Friday, October 19, 2012

birch grove, october dusk




8 comments:

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    1. Steven: these autumn evenings, the glow of this stand of birches seems pressed through the air with a special urgency ...

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  2. i love birches... and birches in the spring or autumn light, they are pure magic (again and again, these days, i must think of this strange similarity, how autumn and spring seem to melt into one, for me)

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    1. Roxana: i have not forgotten, will never forget, that you gave me tarkovsky's birch grove in ivan's childhood a year before i saw this landscape ... as if, somehow, you guessed everything -- what the birches would mean to me, how i would feel the truth of her body in the sensuality of their rhythms ... as if you heard that future resonance deep in me, before the chord was struck ... and i know this, i know that it sounds inside you, as well :-)

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  3. i know these trees. you know this. now you too know these trees and not through me but on your own)))

    your photographing them brings to mind the interview i just watched with Eduard Steichen that can be seen by cutting and pasting this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd5F-KCUpYI&list=LPcdn2zM51wEI&index=1&feature=plcp it is a very important and wonderful interview.

    "it's only the person that is open minded and receptive to new things or accidental things that happen that can make use of them. this question of accident...the man who can take advantage of the accident is only a man...always ready for the unexpected to happen. a photographer, for instance, never really makes a photograph unless he is moved by it, excited or deeply interested in it. a picture taker and a button pusher...just shoots at things he has seen other people do. the photographer establishes...an intimate relationship between himself and whatever he's photographing, whether it's a landscape, a can of beans or greta garbo."

    later in his life, in the third stage as he referred to it, he began studying a small tree on his property. after hundreds of photographs of this one small tree he decided to make a film of the tree. he says this: "you know i began photographing this tree about six or seven years ago...the idea of the film is not to show how the tree looks at different seasons of the year but to present a series of moods. some of the things will not happen again...you see photographing a tree is not like photographing a person...it's a symbol, that tree, of everything that exists in nature. i look upon it almost as a human being, a little girl..." and then he turns and lovingly speaks to the little girl, a part of his life.

    sometimes i wrongly say, light is everything. rather, light holds up that which waits beneath it and draws our attention to it, it deepens the well of our relationship, our intimacy.

    xo
    erin

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    1. erin: i don't think i could have photographed these trees before now (or, at least, the result would not have meant much), but how different it feels when i have some history and life in this landscape, even if it is yet only the smallest ledge for standing at the border and looking in ... what might it mean to photograph this grove for five years, ten years, twenty? to change along with the trees, and know the relationship changing?? (perhaps we will have this with a tree in indiana, a rock, a strream? i think we will ... )

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  4. Light, so achingly captured in the tips of your trees. Almost daily I watch the sunset/sunrise painting the tips of the Pine trees a buttery yellow and I try and I try and I try to capture the light to no avail. No camera, no lens does it justice. I read an article in a newspaper many years ago in which a physician said that he discovered that God is purely and simply light. It was an epiphany to me, this light that is god. I see it in your photograph. xo

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  5. Marion: this photograph, too, fails to do justice to the light in these trees ... it is a mere gesture toward the light (i hope with reverence), a place-holder in the space where i imagine such a true photograph might somehow come into being (of its own accord perhaps, making it is beyond me) ...

    lux est accidens dei, light is a sensible quality of god, the old theologians used to write ... and the even older theologians imagined the first, inaugural act of speech as let there be light, linking god, light, and word at the source of being ... can we do anything except recognize the wisdom of this?

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