creatures and designs hidden in geological formations. Most of the images are exercises in visual imagination, and address the process of developing and augmenting the capability to see forms and patterns that are not objectively there, but are imaginary tracings that abstract lines and shapes from background complexities. ... Beaches along the coast of Maine are the locus of many of the rock portraits, and the process of discovery is worth some attention. The scatter of beach rock is a stage in a random process of erosion driven by twice-daily tides, which eventually produce sand and so recycle the minerals locked up in stone. ... I’ve been thinking about the term abstract and its cousin abstraction, and considering how they relate to my engagement with rocks. I don’t have a sophisticated grounding in the use of the terms in writing/talking about art, so I begin with a collection of my own thoughts and work outward. The 5 AM summary today, which will be refined as I read and consider: abstract (v): pare down to or extract essentials; take away from, purloin, haul away abstract (n): without obvious representational form; an unparsed collection of design elements abstract (adj): in which the representation of Reality requires explanation; as opposed to ‘concrete’; loosely, non-representational Quite a few of my photographs of the last few years have been non-representational captures of forms and patterns, in rock, in wood, in ice and cloud forms. Often I only begin to grasp what they contain when I process the RAW files and have a chance to see what I saw when provoked to click the shutter and capture the momentary conjunction of light and materials. ... This reading is entirely a product of my imagination, and the unpredicted outcome of a simple algorithmic manipulation [copy-mirror-join-rotate] of the seed image: an abstract made concrete, a form found, a Story unleashed, a divinity called into existence by an act of naming. Magic, of a sort, relying on instinctual/hard-wired response to bilateral symmetry, in which the viewer seeks coherent patterns and projects them into conjunctions that appear to be representational: those are ears, those eyes, oh look, there’s a mouth… The wonder is that different viewers find their own figures within the created images; the glory is that people are easily trapped into the engagement, and clearly love the exercise of hunting for coherence. And, as Yogi Berra said, the more one practices, the more one sees. You can see a lot by looking. ... I think of Meatyard and Clarence John Laughlin and Frederick Sommer as inhabiting many of the same quarters of the photographic landscape, where the ineffable reigns supreme and everything is more (and even spookier) than it seems to be at first glance. And I’m delighted to find that I have been, though unbeknownst, treading in his footsteps with about half of those “methods, series, subjects.” ... sure enough some of my creatures are caught in mi-e, communicating directly to the viewer. More commonly, the creatures appear self-absorbed, going about their business, brooding or just being grumpy or dozy or fey, not interacting with the watchers, or simply being unaware of their audience. I’ve assembled a gallery of some that seem to me “immobile, monumental” and performing for the viewers Form Finds Form is a phrase I’m continuing to unpack and trying to more completely grok. My mother was wont to say it, and via Ann Berthoff it has crept into the field of Rhetoric and Composition. It seems to resonate with many things I’ve done over the years (photographic projects, surname mapping, improv music…), even though I can’t fully explain just what it Means. In this instance, my almost accidental discovery of the Form mi-e educed the subset of images, each an exemplar of that Form. But which found which? ... I spent part of yesterday morning photographing the familiar rocks of Marshall Point, a locale just 3 miles away that I’ve explored many times and basically feel is bottomless (i.e., I can keep going back and not ever feel it’s been exhausted). See the Flickr album for pretty much the whole haul of images. Earlier collections: A Marshall Point afternoon and Marshall Point revisited. Some of the same rocks recur, with subtle variations of mood and mien. Introspection around what I’m doing and why is pretty much ceaseless, and really something of a pleasure at every stage, from initial capture through processing and on to eventual grouping and layout in the pages of a Blurb book. But what, you may ask, is the point of photographing rocks? Or, for that matter, anything else that one returns to again and again? Initially I’m looking for patterns and designs that fill the frame in an interesting and pleasing manner, and sometimes I see a face or a creature that prompts the click of the shutter, but many times the creatures only resolve themselves during the processing, or even after the processed image has been uploaded to Flickr. And sometimes it’s not until an image has been mirrored (tessellated, as I like to say) that the hidden beings manifest. Minor White wasn’t just blowing smoke with his oft-quoted dictum One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are. In a somewhat more Delphic mode, Minor White also said The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better. …all photographs are self-portraits. Perhaps I should be choosier about what I photograph and what I commit to the semi-public space of Flickr, and surely many of my images are ultimately forgettable, but many of them have the germs of stories