Tag: lens-artists

….Voices Carry

I have only recently been freed from silence’s surlier bonds. Paradoxically, it’s left me a bit tongue-tied.

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll start with a sunrise.

One that I doubt I’d otherwise have seen.

My son had taken me to what I’m told is one of the most photographed lighthouses in lighthouse-rich New England. Walking gingerly towards it, steadying myself on the arm of a son who’s grown to be almost his dad’s height, no other humans were in sight.

The light that began weaving through predawn dark was extraordinary. Bright orange began threading itself along the horizon. Magenta and lavender sprouted in patches on indigo sky. Then it turned to the most extraordinary pink display I’ve ever seen, before disappearing into an ordinary blue sky. No one who passed by after those suspended moments would have been any wiser to the magic.

The picture I’m sharing wasn’t of sunrise that year, or that day, or the surrounding ones. That deep blue-green camera had ended up shattered in the wreckage of my car, which I mercifully never saw again. The photographs of the damage were more than disturbing enough for me.

I was hit so ferociously hard and at such high speed that morning that my driver’s side door handle broke off and my car spun more than a full rotation, the driver’s side crushed in at the point of first impact, the rear bumper detaching at a second impact as I spun. I felt something spattering and thought it must be my blood, and wondered who would tell my children and look out for them. I was later told it was a mercy I’d been hit at just the angle at which my driver’s side airbag didn’t deploy, because it likely would have snapped my neck given my (not hefty) size.

Since that day I’ve felt like a shadow.

Fears I’d been so proud of leaving behind returned and magnified. I’ve been in intractable pain from spinal injuries, and a traumatic brain injury has taken away so much more. I’m not the same person. I’m not the mother I’ve needed to be. I lost the ability to do the job I loved nearly as well as victims deserve. I’m not even the writer I was. I’m tentative in a way that doesn’t feel anything like me.

And while overwhelmingly the people in my life have been beyond helpful and supportive and kind, I’ve also been dropped cold by two people I’d been a loyal friend to for years, revealed to be incapable of such bonds. That’s sometimes been a deeper blow than the physical pain.

But even in all this turmoil and pain, I’ve been blessed with the community here. In my rare appearances in the long interim when it was I who was a prospective witness and could not yet speak, I have been amazed and grateful at those of you who keep reading and giving me excuses to share my photos. I’ve even talked to some of you in real life (you know who you are, and thank you so much for checking in on me after I went silent).

I hope I’m back for a good long while.

All photos (c) SMG

‘Til Death…and After

Not even a bird could be heard in pre-dawn mist

The quiet hours can be overwhelming. When one finds the way outdoors, at times when no other human guests are likely to be encountered, there is no shortage of wonders to be found in such silent vistas. Nor is there any way around confronting the unadorned absences of those who should be here with us.

There’s nothing quite like watching the sun emerge above a sea of clouds, or disappear underneath the horizon at sundown, to underscore the thin and immeasurable wordless space between heaven and earth.

I’ve been alone to see such moments–before dawn and after dusk–in some of the planet’s most densely-populated cities, and some of its emptiest places.

Solitary sunrises

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to regularly appear on these pages. I’m still not able to explain what’s caused me to be-for far longer than I could have imagined-uncharacteristically hushed about major portions of my last several years.

But such enforced silenced swaths have left me enough space to share my very present past, packed today with the quiet hours in which I still celebrate the July marriage that brought me everywhere I’ve been since leaving home for school. Not only to the earthbound places my husband and I were lucky enough to share, but all the places to which his loss indirectly has brought me.

New life among ancient ruins, Volubilis, Morrocco

On each such anniversary, I’m astounded anew that he hasn’t aged alongside me. It stunned me when, during one of these quiet hours, I first realized I’d not only caught up with, but already somehow lived beyond the age he’d reached at his death. It was more crushing when I realized one of our children had lived more than half a young lifetime without him.

But in quiet hours at timeless vistas and ancient places, I can sometimes spare my aggrieved self the focus on earthly years. I allow myself to see the enduring forever.

Pre-dawn in Udaipur, Rajasthan

Even when the colors fizzle, or are overwhelmed by fog, there are treasures in the near-silent spaces of the endless quiet hours.

Happy Anniversary.

Rabatment and Ruins

Plum Island, Newbury, Massachusetts

It’s all about the balance.

I’d neither learned the techniques people use to frame shots with a “real” camera, nor ever heard of rabatment until now. It is but one way to capture a slice of the world with rectangles-within-rectangles.

Consider all the lines one could draw to carve up the whole of a Plum Beach sunrise space into geometric planes. The cornflower sky becomes slatted air, as if one could reach up and gather sunrise’s starbursts into a morning monture.

Above, left to right: Salisbury bridge, Massachusetts; suspension bridge in Bowdoin, Maine; planes of wood and air in Salisbury, Massachusetts. below: Artichoke Reservoir in West Newbury, Massachusetts.

Light and air carve off rectangular planes from landscapes of still water and gusting sky.

The above photo was taken on an extraordinary sub-zero Massachusetts morning. It somehow packs in each separate category of cleaving and balance in a landscape: rabatment on the left, where a leafless island tree anchors the composition; sky sheared off at the lower third, where the Merrimack River flows East to the horizon and the Atlantic; and a trick of light and clouds that slices straight down the mid-seam.

And I could not possibly leave the subject of rectangular composition without sharing a bit of rabbatement–tricks of composition by means of color and light and segmented negative space in and around another Rabat. . . .

The Circle Game

Some might look at this photo and see a single glowing peacock. Pavo cristatus. I can’t speak for the muster of peahens who paused to watch him that August day in Jodhpur, but it’s the countless circles which mesmerized me.

The magician’s swoosh as he vogues, a whisper of downcast bright blue irises. The multi-eyed lifting wave he’s created with closely spaced smaller circles at his display’s bottom layer: a Cupid’s bow being drawn from the straight edge of shadow underneath, or a garden snake? I see the deep greens and blues in which I’ll always feel my missing piece still soaking in the sun.

Now the circles are beckoning me back.

The circle that recently closed for my siblings and me and our families has taken the wind out of me for longer than I would have imagined, deepening winter’s already enduring darkness.

Maybe I’m drawn to the circle’s immortality. Or that’s it’s unbroken. A wedding ring. Gold-dusted green eyes echoed in a child. The planetesque orb formerly known as Pluto.

Offerings in Udaipur. Stars within circles among the wares in Marrakesh. Concentric mosaic circles at St. Mary’s Church in Dublin, Ireland.

Slightly off-center rings around a tree’s perfectly-shaped young core; the algebraic drama of a bright lemon flower’s singular souls. The gentle hills and valleys in bullet glass.

Half of a perfect circle reflected against a hull at sunset. The bumpy segmented layers which peel away to an onion’s solid spherical center. Trees reflecting inside a cylindrical silver tube at high noon.

A sousaphone reflecting rings of past and present. A ship’s wheel’s perfect geometrical symmetry.

Harry Chapin’s All my Life’s a Circle and Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game were among the first songs my guitar teacher taught me. She leaned far more towards folk than blues. So did I, back then. Before I found John Hiatt and Circle Back. When I had much less to circle back to, and before I fully understood that much circling back is neither smoothly accomplished nor voluntary. Before I realized how easily it can involve degrees of descent into nightmare. The algos of pain more than the nostos of yearning to come home again.

Practically speaking, I can’t turn back time. But lens artists have the power to tame the boundless circles which demarcate our days and nights: the impossibly bright orbs of fire and flares which we gaze directly upon at our peril. For now, we flatten them into gentle white-gold circles coaxing our skies in and out of peacock blue on this side of Paradise.