Tag: New Hampshire

Gardens of Sound

I hear music everywhere, especially in the quietest places.

In the then-present of this photo from Ireland, three of my children and I looked out from darkness to the vivid light of day beyond the window. I didn’t consciously hear music at the time, but I hear the soundtrack when I look at the picture.

The trip was in honor of their father, on the second Father’s Day without him here with us in the traditional way. In the picture, I hear music. I travel back in time to Phillips Church and hear the Rev singing the words to Thaxted, from Jupiter in Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite.

All of that afternoon’s music floods back. It comforts me. The sibilance of Sweet Baby James sung by hundreds. Becca’s For Good.

Lilting notes and words of light and love and fellowship floating above an empty black plane nothing escapes.

I wish everyone could hear it.

Photos somehow press “play” and I hear songs my daughter sang and music she and her siblings played. Papa Dick singing a customized song for each of fifteen grandchildren he bounced on his knee on countless Sundays. I listen to tuneful and argumentative birds I watched years ago. Satiated crowds chattering around a mirrored sculpture in Salem just after Thanksgiving. Blue Angels roaring overhead. A John Philip Sousa sound track to July fireworks, and I cycle back to countless marching band and Percussion Ensemble performances and practices. Beloved beagles synchronously snoring and baying. The sounds of silence at sunrise.

And this one? I hear Fenway Park. Birds singing to each other along the Emerald Necklace. “Put me in, coach.” The Standells’ Love that Dirty Water. Dropkick Murphys shipping up to Boston.

Please, Come to Boston. If only for the springtime.

Ears to the heavens, let me hear you again.

I Walk the Line

Above and Below the Line

There’s a certain thrill in clenching a fist at a poker table, before opening it to reveal one chip, two chips, or an empty hand.

Are you betting against the high hands or the low hands? Or are you betting it all on winning both by extracting five of seven cards for the high and a different group of five for the lowest low?

Will you take the whole pot, or nothing?

The possible highs and lows are limited by face-down cards you have not seen, and there’s no reward for anything in-between.

Wherever I’ve found myself in the world, my camera has been poised for the landscape shot. Extended into a panorama, my phone camera actively protests if I do not continuously anchor my shot at the exact midline of whatever’s before me.

The line where there is no up and no down, but just a steady line from West to East.

Unlike a photographic ouvre as a whole, the highs and lows are in strict, symmetrical equipoise.

I frequently focus on the horizon, the great midpoint of the view from a pint-sized human’s inconsequential height.

But sometimes I change it up. I climb a bridge or a mountain. A Hellcat tower or an Icelandic cliff. I fling myself underneath a giant spider sculpture and look up at various angles. I wade into the ocean or across a muddy bog.

I point up at installation art, architecture, and intra-species imbroglios. I shoot high or down at the earth below my feet, excising external cues so viewers may have no idea what they are seeing, or how it fits into its surroundings. I shoot at reflected images which will never reappear in exactly the same light, color, or form.

The context is gone, so imagination can take over.

Ups and Downs

I’ve learned that sometimes, when the surf is so high it drowns out other sounds, and one is poised to click a shutter on another plebian midline Golden Ratio shot, I should pause. Look up and down.

I might find something only fleetingly present, and irreplaceable.

My new friend, Sophie the pup

You never know what may flash across the heavens, or have settled quietly at your feet.

Balancing Acts

I’ve always thought of asymmetry as unstable, and occasionally unsettling. Slightly to dizzyingly off-kilter, like the horizon in an unadjusted quick shot with frozen fingers in sub-zero air. The opposite of symmetrical.

I’m reconsidering that in light of an invitation to consider asymmetry not as imbalanced, but as a different and more complicated kind of balance: “two differing sides that balance each other out.”

Not unlike a second reader, or compatible beagles, or a loving marriage. Asymmetry that brings out the best in both sides.

