The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers. Peter Matthiessen
It is the notion of intimacy that I want to convey in my images: that something vital is happening; that we expose and are creating ourselves when we truly see things as they are; and that nature can reflect back to us the depth, beauty and being of our own deeply incised canyons and hidden landscapes. With the camera I attempt to communicate faithfully and simply my own experience of that journey.
In the first half of the 21st Century we will have to decide what value wilderness and nature have for us; for setting and acting on priorities now will launch us in a direction from which there is no turning back. We have already given up much that is irretrievable. I want my work to support the consciousness of each viewer, that wilderness reflects a fundamentally important part of her, ultimately an unnamable but not unknowable facet of her being. Nature Deficit Disorder, a term used by contemporary therapists to describe a lack of awareness of the role of nature in our lives, and the underlying belief in a predominantly electronic and spectator view of the world, threatens to reduce all our media-sifted and homogenized senses to a pair of high-end speakers and the largest viewing screen we can afford. Inherent in a photographic image of nature is the potential to remind the viewer of her uniqueness, for never have these emotions, just so, ever been felt before, that this moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise is the bridge back to herself and to her own journey of awe-inspiring self-discovery.
Further thoughts along the way of being a photographer
In a presentation many years ago, I heard Danaan Parry, author of Warriors of the Heart, say, "The source of all conflict is a desire for intimacy." Aside from my photography, as a Conflict Consultant I work to help people understand that conflict is a symptom of unmet needs, and a gift if we are willing to face it with courage and curiosity. At the source of all conflict then is our attempt, no matter how feeble or apparently contradictory, to experience beauty and harmony. I think that Danaan would have said that our desire to know ourselves, to be in union with all things, is what he meant by "intimacy." The paradox seems to result from this contradiction between our deepest desire for union and the limited paths that our current level of awareness opens us to. This divine discontent urges us forward, forging new questions about the meaning of our lives and the experience of being.
A large part of photography for me then is my attempt to resolve these contradictions. When I do it well, I expose myself to what I don't know and the accompanying wonder, joy and fear. At times it seems I am fighting the limits of photographic technology while wrestling with this even deeper itch for something I cannot name. At other times, even with my limited technical skills, all the elements required to create an organic image come together and I am dissolved in the process. That is when I experience the symphony of which I and the landscape are both a part and the whole.