that only emerge after days or months of ripening. ... It’s always worthwhile to consider what others see in and say about the images into which I invest (or from which I draw?) so much meaning. The constructive exercise of making meaning from fragments, of perceiving form in what might first appear chaotic, is surely worth documenting, explicating, tracing in line and word. I need to develop the tools to extract and display what I discover and discern. I deal in the whimsical and the figurative, imagining the Story, as in Pas de Deux ... I’ve been trying to figure out effective and efficient means to parse some of my more …erm… complicated images, to reveal what I see hidden in them. If I had the chops to be able to reproduce what I see as drawings, cartoons, or even tracings, I would spend many happy hours rendering photographic captures into hand-drawn graphics. While I can imagine what such translations would look like, I certainly haven’t the powers or skills to realize my imaginings. ... I wish I understood better the geological processes of formation and erosion that produced the laminar structure of this cobble, with its pupil’d eve and the vein of quartz seeming to define a mouthful of teeth. I’m almost content to accept them/it as Nature’s gift to my Quixotic search for rock persons, though I know it’s basically my overheated imagination at work. ... Some of my photographs and tessellations are just plain overwhelming, with too much going on for a viewer to parse without some sort of guidance to what I see that makes an image worth promulgating: and What to do by way of assistance is something I wrestle with, and betimes I suffer notions of what I might do to build explanations and on-ramps for my more enigmatic photographs. ... I know what I need next, but I’m not sure how to realize it. Herewith an outline, thanks to a book that rolled in a couple of days ago, By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List II [Conceived and Compiled by Jason Eskenazi (Author), Jno Cook (Illustrator)]. This is just the sort of tiny-niche bit of bijoux fugitivia I love to discover and possess, but it needs a bit of explanation. Robert Frank’s The Americans is arguably one of the most influential photographic books of the mid-20th century (first published in 1958), and is still making waves among photographers, still being discussed and influencing the work of new discoverers of its singular (well, multiple) views of America. Here’s the Amazon description of By the Glow: While working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Eskenazi began to ask photographers he knew visiting the Looking In exhibition [2009] about Robert Frank’s The Americans, to choose their favorite image and why. In the years since he quit, as he himself got back out on the road again to shoot, he complied hundreds of photographers’ answers in this unique book destined to become a classic in photography education… I got the first edition of By the Glow a few years ago, and hadda buy the second. I was delighted to find Jno Cook’s spare but effective drawings of Frank’s photographs, which are just the sort of thing I need to convey to viewers what I see in my photographs and tessellations. Here’s one of Jno Cook’s renderings of an iconic image from The Americans: I didn’t know it until a Google search just now, but am delighted to find that Jno Cook made a Robert Frank Coloring Book (now long out of print and very pricey!), so Kentlee’s notion that I should make a coloring book was prescient as well as brilliant. But how exactly to proceed? How can I make the drawings that reveal what I see? The technology surely includes Layers in Illustrator or GIMP, and probably the Wacom tablet I bought a while ago with high hopes, but haven’t yet managed to tame to my purposes. And of course the skills to create a workflow that I can actually live with… ... The faces that seem to peer up at me on rocky beaches are indubitably creatures of my imagination, but no less real for that. I’ve been trying to invent broader contexts and aesthetic provenance to clothe their ubiquity, but it was only yesterday, as I was reading WJT Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?, that it came home to me that my delirious panoply of rocks are objets trouvés, found objects in the full sense of the term. ... I like me a good enigma, and I’ve used that word in all sorts of connections over the years, but never thought to inquire into its etymology and various senses. Dictionaries seem to agree that the Greek ainos, ‘fable’, is the original progenitor, but others cited are Greek ainisessthai, ‘to speak allusively’, and Latin aenigma, ‘riddle’. The modern senses favor mysterious puzzling hard to explain inexplicable hidden meaning or known thing concealed under obscure words or forms dark saying baffles understanding Looking over my own past uses, I seem often to invoke enigma in describing something non-obvious that interests me or piques curiosity or captures my attention. An artful story is what’s required to dispel murk (or mirk). See Narrativium for the how and why. Most dictionary senses seem to favor the textual enigma, but I’m especially drawn to visual instances, in which there’s something unresolved or ???huh??? or flat-out puzzling or ambiguous and suggestive of multiple possible readings or just plain weird ... One that seems somehow inevitable is tentatively titled Elevenses, being the eleventh: ‘Elevenses’ (‘elevensies’ if you are a Hobbit, or a non-Hobbit with a penchant for puerile language) refers, as the word