Preface
Frequently, I have written about how images enable recollections. Consequently, I have recently been reviewing old photos and my log of field notes from spring 2020 with an intent to refresh sensations of those moments in nature taking place during an unusual situation: the outbreak of a pandemic. In numerous experiences using my camera, whether patiently preparing to photograph a serene landscape setting or peering through my viewfinder at a sporting event surrounded by thousands of the teams’ screaming fans, I have learned my attention to specifics in the atmosphere around me magnifies, and I am able to isolate the incident for greater concentration and later recall.
* * *
As I photograph a moment in time, I am more aware of the environment because I expect to save images that effectively reflect the circumstance and significance at the stage of an action when they were taken. The way the initial taste of a simple petite madeleine famously evoked a sensory response eliciting complexities of the past for Proust when “suddenly the memory revealed itself,” similarly for me such recorded scenes in photography preserve emotions or thoughts connected to a collage of occasions, distinct points in time within which the pictures were captured. In fact, images allow us to possess memories from the past where experiences or perceptions have developed, so that reality can become something more changeable under our control, sometimes even reconstructed or reordered in the way we wish.
* * *
Past
Lately, I’ve become accustomed to an absence of traffic on the state highway. Even the interstate appears somewhat empty today when I cross on an overpass. Driving toward the shore, reports narrated on the car radio about the rapidly spreading virus seem to suggest we are living in a science fiction novel I’ve not yet read. Switching to Symphony Hall on Sirius, I retreat from early spring 2020 to the comfort of a Mozart sonata, wordless instrumental music composed almost three centuries ago. The way one might not immediately recognize an incremental alteration in life, the day’s weather has grayed gradually, so subtly to go almost unobserved. This overcast sky in the beginning of April appears milky with a little light haze in low-lying places, a shade somewhat like a film of off-white ice on the frosted surface of a forest pond.
* * *
A collection of clouds along the horizon line finally cups the setting sun peeking between departing cloud cover, weakly illuminating that wispy fog wafting and lifting along the shore. The landscape, still idle and gray with its winter affliction, refuses to cooperate when I peer through my camera viewfinder for a scenic image. Granite boulders placed at the coast to protect against damage from seasonal erosion glow a wet sheen in the fading late sunlight. Like most people I know, I never tire of sunsets. Shuddering in today’s soft western wind, the lake water, luminous and iridescent, shines subtly one last time before nightfall. Soon, a clearing sky overhead will summon the stars to give guidance again, as they have since the beginning of time, though they will not resolve questions on the minds of many during this spring.
* * *
Three weeks since the onset of a pandemic, we dread more internet updates of every day’s death toll. All night, ominous news continues to be posted online from near and far; no time zone around the world is immune. So many are troubled by uncertainty or doubt, without reason for hope; some others left alone seem sleepless in their grief. Despite the gravity of each bulletin, I have felt sheltered from the storm, to borrow from a Bob Dylan lyric, but such security cultivates a sense of guilt as well. Standing safely beside my tripod on a dune hill ridge, the sandy earth surrounding me swiftly blackening, I finally photograph the last flare at sundown. Already, edges of the horizon cloud cover are backlit the crimson of fresh blood, those small holes opening among the clouds now appear riddled with a fiery red briefly tinting the lakeshore. Soon, even these details will quickly disappear, as the nighttime net retrieves from this landscape what it had been granted by daylight.
* * *
Local lockdowns coincide with the beginning of spring. In The Waste Land T.S. Eliot determined April to be “the cruellest month,” but this year thirty days will clearly not be enough to contain the cruelty. Although the seasonal squalls have ended, a frigid front still grips the region. Each morning at sunrise, when the wide beach whitens like a linen sheet, isolated pine trees lift in silhouette among the foredunes with stenciled outlines of shade as a pattern of design on the sand, and daylight scrapes away the night’s disguise. Alone again along the shore, I have escaped that weight of uncertainty now present wherever crowds gather anxiously. Like an alarm, the short screech of a distant freight train whistle irritates and awakens me from focusing on the lakeside scene in my viewfinder, temporarily breaking this silence of solitude, a solace following so many news reports of sorrow.
* * *
The transition to spring-like weather has hesitated somewhat during the first weeks of the season. Yesterday morning we even woke to a light dusting of snowfall, although I managed to capture a sunset glow a few days ago. However, world events have shifted suddenly and stunningly during the same time period, and much of the nation has witnessed strict restrictions on travel or limits on participation in everyday activities. Professional landscape and travel photographers who normally rely upon great mobility to achieve income from dramatic images in international locations, since many of their photos are sold to the tourist industry, have been confined to home areas and have lost livelihoods because of shutdowns.
