Plum Island – Love in the Spaces

Rabatment and Ruins

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. . . .

I Walk 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.

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.

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

Spirited Away

Spiritual sites abound in the great wide world. But we need not go far. Sometimes they are within our homes, or mere steps away. Occasionally they are only in our minds. They may be felt in the presence of the quotidian. A napping cow in Varanasi. A pair of pigeons in Casablanca. Painted panels in a college chapel in Maine.

Such sites and sights, for me, are portals to the past. A single gold flower in the wet heat of sunrise over the Ganges in an ancient city. Storks nesting atop ancient Berber-Roman columns’ capstones, open to the heavens after the structures they held have crumbled away. In Volubilis, a nesting parent appeared to bask in the perfection of her landing atop a now freestanding pillar near Meknes.

Although I have been known to suspect saints are underfoot, I tend to find more traditional spirits while looking up.

Sometimes, neck-craningly high….

My daughter took me to Qutb Minar, where brilliant lime parakeets looked down on us from a crown of carved bricks on a minaret taller than ten stacked Green Monsters. The view from the ground left me thunderstruck. I can only imagine the awe in surveying the earthbound from such heights.

Lowering my gaze to the horizon, I also regularly find spiritual sights and sensations. On gray and pastel mornings, and when an ordinary day catches fire–sometimes just for a few minutes–and on every day in between.

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