In the Fluidity of Black and White

 In her essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag writes, “To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real.” It is our nature to become inured to the diversity and complexities that surround us, to simplify and seek clarity. Yet the world is so much more and photography is an exemplary tool to recover our sense of wonder. Here, in the fluidity of black and white, I strive to restore that sense of otherness that surrounds us, and to extend its artistic intricacies, not replace them.

In that narrowing of life that comes with winter, I’ve come to expand the snow-filled woods of the Finger Lakes into unexpected abstract expressions. With the swipe of a camera and long exposures, I fill the woods with strange monolithic presences, winter palimpsests that are inscribed anew each day. Now, a walk in these woods is accompanied by the awareness that fields of force shape all physical phenomena, hidden and visible. The woods are always more than they seem, even when they are reduced to just shadows in the snow. 

It was also a revelation to walk through the exuberant profusion of life in the pine and oak hammocks of Florida. This living, astonishing, communal space provided a new way of seeing, a new aesthetic visually exploding the reductionist descriptions of place, such as ‘live oak’, ‘cabbage palms’, ‘resurrection ferns’. These photos do not document what can be seen in Myakka River State Park, but reveal an algorithmic wonder.

Walking through Lower Antelope Canyon also led to a shift in perspective, a break from what one might expect from a walk in a ‘slot canyon’. The sculptures in Navajo Sandstone carved by water in the sweep of time, and the forms I share here, are strikingly anomalous, different from one might expect, even when these sinuous forms are drained of their brilliant color.   

Finally, the photographed figures rising from the ceremonial fire of the Genundowa Festival of Lights, has the immediate potential to separate us from the quotidian. They can connect us to a past when the shifting shapes of flame were viewed as spiritual expressions—the manifestations of fire that would guide us in this uncertain world. Borrowing from Sontag in the same essay, the flames, the burning of the wood, and the figures that emerge may each be distinct, but were once viewed as shaped by the same spirit.

These photographs do not chronicle the world, and they are not copies. They are extensions of the ‘real’.