* * *
Ironically, earlier this year various publications reported problems of overcrowding and complications caused by the popularity of tourism, partly due to enticements of compelling photographs posted on social media platforms like Instagram. Nevertheless, perhaps the most iconic picture this past winter—seen in newspapers, magazines, and online sites—displayed a long, stalled line of mountain climbers awaiting their turn to ascend a final ridge to the top of Mt. Everest, as reported in John Hammer’s article for GQ titled “Chaos at the Top of the World.” Bloomberg published a story called “Tourism Is Eating the World,” while The Atlantic offered “Too Many People Want to Travel.” In addition, Outside Magazine released a revealing piece declaring “Utah Wanted All the Tourists, Then It Got Them,” chronicling “the global phenomenon of over-tourism that has wreaked havoc from Phuket to Venice to Tulum….” Standing alone by my tripod on an Indiana Dunes beach to take a sunset photograph, naturally and subconsciously practicing social distancing, I noted no one could be seen in any direction. Moreover, I was aware that in a span of mere weeks citizens around the world observed circumstances nearly unimaginable.
* * *
Following a series of forceful storms inflicting their will upon the lakeshore over the course of winter months, this sandy trail among the cream-colored foredunes is littered in early spring with weathered wooden slats that had been fastened by metal connections, each now encrusted with specks of rust, from a broken section of erosion-control fencing still awaiting mending. Indeed, an onshore wind now whines once more between the twisting and misshapen limbs of skeletal beach trees near where I am waiting to take a landscape picture. Through my zoom lens, a woman probably in her sixties and walking alone seems to be selecting beige shells for her collection from those found among a darkly scalloped outline of water-stained sand along the shore.
* * *
The woman wipes those shells clean of smudges by softly rubbing each one between her fingers with the sleeve of a light green sweater before filling the emptiness of a plaid fabric handbag. Being cautious, she wears a black cloth face mask, and I want to ask about her fear or how long it will last, though I do not fault her. Like so many others, does she find the unknown so frightening? Does she already know someone harmed by this unprecedented virus? Does she imagine the sound of the turbulent surf whispering a warning in her ear? Watching her hesitant steps—pausing occasionally to stoop and inspect shells or small smooth stones, one after another—I wait until she strolls beyond a bend in the coastline, out of range for the four borders of my camera frame. Finally, I photograph the placid scenery, cleared of humans.
* * *
In some places along the shore, the fine grains of sand give way to colorful beach pebbles shuffled about the surf with the surge of each wave. Normally, I frequently meet very friendly people, often couples seeking these small stones, as well as shells or various other relics of the past, such as beach glass or crinoids. But the declaration of a dangerous pandemic and warnings about close socializing have limited even these conversations. In the past, these affable gatherers of beach souvenirs informed me that crinoids are fossils found among the shells and often confused with them by most visitors. Left by creatures similar to sea urchins or sea cucumbers, the pieces discovered along the Indiana Dunes are tiny and usually disk-shaped parts—many five-sided and resembling a star—of the spinal stack. These items are ideal for various uses, such as beads in jewelry, especially a favorite necklace for good luck or a charm bracelet worn to ward off evil, since the hollow center of the crinoid disk serves perfectly for stringing on a chain.
* * *
Walking leisurely at the edge of the water, carefully picking up interesting bits of debris one at a time to examine their distinctive shape or tint, these beachcombers always struck me as excellent examples of patience and peacefulness. Indeed, I’m reminded of “Blue Spaces,” an essay written by Elle Hunt advising “why time spent near water is the secret of happiness.” Following studies by experts, including a marine scientist and an environmental psychologist, Hunt suggests “the science is consistent” that “being by the water is good for body and mind.” Appropriately, this thoughtful piece explains being beside bodies of water proves to be restorative physically and spiritually for humans, producing positive results in one’s mood or emotional outlook.
