THE PRESENT
Being here. Mono no aware. The real versus the imagined. Stillness. Silence. The sensorial. The seen. The spoken. Routines. Transitions. Progressions. Allowing. Mindfulness. Taking photographs to not forget. A sky teeming with stars. The first signs of pink buds on trees. Hills of grass. Falling leaves. Fresh snow. A setting sun that always arrives too soon.
In this section, I revisit a childhood game. Before I owned a camera, I would take a mental snapshot of everything in front of me. I'd challenge myself to take in as many colors, details, smells, and sounds as I could.
Photography is a more elegant attempt to capture time. We use the camera to escape the ephemeral quality of reality. But in this quest to get the perfect lighting and angles, the present is lost. We aren't witnessing it. We are too focused on archiving it.
I play around with the idea of dissecting moments into smaller pieces, but to the extent that the "bigger picture" becomes unclear. Or even worse - forgettable.
In this excerpt from
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery,
Jeanette Winterson observes the necessity of contemplation in her writing practice. But this quote can be applied to any creative work.
While working on
An Exploration of Time, I found myself sitting in silence more often than not. The process of finding the right words and images felt like watering a very delicate plant without instructions.
She also compares her words to living things, where they grow in their own time. Nature is unhurried. It does not look at the clock, and somehow everything reaches completion. Jeanette adopts a similar approach, allowing things to come to her.
I'll try to remember that.
All video footage is from my personal collection.
