Lens Artists – Love in the Spaces

Wings are among my photographs’ most frequent subjects.

I did not consciously plan a mini-trend, but my first novel has a fallen wing on its cover, while my first (and likely only) non-fiction book’s cover has frigates flying aloft in lavender twilight.

The picture of of the sheared-off wing is mine. I still cannot bring myself to contemplate how it was shorn. The photo could be the answer to a riddle: I took it in full color in black and white. My daughter and I were on a black sand beach in Iceland, where I was minutes away from slipping on black ice at the lower part of a cliff, breaking a leg not far from the bright white seafoam washing ashore.

The frigates were photographed by my husband, aloft above him and soaring over equatorial waters, on this side of the veil, as of course my husband was then.

I have been lucky enough to see and photograph winged creatures on other continents since then, wishing every second all of us could have been together, but feeling the connection between what’s earthbound and heaven sent.

I’m so conditioned to my lens of somber reflection that if I see the word “zigzag,” a snippet of a poem about grief pops into my mind: “you went zig and I went zag….”

Never to share the same geometric or worldly plane again.

Zigzagging as a complete rupture–permanent separation from a single once-common point and place in the world. No longer a connection at the root, but instead an ever-widening impenetrable vortex away from it.

The wedge of the tornado, not its swirling touchdown point.

Charles Causley’s poetry-fueled rambles around his home town of Launceston included the hardest of hard-edged zigzags set into quarry stone.

But when searching my own images for zigzags, I find they’re not always sharp-edged, and rarely are set in stone.

Early sunset clouds cast a beautiful Icelandic pony in a otherworldly soft ice-gold that makes her appear to glow. A Cedar waxwing’s bright feathers set off soft black triangles and by perching on bare March branches divides the sky into floating triangles of pure blue. Sunrise pauses just long enough to separate itself into a sharply angled fan of fire that reduces a lighthouse to a tiny point. Sunlit leaves reveal a tree’s branching zigs and zags, which may rearrange themselves with as little as the weight of a squirrel.