* * *
Like those in many other countries throughout the world, Americans’ attention has been focused upon every aspect of the coronavirus pandemic and its influence over all, so much so that a rare national emergency has been declared. Among the recommendations by medical experts, people learned new terms as they have been advised to practice safety measures, including social distancing, which drastically limits the kinds of healthy interactive activities available for individuals. Nevertheless, hiking through nature’s landscape presents an ideal physical exertion that fits the prescribed description of productive exercise. In addition, some research has verified the positive consequences for body and mind when one is alone in nature. A number of other studies have concluded that hiking can sharpen one’s thinking process, help increase a sense of calm, enhance personal satisfaction, inspire creativity, and improve one’s attitude through a strong connection with nature. Each benefit offers relief arising from this bit of liberty, a feigned feeling of freedom that almost seems to exist as an attempt at compensation for so much restriction endured every day.
* * *
No matter the turmoil felt elsewhere, I find this serene scenery remains relaxing. Significant details fixed in my memory or frozen in my past photos stay the same whenever I visit. Relying on its consistency, I repeatedly return for such reassurance. This graceful landscape shapes my flow of emotions the way words written on a blank page create a parameter for thought. Tonight, this ripening light at sundown foreshadows the withering away of another day in the list of lost dates crossed off my calendar pages since the start of the sequestering. Nevertheless, like most people I know, I do not grow weary of sunsets. To capture that moment before the now flowering rose-colored sky closes over Lake Michigan, hoping to display this instant on the cover of next year’s edition of the community calendar, I optimistically snap the shutter button on my camera.
* * *
The physical beauty of this landscape nevertheless presents itself as testimony to the spiritual influence of nature, its ability to heal uneasy sentiments. Walt Whitman once wrote about objects of our outward surroundings as “dumb beautiful ministers,” observing how these mute pieces of the world we find around us often also become planted “permanently within us.” Forever, this close of day’s orange sun now in focus within my camera frame will seem pinned in place just above the darkening horizon, as if stalled amid the evening’s deepening blue sky, when I freeze it in a photograph. Not surprisingly, I prefer such silent and tranquil scenery to the panic and disarray frequently seen elsewhere in everyday living. Robert Frost claimed part of his poetry’s impetus was to act as “a momentary stay against confusion.” For me, stilled images of nature contemplated in a quiet moment, maybe even as viewed on walls in the hushed atmospheres of urban museums or suburban galleries, provide a comparable use. Vivid visions of the landscape painted so long ago by the Impressionist artists supply splendor and still support us with solace in times of sadness. Perhaps certain photos can serve a similar purpose.
* * *
At end of winter, when the creek overflows with snowmelt or thawed ice that had collected in these deep recesses between dune hills, fog often floats low over this trail or snarl of underbrush and beneath the trees before a strengthening sun reshapes the landscape. Today, a quickly developing southern breeze tosses about branches in these old oaks, deposits beneath them dozens of thin sticks and twisted twigs good for nest building or for kindling. Slim clouds swiftly slip overhead, white wisps drifting toward the north. Some believe the land seems too bland and drab before the season’s vivid colors appear, but each time I hike these woods, even in late winter or at the beginning of spring, I find something new to interest me.
* * *
Similar to the isolation experienced by an exile, left to philosophical contemplation and self-examination of emotions, I hike alone. Through dune woods finally beginning to fill with spring foliage, I am startled by the sudden fade to gray shade brought by these leaves following months of winter’s stiff and sharply contrasting shadows of bare branches. Later, ambushed by a brief but heavy rain shower, I will wish for shelter from an even thicker summer canopy. Rising winds fling sand grit against my face and whisper a rumor of rough weather ahead. These leaves along Trail Two now appear nearly weightless. Some from last fall lie dried and scuttling on the ground among underbrush in blustery gusts.
* * *
Hiking beside the creek, I know dune hills will deaden stronger air currents flowing over Lake Michigan. I come upon the stump of an old tree trunk with rotten wood crumbling into itself, creating a crater with its depth seemingly suffused with sawdust where a slender ribbon snake just under two feet long curls into a circle. A couple of lateral yellow stripes seem more conspicuous against the surrounding background of dark bark. Currently motionless as if in a siesta, he looks comfortable and content, so I leave him to his sleep as I move farther through the dune woods. The creek current coils before me, wraps around a little hill and drains into a marsh farther ahead where the overflowing floodwaters will sprawl all the way into early summer.
* * *
Last week as I walked the shoreline along Lake Michigan on an unseasonably warm evening for early spring, I noticed groups of visitors gathering to watch a forthcoming sunset. By the time the sky above the horizon had been lit with an array of rich colors, a small crowd had collected by the water’s edge, though most were significantly spaced from one another. I had to set my tripod among dune mounds on a ridge to omit from my camera frame those figures strolling the beach below. That same night I viewed an episode of the Ken Burns documentary about Ernest Hemingway with images of the masses at crowded street cafes in Paris during 1921 and 1922, film clips captured not long after the end of World War I in November of 1918 and the Spanish Flu pandemic that extended from 1918 until 1920. These scenes reminded me of the possible return to normality, including full beaches on hot summer days, one would like to believe will soon occur again as surely as the next sunset.
