Forging One's Own Path

About 6-1/2 years ago, I blogged about my youngest son's (Josh's) joyous "discovery" of the magic of photography. Having (back then, newly and quickly) acquired a few "old" Polaroids, including the venerable SX-70, and moving on for a time to Canon's AE-1 Program (a model I learned from in the late 1970s!) before settling on a more modern Fuji XT-2 that he never leaves the house without, Josh's honeymoon with photography has never ended. I had no way of knowing any of this would come to pass when I wrote (back in march, 2015): "Of course, I have no idea how long Josh's enthusiasm will last. It may die out, it may intensify, or it may transform into some other related art form. But if these early indications are a valid data source, he has clearly been very deeply bitten by his creative muse. May they forever more remain inseparable." Prescient musings, indeed!

What a sincere joy it is - as a photographer and loving father - to witness Josh's continued - accelerating - maturation as a bona fide artist. He and I (Josh, somewhat reluctantly at first, humbly unsure of his pictures' aesthetic "worth") finally put together an on-line gallery to show off some of his best work. Speaking just as a father, it melts my heart to see this flowering of Josh's artistic passion. But speaking as a photographer, I am simply awed by his prodigious talent. To go from effectively never having "clicked a shutter" before 2015 (and ignoring Josh's very early foray into photography, when he was 5, and played with a Casio QV-10 for a few days before relegating it to his closet, and never touching it again), to the technically and aesthetically superlative images - any of which I would be proud to call my own, but alas, cannot, since they're all unmistakably Josh's! (Josh does all of his own editing, and has never taken a course on photography) - that you will find on his new website, is astoundingly rare. 

Whatever irreducible bias I may have as a father aside, Josh's images are infused with a palpable artistry. While his and my aesthetic spaces do overlap in places (we both love epic" landscapes and run toward magic light without cost to life or limb), the pattern-of-patterns of his images is uniquely his (this, despite, or possibly because of, being exposed to his dad's photography for so many years). To forge one's own aesthetic path is far from easy, but is a clear sign that something special is brewing. Although he is most passionate about taking - and expressing his photographic vision through - macros, his well honed eye for light, geometry, and composition in general is seen in all of his photographs. But enough gushing by an unreservedly - and unabashedly - enthused dad/photographer. Go take a look at Josh's work on his new website. You won't regret it!

Delusion of Separateness

"A human being is part of the
whole called by us a universe,
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself,
his thoughts and his feelings,
as something separate
from the rest, a kind
of optical delusion
of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind
of prison for us;
it restricts us to our
personal decisions and
our affections to a few
persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of
compassion to embrace
all living creatures and
the whole of nature of
its beauty."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Three Quarks for Muster Mark

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)
The Quark and the Jaguar

Similarity of Form

 "The Sage embraces similarity
of understanding and pays
no regard to similarity of form.
The world in general is attracted
by similarity of form,
but remains indifferent to
similarity of understanding."

- Lie Yukou (c.400 BCE)

Divine Spark

"Those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well.... Love is the best and noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be. If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one's love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger."

- Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Transparent as a Dragonfly

"Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

The Heavenly Gate

"It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself."

- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)

Conceptualizing Elephants

 "The skies and land are so enormous,
and the detail so precise and exquisite
that wherever you are you are isolated
in a glowing world between
the macro and the micro."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Postscript. These two very distinct images were both taken while on a hike up the Cascade Pass Trail (in Northern Cascades National Park, WA) with my wife and youngest son about a month ago. They obviously represent - and evoke - vastly different emotional and aesthetic sensibilities, yet each captures but an infinitesimally small part of the experience of hiking up this amazing trail. From an epic - and audibly loud -"Wow!" as we turned a corner and were thrust into the first image, to an oh-so-gently-whispered, "How lovely!" as my eye fell on a patch of small ferns quietly sitting along our path, this trail is that, and infinitely more in between. My vain efforts to capture its fathomless heights and depths and all sorts of visual delights with a camera reminded me of the proverbial blind men awkwardly - and absurdly - stumbling around trying to conceptualize an elephant :) 

Turning Matter into Spirit

"There are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men – they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle?…Turning matter into spirit."

- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 - 1957)
Zorba the Greek

Sliding Down Earth's Spacetime Curve

"The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime."

- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
The Universe in Your Hand

Postscript. This height of this lovely waterfall - Rocky Brooks Falls near Dosewallips State Park, WA - is hard to judge from the picture alone, but it is among the Olympic Peninsula's tallest at about 230 ft! Rocky Brooks falls is also embarrassingly easy to get to: a short 4 mile journey by car on a paved road from the main highway that runs up the Hood Canal, and then (the truly embarrassingly easy part) a 200 yard (!) hike - though "hike" is not the best word: you'll hardly have time to take more than a few breaths before coming to the falls, and can keep the munchies and extra water back at the car. Well, maybe that last part is a bit premature... the falls are so extraordinary to experience in person - the sound, the smell, the subtle mist, the surrounding bird song, and the gentle burbling stream that both greets each expectant visitor and says farewell - that one is well advised to anticipate a longer-than-casual-length stay. Over the course of my family's two weeks on the Peninsula, I took four trips to this falls - the shortest of which lasted no less than 3 hours - and each time spent far more time just sitting and communing with its tender rhythms than prowling around with tripod and camera looking for compositions. A reminder that there are special places that - with "good motivation and appropriate merit" (ref: a blog entry I posted about a week ago) - palpably compel you to stop whatever you're doing and just ... be.