I may look past a vaguely queasy horizon line, and instead focus on a rocky outcropping turned midnight black to set off a riotously colorful sunrise. The opaque velvet that complements jewels, deepening their use of light to enhance their dazzlingly reflected and refracted cores.

Beneficent balance.

We may find glorious asymmetry over time and space, too–wherever the living and breathing now walk or touch down along (or grow nearby) the paths of beings who occupied them in the sometimes very distant past.

Sometimes the balance shifts. The past is restored or renewed and the present fades by shades into the background.

Old Ironsides, rebuilt and docked in Boston Harbor, where the setting sun blankets the city skyline it obscures. An ancient Spanish Galleon docked within a cobblestone’s throw of a Starbucks housed in an old Captain’s House on Massachusetts’ North Shore. A 19th Century carved Eagle freshened with gold leaf overlooking 21st Century Halloween crowds in Salem. Modern wares for sale in an ancient markets in Fez and Marrakesh. Winding Torii gates in Kyoto, where tourists look up into ancient bamboo forests that seem to converge at a point miles above them.

A single image may involve quite a few balancing acts. Day melting into night. Blazing and muted colors, both reducing to black. Budding and emptying, upright and bowed, fall and winter.

Past and present.

Mountain trials echoing with once-solid weighted steps are now carried with us as we climb alone.

It can be a delicate balance.

Fleeting Façades

The lion or the lamb?

A façade sometimes bears little relationship to what, or whom, you will find beyond it.

(As has been underscored to me by more than one bitterly divorced friend, what you expect from what’s on display is not necessarily what you will find.)

I come from a generation of buttoned-up New Englanders and introverted first-generation Brooklyners. Putting aside childhood theatrics and the professional behavior necessitated in criminal courtrooms and other adversary situations, we tend to be back-benchers in social settings. We’re not temperamentally inclined towards public displays of any kind. I may be a lioness in court, but dissolve in tears when I am alone, missing people I love.

We’re more Eames than Baroque. My mother’s collages and paintings used clean lines and empty faces which viewers are free to fill in. My late husband filled a Federalist home with a truth-in-advertising interior of hand-hewn pine furniture that was Quaker-like in its simplicity. I moved from there to a much tinier Victorian house and outfitted it in mid-century Danish Modern. (It was, as they ironically say, a look.)

I leave the most raucous visual displays to nature. As one must.

Between sunrise and sunset displays, I see nature showing off all around me. A Maple leaf crushed underfoot, transformed into an ascending dove A single bird perched in Jaiselmer, like its tethered twin in the exquisite miniature painting that hung on display in a New York Museum gallery in The Goldfinch.

I’ve realized only in reflecting about what I choose to exhibit that the photos which adorn my desk and wall are of discrete displays. Every day, I look at the series of black and white portraits arrayed at my eye level and see my children on the day my husband coaxed them into posing for a Mother’s Day gift. I feel my heart settle every time I see their faces, carrying me back to the old yellow house my husband loved when we were a family of six (not counting the beagles and their own occasionally unfortunate mischievous displays). When my husband was alive and we had no inkling anything was amiss.

Nature continuously launches and reformulates its own displays. The outdoor photos my husband took and I’ve framed are of colorful performances among living creatures in their prime: a male frigate’s stunning (and successful) performance before a rapt audience of potential partners; scarlet macaws’ mating dance; magnificently armored molting reptiles making their rounds. A voguing sea lion. An icy silver heart lit by moonlight and delivered by high tide, displayed like a crown jewel on a black velvet beach in Iceland.

From the air, it seems like the Blue Planet itself is on display. Closer in, I’ve been struck by displays left by unseen human hands. Installation art in Boston and New York City. Wares and murals in Morocco. A single flower displayed against a silver New Hampshire pond. Birds positioning themselves within algae-slicked pier frames in Boston Harbor. A gathering storm beginning to show itself inland.

As with all art, capturing a display from whatever space I occupy in the world, and being able to share it, is both the privilege and essence of photography.