itself suggests, to food taken at eleven in the morning. Actually, the word applies not to the mere snack itself, but to the whole concept of a brief, healing pause in the crisis of the day. It is peculiarly British, and is rather more significant than its common definition of “a light informal snack” would suggest. It is, in fact, an institution, an inviolable right, a routine without which the British could not (would refuse to) continue with their working day. (Note to any country considering invading Britain: do it at eleven a.m. when everyone’s attention is focused elsewhere.) (from theoldfoodie.com) Perhaps Elevenses wants to be free-standing, and thus able to include occasional images that have appeared in other books. Perhaps it’s about what I think about photography, and about my own practise in the medium. Sometimes it’s a bit difficult to know which are my own ideas, which are my distillations of others’ ideas, and which are basically purloined words of other writers. I imagine Elevenses as an effort to sort those various strains out. As I have read about photography I have transcribed especially trenchant passages, in which authors seemed to be speaking directly to my concerns and sensibilities of the moment. It’s difficult to know how useful such extracts might be to others, unless I am able to use them to illustrate or exemplify some particular point or issue in my own photographic work. One more ears-of-hippopotamus that I’ve been contemplating: Landscapes of the Imagination. ... The perennial puzzlement of how to think about and what to do with the vast array of anthropo- and zoomorphic images of rocks and wood and water seems to be heading toward a resolution, but the complexities and leaps of association that underlie will take some explication. The cut-to-the-chase of the moment is an evolving scheme for a multimedia gallery presentation next summer, the provisional title for which is Morphic Resonance: Portraits in Stone, Wood, and Water ... The hominin ancestor who picked up and carried the pebble some 20 miles from its geological origin seems to me to represent an early (I’m tempted to claim the earliest) instance of aesthetic Consciousness in our own evolutionary branch [“possibly the earliest example of symbolic thinking or aesthetic sense in the human heritage”]). My own pursuit of wholly imaginary faces in various materials seems a direct descendant. I’ve been chewing over the deeper significance of this for the last year or so (since I learned of the Makapansgat Pebble). A couple of weeks ago the phrase “morphic resonance” drifted through my mind, and seemed somehow portentious (though I can’t remember when/where I first encountered it). It turned out to be a coinage of Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future. This seems akin to notions of ‘distributed consciousness’ with which I’ve been toying in the last year or so, and surely skates on the rim of mystical hoo-hah. ... As we were climbing Mount Megunticook last weekend, this thought wafted through my mind: Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing, or is my imagination working overtime? How would I know? Finding faces in beach or mountain rock is an exercise in imagination, perception, analogy, metaphor. But always: the more, the more, and definitely the merrier, as I’m pulled along by the joys of discovery. As Broot observed: Rock faces are on rock faces. ... The geologic forces (pressure, strain, erosion) that formed what we see are merely a freeze-frame moment in processes that have taken place over vast stretches of time, and are of course continuing. The rocks of a decade or a century hence will look much the same, but a visitor tomorrow or next spring may not see the same things that I saw and photographed. Different light conditions change the view from hour to hour and day to day, and the flat light of an overcast morning discloses different figures than one sees in the raking light of a clear dawn or late afternoon, or in the mistiness of a rainy day. And angle of view and distance from rock to focal plane—and of course the framing chosen by the photographer—are other axes of variation. ... My photographic projects tend to sprawl and, once begun, to light out for the Territories and eschew simple summation under conventional labels. In the last ten years I've explored Abandoned Ancestors (Bluenose Physiognomy, Abandoned Ancestors) Faces in beach rocks and weathered wood (Just A Rock, Physiognomic Best-Of) Creatures in the ephemeral medium of pond ice (Gone Tomorrow, Drift Inn Ice) Graveyard memorials (Remembered, cemeteries, Colma pet cemetery) Fanciful narratives (A catalog of wings for celestials, Who Was Joe Wilner?) Enigmas great and small (YMMV, Ensōs) The magic of surface abstractions (Finding Abstractions, Surfaces) ...to name but a few I've never been clear about the intended audience for my photographic work, or even about why I've been so fascinated by the medium for the last 60-odd years. I don't so much wish to communicate as to explore, to continue to search out new personal epiphanies and interconnections in the visual realms. If others enjoy the results and share my enthusiasms for discoveries, so much the better. But my primary goals are self-indulgent. This show is mostly concerned with visual palindromes. They often surprise us with hidden messages and lurking creatures which seem to be manifestations of the hidden and the latent, containers of the numinous and the mythic, reminders of other worlds just outside our normal senses and powers of observation. Such