* * *
At the start of summer when weather has warmed to the 90s and the air turns humid, each of the nearby beaches along Lake Michigan will frequently fill with visitors by late morning, even in this time of pandemic concerns. Especially recently, since the waterfront in neighboring Chicago and other Illinois spots remained closed to sunbathers or swimmers due to their state’s restrictions intended to counter spread of the virus, the Indiana Dunes shoreline has drawn larger gatherings. Consequently, attempting to avoid crowded conditions, I often try to find alternative locations to photograph, places with paths less traveled (to borrow language from Robert Frost) during such heat. This week, after watching an archived video interview with David Foster Wallace in which the author explains “a hunger for silence and quiet” away from the constant clamor in contemporary society, I chose again to hike a loop through the Great Marsh. Moving among the wetland, I managed to travel in a relaxed pace without encountering anyone else, and I was struck once more by the calm surroundings, the serenity of its distinct stillness broken only by a far-off bird call or a bull frog’s croak, perhaps even the noisy flapping of a nearby Great Blue Heron’s large wings.
* * *
Yesterday, as everyone experienced Easter Sunday in a uniquely different fashion than in the past, I read an article in the current New Yorker, “Mortality and the Old Masters,” by poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who has written about his own mortality since a recent diagnosis of lung cancer. Among the observations and speculations offered in this piece, the author conjectures the coronavirus pandemic—”unlike the 1917-1918 influenza pandemic, which killed as many as a hundred million people, largely young, and left so little cultural trace”—may create a longer lasting impact on how we perceive the world around us, including visual works of art. Schjeldahl suggests we will even reevaluate those classic artworks known so well by all: “Here’s a prediction of our experience when we are again free to wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember.” With this in mind, I reviewed a number of my photographs from previous seasons. Details such as strings of footprints on an empty beach under a setting sun suddenly appeared to have an added significance, seemingly symbolic of an awareness of absence, calling to mind the disappearance of those who once stepped along the sandy shore. My photographs now exhibited to me a greater sense of isolation or solitude. Photographer James Balog once famously stated a truism, that “photography is a way to shape human perception.” However, the interpretation of content in photographs, as well as other art forms, clearly can just as easily be shaped through human perception influenced by changing contemporary conditions.
* * *
Lake Michigan faded to dishwater gray as I waited to snap one final photograph of sunset. Each evening, nature presents a repeat performance, but tonight I was the sole observer on this northern Indiana beach. Upon declining daylight, shadows of pines lengthened along the foredunes until the shoreline shut, another page finished in a thick book to be put aside until tomorrow. With a thin mist coming inland, the landscape blurred then dampened. At last, the horizon line vanished. Soon, the whole coast was swallowed by nightfall. Unseen, clusters of migrating clouds, low-altitude cumuli southbound from Canada, quietly crossed a starless sky. As if gossiping in the dark with one another, gulls squawked back and forth. A susurration of surf continued. Its furtive whisper infiltrated the blackness as though knowingly sharing a sinister secret. However, standing alone by my tripod, drying the camera body with a soft cloth and gathering the photography gear in my backpack, I felt a sense of security, temporarily shielded from those threats spreading elsewhere.
* * *
In some ways nothing changes day to day, though I know everything does, and the catalyst is time. The destruction of this coastline through two centuries has been incredibly sad. Once in the past, in an economically motivated act, the shape of this landscape was defaced. A whole dune hill, known as the Hoosier Slide and believed to be the highest peak along the Indiana shore, was leveled in the 1920s to supply sand, glittering brilliantly in sunshine, for manufacture of glass products. Because the unusual consistency of the sand created a bluish stain, it was deemed ideal for better preservation of food in tinted storage jars on shop shelves or for safe homemade canning in pantries. Additionally, vast tracts of sand almost too huge to imagine were scraped from the landscape for railroad freight shipping to Chicago and elsewhere as construction material, flattening much of Indiana’s undulating topography beside Lake Michigan. Extensive stretches of the area’s characteristic scenic dunes were ravaged and its natural habitat dismantled. Though large portions of the coast healed after decades of national and state park stewardship, marks of lasting scars remain visible throughout the terrain.
