deliberately blurred square image of a full moon rising over the ocean

Sum of the Parts

deliberately blurred square image of a full moon rising over the ocean

Sum of the Parts

Ocean swells and falls as a twilight breeze ruffles my hair
salty fresh with spray
waves thumping deeply through bedrock
Watching the moon rise
and waiting

Alone now

Then it happens ...  the scene blurs and folds
into two ... then three
Ocean Sky Moon
as balanced as they are suspended
Individually separate
As the sum of the parts
they are the world

(Inspired by Ness 2012)

I have been working on a series lately called 'Sum of the Parts' in which I deliberately blur my photograph in an attempt to break it into it's component parts. The pieces invite the viewer to to meditate on a scene without visual distraction of detail in a realm without time. That's the theory anyways! The first image in this series was blogged here as Sunset Wave and is shown below.

Tell me, do you work in or on a series? By that I mean do you think "today I'm going to take a picture for my *insert classy description here* series"? Or do you look back on your portfolio and think "Hey I've got a lot pictures of flowers/car number plates/left shoes ... I should put them together in a series"?

Do tell! :-)


Fern unfolding, it's fiddle-head unfurling.

Fernland

Fern unfolding, it's fiddle-head unfurling.

Fernland

Damp, earthy - a faint musk
Cool, verdant
quiet ... still
Fractal patterns stretch
Unfolding gently, chaos becomes ordinary
repeated
and repeated
and repeated - seeming endlessly
easy to dismiss, to overlook as all alike
they're copies to a point
each unique - new and ancient both

Reaching for the light
As I to you
unfurling in hope that the light will come
Do you see me here in the fernland?
beneath the trees
striving for the dappled
When I find it I thrive
Without it a piece of me dies

(June 2012)

----

I'm not a religious person, let me just state that up front. Sometimes when I look over what I've written, I can see how some of the writing could be viewed that way ... all this striving and longing for light stuff. What I am striving for is a completeness that I don't find in my day-to-day life. A feeling that I glimpse every now and again of a natural patterning (and I emphatically do not refer to design) at once simple and mind-bendingly complex. I see it in the sky, in the forming of clouds or the way light refracts through a freshly rained droplet. Or in this case the fiddle-head of a fernlet reaching through the dark. I see them as beautiful but I also have the rationality to know that it's me who's labeling them that way. That they, in all likelihood would exist and go on without my observations ... or would they? Sounds like a discussion over a glass of wine (or three)! Anyways, enough rambling. Enjoy!


Dead skink on tissue paper in a small box

“It’s dead” said Petra

 

Dead skink on tissue paper in a small box1.
She held out her hand
Upon her palm a tiny lizard, a skink
A shining dark olive back – thin yellow strip along the sides
Iridescent blue-aqua beneath its chin
Beautiful
“It’s dead” said Petra as she held it aloft by the tail – and it was
I looked into its eye and saw right through to the verdant bush beyond
The tangled twigs and rocks – a land of nooks and tasty creatures
“Most likely where this lizard is now” I thought as I peered through the eyeless window
I remembered to breathe – brought myself back
The sounds of this world filling my ears as I returned
from reverie and soft melancholia
Into the light - the present

2.
She made a small home for the lizard
A little box lined with tissue and care
The tiny claws catching still – a feeble anchor
it looked like it would dart away in a flash
but it already had
Discarding this garment long ago
a once animate husk
Beating and alive 
(GD @ Ness May 2012)

Black and white image of a child's head with a bunched lock of hair

The Small Details

Black and white image of a child's head with a bunched lock of hair

It's easy to overlook the small details ... those little things largely unnoticed. Often they're the things I find most rewarding to capture ... the pictures that bring intimacy to an otherwise mundane scene.


Two stones stacked atop one another

Found Stones

Two stones stacked atop one another

One

Round and thin ground - not polished – sheens from within

colour the light grey of clouds that promise but bring no rain

Pale orange flecks spittle across its face

But these come after

My first thought?

That it would go far

skipped across the smooth surface of a dam or creek

maybe to the other side

maybe to be held again

maybe

 

The Other

A rough kite shape, smaller

Quartz intrusion speaking of a violent past

struck by the cross formed

I don’t believe in the crucifix

But I believe in space and time intersecting

A singularity we call the present

 

Both

Seen amongst millions

Pondered, chosen

Carried up from the sea and

Placed atop a wooden table,

Talked about - discussed and played with

Then one forms a circle around the other

Yes, that works

They’re together again

Found stones

 

(Ness, May 2011)


Overhead tall trees disappearing upward into mist

Familiar

Familiar hills
the horizon half-remembered
my folk grew
and grew old
died here
Yet I've never stood here before I know
the curves of the land drawn in me
How do I know this place?

My mind some structured facsimile for geography?
A genetic memory for place?
For time?
I cannot explain but I know
that my soul has been here before

Overhead tall trees disappearing upward into mist

I am fascinated by the notion of genetic memory ... that a landscape or place experienced over generations may leave some kind of imprint in the descendants of those generations. A line of hills, a mountain, a river ... these things change over time I know but their basic forms can remain constant on a scale far larger than the people living on them. I don't believe anyone has found any evidence such a phenomena may exist but that's not about to stop me pondering on it.

What about you? have you ever been to a place or landscape that seemed so familiar to you only to find out later that you ancestors had been there? Thought that they would practically be looking at what you're seeing now.