fearful symmetries provoke contemplation and draw us to fancy, to explorations of the imagination, and to the making of stories. ... Bilateral symmetry with horizontal mirroring is pretty much baked into our perceptual apparatus, because of our own right/left symmetry and our binocular visual equipment. But chirality (right- and left-handedness) is even more basic, at the molecular level and far beyond the resolving power of human visual apparatus. We respond to symmetry as if it is looking back at us. I see the tessellations as graphic palindromes, chiral workings-out of visual ideas in bifold rotational symmetries. To some eyes this reduplicative mirroring procedure is simply a gimmick, an obvious transformation that adds little or nothing to the content of the seed image. Others see the composite images as whole new realms for visual exploration, containing creatures and landscapes and meandering motifs that are implied but unrevealed in the seed images. The tessellations begin with the mundane, with bits of the real world we traverse and examine. They then unfold to mirror what our eyes have seen and the camera's sensor has captured. Sometimes we are surprised to find something almost magical staring back at us: a bit of the real transformed to something that never was. ... Most of the images in this show are imaginary, though they are rooted in the solid reality of rock and ice and rusting metal. We seek to place new images into the catalog of things-seen, but sometimes what we see is novel, new to us, outside of our existing categories or expectations, and the viewer's eye struggles to find some narrative essence. We IMAGINE faces, or structures, or processes, in images that seem to grow outward from a central point, or from a central line that forms an axis. We try to parse what we see, but our eyes do indeed deceive us with illusory patterns, and our minds happily construct alternate readings of sensory input. Subjectively, we see things that aren't objectively there, and objective reality turns out to be multifarious, fungible, subject to negotiation and reinterpretation. Nothing is simply what it seems at first to be, and always contains unseen and obscured deeper levels. We labor to to discern coherence and pattern, to read the story. Our stories are fabrications, full of just-so and might-be and as-if. A spread of lichen on a gravestone becomes monks bowing to one another. An icicle is suddenly a figure from a Japanese horror story. A bit of rock becomes a cosmic explosion, while another seems a regnant being referencing a William Blake illustration. All of these readings take place in and emerge from the viewer's imagination, and successive viewers find different things. The monks can be seen as rabbits. The cosmos might be an oriental rug design. What is REAL in all these realms? ... I've done hundreds of experiments in construction of bilateral symmetries, most of them during the ad hoc of post-processing; only a few were visualized or imagined in the camera's viewfinder. The figures that appear in the strict geometry of axial unfolding seem to have been lurking, awaiting their freedom. They often elicit flights of onomastic fancy in viewers ("that looks like a ..."). The 4-panel tessellations often manifest as mandalas, seeming to radiate from a center, or as sylized thunderbolt dorjes of filigreed numinosity that invite contemplation: What is REAL in these realms? Is this photography or is it artifice? Are we looking at the real or the imaginary? ... Aunt Kate reminds us of our corporeal near-symmetry. She is surely a real person, though the direct-positive capture technology of the tintype renders her as a mirror image of herself, and the photographer has added color to make her image seem more lifelike. Her REALITY is 150 years gone, and she would have been forgotten if I hadn't rescued the original 2" x 3" tintype from a Nova Scotia junk store. The image evokes a multitude of different parsings: technological, genealogical, cultural, aesthetic, mysterious. Her life-size appearance on satin hints at the latent power of the tissue medium to invoke the vitality of breath: she seems almost to be alive as moving air wafts the satin, and we're led to marvel at the paradoxes of photography—the captured moment brought forward in time, the connection of the now to the forever-vanished past, the distance that separates then from now. Aunt Kate is with us yet. ... (to go with the next Rock book?) Among the graphic and representational arts, photography is uniquely concerned with the moment, and with recording the photographer's vision of an ephemerality—of something that may be for an instant, and then pass away. The genesis and nature of that vision is one of the mysteries: what combination of learned and instinctive, of studied and inspired, of the remembered and the novel, results in the click of the shutter and the capture of the moment? It's different for every photographer, and for each photograph too, but seems to all come down to seeing, to recognizing that something framed in the viewfinder is worthy of apprehension, of separating out from the continuous flow of the river of visual stimuli. The juncture of mechanical and aesthetic is analogous to the mysteries of improvised music, in which the player's mind (perceptions, memories, developed skills, temporal mappings)somehow coaxes an external instrument into a flow of consonant sound. The ephemerality of the moment may be captured for posterity, via recording, but without such capture, the sound vanishes into the aether.