* * *
During late April the spring landscape truly begins to take shape. Before May arrives, colorful beauty will return in the form of this season’s first flowers and in the shape of vivid images exhibiting blossoming fruit trees. Nevertheless, I like to inventory the area at the start of this month, hike trails under mostly bare branches, walk paths through stark stretches of nearly empty shrubbery, or even check for examples on the hedges along fences at the edges of my backyard. All the while, I perceive places where scatterings of last year’s foliage remain, not yet fallen and fully intact. Surprised by how many leaves, though brown and crisp, have withstood winter’s harsh weather and continue to cling to thin limbs or decorate underbrush still rising from the dark soil, I find they have transitioned into a different kind of attractiveness—gray, wavy, and striated—at times looking almost metallic, appearing artificial in their artistic presence. Though changed, they also appear to offer a certain type of symbolism, one which I admire as it seems to signal a kind of survival, a characteristic valued anytime but maybe more so in this difficult year.
* * *
A remote route winding inland from Trail Ten through the foredunes at the eastern end of Indiana Dunes State Park rises toward thickening woods past a narrow ridge above the Big Blowout, offering a wide view beyond the beach. During early spring, the high sunlight at noon spills between silhouetted thin limbs of trees yet empty and awaiting the season’s promised gift of green leaves. Marram grass has remained tawny since winter. When I travel this direction in April, an easy breeze often slips onshore—lightly lifting, shifting, and smoothing the loose sand. The air is still usually chilled by a colder Lake Michigan, its surface hue now more frequently colored by blue skies. Although the winter months this year passed without so much snow to weigh down and break weaker branches, damaging winds from strong northern storms toppled many trunks precariously balanced on dune hills at the edge of the lake. All along the park’s shoreline the scenery has been altered dramatically by coastal erosion. We are fortunate that nature is so resilient, yet we frequently forget how fragile it can be. Indeed, I appreciate the difficulties with preservation that characterize the region’s history—the litany of political, social, or artistic figures who saved this place from total destruction by industry about a century ago. In times of uneasiness, I like to hike this isolated section of the landscape, visit its silent and solitary setting presenting a necessary sense of peace, especially during moments of human chaos, as a way to reconnect with the calmer character of nature.
* * *
I was pleased to see this week that the Indiana Office on Tourism and Development featured my photo of Trail Nine at Indiana Dunes State Park, taken in June of last year while I helped lead a photo walk, as the visual for their “Visit Indiana” promotion to have state residents resume hiking at local sites as an excellent form of safe exercise. Visitors are reminded “social distancing is important to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.” However, all are advised: “If you need to get out of the house, areas where you can find seclusion are ideal, like Indiana Dunes State Park.” In a journal entry posted at the time I captured the image, I wrote about Trail Nine: “the hike begins beside marshland, moves through dune woods, rises a sand hill to an elevated path curving around the impressive Beach House Blowout, and then extends along a narrow ridge with vistas of Lake Michigan. In a report rating this 3.6-mile loop as the number one trail in Indiana, The Hiking Project observes: ‘This is the definitive trail in the dunes. It combines hiking through mature forests and along the top of a dune ridge overlooking Lake Michigan. The views are incredible.’”
* * *
Despite an uncertainty evidenced every day in news reports during the past few months—while much of the world’s intended entertainment and sporting events or other already arranged gatherings, large and small, have been placed on temporary hold, postponed to a later date, or canceled altogether—daily elements of the environment continue on nature’s normal schedule. Additionally, those folks noticing common meteorological features have acquired an enhanced appreciation for their regular occurrences, such as cloudless afternoons and a sequence of vivid sunsets. In recent weeks many have commented upon an apparent greater richness when viewing clear distant skies, most likely because of an absence of pollution from fewer cars on roads and decreasing activity in nearby industries. Furthermore, we are reminded clean air contributes to brighter and more colorful sunrises or sunsets, unhindered spectacles that everyone eyeing skies everywhere can witness. Indeed, Henry David Thoreau once noted: “We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited….”