Water falling as drops onto a fountain plate before falling as drops off the other side

Perfume

Water falling as drops onto a fountain plate before falling as drops off the other side

Thought
falling as water through air
shaped and warped by passage
divide and coalesce then
splash!
merged - our instant experienced
then gone, essence perfuming the next
lingering as the half remembered dream
an aroma of reality at the edge of an instant
before falling and dripping away

Space and Spirit Both

Faint breeze and sunshine
cricket chirp and flycatcher calls overlay the oceans rhythmic white roar
occasional slap
unexpected silences - an absence
I stare until the scene turns white - sound painting abstracted spikes and swirls
I think of you then, distant
in space and spirit both
yet in that instant - that void
I am connected by more than I know

(Written at Ness 6 May 2012)


Rockt coast at dawn seen refracted through a glass sphere

Turning the World Upside Down

Fresh salt tang scents the delicious white noise of surf on rock - 
irregular boom and thump
unexpected quiet - pauses
Never turn your back on the Sea
She is inexorable and quick
faster than you think
Slams, knocks and pulls
Cold!
A short bubbled tumble before you're pressed into the polished rocks
then
fade into icy blackness 

I wake from this, standing - face tinted orange with the day's new light

Dawn feels like days ago and I'm wearing potential's golden glow
The world looks different from here
huge and at once tiny
My effect on it? The same.

(Written at Ness, May 2012)

I carry a beautiful thing around in my camera bag. An oculus. It's a clear glass sphere and it changes the way I look at the world. It doesn't look amazing on it's own ... in fact it can appear quite dull but sometimes I hold it up in front my face and it takes my breath away. Through the properties of refraction, it renders any scene into a tiny world ... a tiny, totally in-focus world. An upside-down, totally in focus world. In the image above taken just after dawn on the far south coast of New South Wales, I rested the sphere atop a rock looking out toward the waves. The fine bedding of the Ordovician mudstones of this part of the coast have been buckled and twisted and rent vertically in places. I brought the sphere (and it's refractive contents) into focus and rendered the background blurred. It looks great right way up but I like to rotate my oculus images through 180 degrees to aid the viewer's appreciation of the scene. The little sun flare off the edge of the sphere is one of my favourite parts of the image.

In the image below, I'm holding the sphere with my left hand and shooting with my right. It was taken in coastal forest. This image reminds me that the world is a fragile place and one that we literally hold in our hands as a place to nourish and feed ourselves.

Trees overhead refracted through a hand-held glass sphere

I'm fascinated with different ways of looking at ordinary things. Refraction and refraction images are just two.

What about you? Do you carry anything special in your bag? Something that turns your world upside-down or causes you to look at the world in a different way?


Telegraph poles resemble crosses as they disappear over a hil

The Monaro Plains

Telegraph poles resemble crosses as they disappear over a hill

THE MONARO PLAINS - Anthony Lawrence (May 2012)

Wooden crosses
a vanishing point wired for talk

a watercolour bleed
of low clouds, windbroken pines

a charcoal rubbing
of lost connections  ~ you are here

passing through
uncoupled is a state of rhyme

what the eye reveals
the mouth extends in clipped syllables

depth of field
a black rain squall of starlings on a hill


Words: Anthony Lawrence (Used with author's permission)
Picture: Geoffrey Dunn

Sunset Wave

Sea and Sky blur into faux continuum

Forever parted by our exhalations


Motionless

Sometimes, when I feel like I'm not going anywhere ... not being creative ... that I'm somehow fixed in a defined space, I remember the first time I lay on the ground as a child and imagined the world turning. How as it spun about its axis or hurtled through space I had to dig a little deeper with my fingers to stop from flying off ... that crazy tilting cartwheel feeling. I remember then that stillness is an illusion, that we are never motionless ... never perfectly still ... that we are all moving even if it's a slow drift on an unseen tide.


Petroleum

Petroleum

windswept leafy autumn chill
fuel that warmed machine's internals
now drained
tanks vapour filled
hollow booming - signage an empty promise
abandoned a day and already unkempt
fenced, dug up and replaced
the land given a new life
and on future warm summer evenings
when myriad people sip and gaze
from fresh balconies
a faint waft of petroleum
hangs sweetly in the air

-May 2012

 

Our local service station has finally closed. It marks the end of an era for this little suburb. One of the last small servos to go. The bicycle shop - it was handy having one just down the road - closed up months ago. I was on my way back from a family shoot on Sunday and saw that the place had finally closed ... so I stopped and took some photographs. The signage came down yesterday morning.  I know all things must change and the world moves on but I was sad to see it go. Soon it will be as though nothing was there. Units will be up in a year. Nothing will remain except the faint waft of petroleum hanging sweetly in the air.

What about you? Do you document the things that change before they change?


Long daytime exposure of the sea against rocks

Shores of a methane sea

Long daytime exposure of the sea against rocks

Imagine standing on a planet much colder than this one is now and looking out over a sea of liquid methane ...

Shores of a Methane Sea ... the crunch of crystalline accretions under your boot

... the way the liquid moves and sighs - not like water

but thinner and with crackle...

 

About the picture: playing around with the B+W ND110E 10 stop neutral density filter.


water droplets consdensed onto a shiny blue surface

Condensed

water droplets consdensed onto a shiny blue surface

Condensed

The cool skin, attractive

pulling my eyes

pulling the very vapours from the air 

 

loving dappled and blue

condensed.