The 'something' framed in the viewfinder is in essence a pattern, a coherence of line and light, of shape and texture, perhaps of sign and symbol. The meaning of the pattern may be clear to the photographer, or may only emerge as the image is processed, or (in the case of abstractions and enigmas) may remain for the viewer to parse and define. The framing itself is the active aesthetic choice of composition, the moment of time and space in which the photographer says "ah, there it is!"

Another way to see the 'something' that may be framed in the viewfinder is as an instance of form, an entity that has and forcefully expresses its own identity, and that may reference other forms, similar or related or antinomial. It's here that the perplexity of the apothegm form finds form enters the exploration: is form an actual thing (a rock, a cube, a folded cloth, an empty container), or is it a description of a concept (a shape in the abstract, a Platonic ideal like a sphere or triangle, the contents of a container [the prospective muffin in a muffin pan]. Or does form come into being when there are enough instances of something to name them collectively? Rocks are a form because people have long experience of them and understand how to add new arrivals to the form, but an entirely novel object can't be comfortably contained within established categories until there are enough instances to exemplify its properties, and thus define it as a form.

And so we come to the situation where we've seen and grouped or classified enough instances that a form emerges. One rock that seems to be a face is a curiosity; 50 rocky faces, friends, is a Movement. You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. And more instances announce themselves as members of the form, and pretty soon everybody is seeing faces in rocks, or on pieces of toast, or in passing clouds. ... So Form can be an imaginary something as well as a concrete physical object that manifests characteristics and properties. Form seems emergent from seeing, interpreting, categorizing multiple instances of a something. And so we return to WYGIWYS. I saw pattern emerge from Nova Scotia phone books, but the form those patterns found was mapping of spatial distribution that revealed underlying processes. Likewise, one ancestor picture is a curiosity, an unsolved puzzle of unplumbed dimensions; a curated collection may reveal all sorts of things that emerge as forms in their own right, that tell stories or hint at obscured narratives (Forebears and the Joe Wilner collection are exemplars).

Forms may become Objects of Contemplation, such that exploring a collection of instances, for example of ensos, is an opportunity to consider ineffabilities, to seek epiphany, to be drawn toward deepened understanding of SOMEthing. And so it is with Beacon Hill doorways or knotholes in railroad ties or creatures in rock or ice. SOMEthing may emerge, some insight into form or essence or process. The specifics aren't predictable, still less foreordained, and different observers may read different versions from the displayed evidence. In the case of tessellations, pretty clearly there is no "rightness" of interpretation, since any reading is an exercise of imagination or projection. ... Strive for consistency and principled engagement, and to build things that express the qualities you respect and admire. Fashion a legacy, by working to be clear about what you’re doing. Presence, engagement, candor; shun the ignoble and the invidious. Don’t succumb to pride. Practise humility and honor, don’t waste time or energy. Make things. Engage with people. Serve. ===== 28xii19 And ultimately why does this Body of Work matter? Why do I collect all these examples of morphic resonance? In answer, I purloin a phrase from the last paragraph of Adam Gopnik's recent profile of Roz Chast: these photographs capture /Things that will Go Unseen/ if I didn't see them and bring their magnificence to the attention of others.