* * *
Somber clouds prowl the sky above Lake Michigan. A repetition of breaking waves echoes across the coastline at twilight with the regular rhythm of an analog clock’s hesitating second hand. A frail woman wearing a sea-green sweatshirt and blue jeans with lots of splotches bleached white moves tentatively between the dunes, her short gray hair undisturbed by the lake breeze. When she reaches the beach, I see she is leaning slightly to the left, her weight resting a bit on a slender walking stick held at her hip. Although she strolls alone, she approaches the shoreline like one wishing to share the scenery with others. Her cane momentarily tucked under her left elbow, she crouches and kneels to feel the growing foam in the shallow wash of a shuddering surf that appears to melt, whitening all around her. The woman holds her right palm in front of her face like a hand mirror before peeking through splayed fingers at the darkening lake. When she rises, her pants legs dampened with lake water, she seems to be smiling, perhaps even relieved by the day’s departure. As if to display to an invisible companion how the water sweeps clean and smooths the beach sand, she steps back and watches the little waves erase her footprints. Soon, she eases back inland with the aid of her wooden staff. Her figure fading into the disappearing light, she returns through the shroud of shadowy mounds among blackening foredunes like an actress stepping behind a closing heavy curtain and vanishing backstage following her solo performance in an original minimalist one-act play.
* * *
Due to conditions created by the pandemic virus, everyone has had to adjust everyday living in recent months. Certainly, a serious impact has been felt by multitudes whose health or livelihood has been affected. However, I am grateful that my situation has allowed for merely altering behavior a bit and more minor modifications to planning, including cancelling or postponing a series of various public appearances—a photography workshop, a multimedia presentation, a photo exhibit, etc.—scheduled for this time of year. Nevertheless, since my regular routine for capturing images in the landscape usually involves solo hikes to somewhat isolated locations of the state and national parks where I am unlikely to encounter others, and the photographs sometimes display secluded scenes in less visited settings, my focus of attention has not changed. Indeed, many of my photographic works, such as an individual leafless tree standing in lakeshore foredunes, complement current concerns and appropriately offer symbols of solitude or present patches of the natural habitat separated from much human traffic.
* * *
Present
Although today’s sunset did not disappoint, presenting a stunning array of colors captured by my camera, I linger longer than I should. Walking along the edge of the water, the end of the coast suddenly lies out of sight, as if concealed by black brushstrokes. Draped under nature’s heavy cape at sundown, the nearby landscape now appears shapeless. The shoreline just ahead frays, worn away like a weakened seam with its stitches swiftly undone. A hiss of surf fills this moonless night, too dark for any more photos. Unseen waves break on the beach and spray a thin layer of continuous mist drifting onshore, suspended in the air and ever present, as if persistent remnants of a remembrance.
* * *
The mind tends to intensify what the eye cannot see, yet I imagine those settings I’d composed earlier in the day within the frame of my viewfinder. Each moment of recollection lifts itself in my memory, one after another, and together they present a unified sequence that acts like a child who begs attention with insistent repetition. By the time I start my engine in the darkened parking lot, all the other cars have gone. The silence on this drive yields to music as I listen to a piano sonata by Liszt on Sirius to serenade me on my way home. I aim the bright lines of my headlights into the same shared emptiness as everywhere else but toward a familiar direction to be explored once more.
* * *
Likely illuminated by another vibrant sunrise, the attractive natural scenery of this special place beside the lake will reappear at daybreak. Its aesthetic appeal will also be seen repeatedly by me when viewing those digital images stored on my computer for future use, a personal inventory of additional reminiscences I have sorted in that catalog of preserved photos. As Susan Sontag wrote about photography, capturing images is one way of imprisoning reality to possess the past. Likewise, I believe every photograph possibly exists as a tricky loophole in the chronology of time. Each is an invitation to revisit, reexamine, and reassess experiences or observations, perhaps even to undo or ameliorate any previous understanding of some unpleasant consequences from what has happened and cannot be retracted. In this way most nature photos, such as a series of sunset shots, could bestow a contrast against the coming darkness, advancing an appreciation for enduring natural beauty when seeking means for an increased pleasant distraction. More significantly, following moments of difficulty and distress, perhaps these photographs can provide needed comfort and consolation.
I appreciate these comments a lot. I think I relate to them, and to what you have expressed here, at least in part because at family gatherings almost as long as I've had access to a camera, -- and in other situations where an image or an occasion or a story beg to be captured somehow -- I am grabbing pictures or asking someone to use my camera to capture me in a particular scene some part of me wants to remain anchored in. Even though I'm primarily a "point and shoot" photographer and only my eye and instincts serve me when I get something "good", I also find that as I age, and my memory isn't what it once was, I rely heavily on photos to help me recreate not just events in my life but the emotions I associate with those events, whether somber or joyous. Thank you for sharing these notes, Ed.