Numinous Self-Actualization

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term ... refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming." - Abraham Maslow (1908 - 1970)

Forty two years ago (and, in view of the commentary to follow, a faint echo of Adams' answer to life, universe, and everything), my family and I took a trip out west that I have never forgotten. My 'family' back then was made up of my parents and both grandparents on my dad's side. I have never forgotten that trip for two reasons: (1) it was the last trip that all of us were together on (my grandparents were - in 1970 - well into their 80s and it was upon our return to 'home' that year - on Long Island, NY - that health issues that would eventually take both their lives first appeared); and (2) it was the first time my 10 year old self was exposed - and spiritually awakened to - the extraordinary aesthetic riches that mother Earth offers.

Now fast-forward to the present; more precisely, to 10-25 August, during which time my family and I (including my wife, our two sons and my mom, who just happens to be the same age as my grandfather was in 1970) flew out to Denver, CO to rent a 32-ft RV and used it to explore the Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone national parks. (This trip was 2/3 as long as my 1970 trip, but covered many, if not all, of the memorable sights and sounds I remember from long ago.) Long in planing (dating back about three years, at least), I wanted to make this trip for two reasons: (1) to provide my kids an opportunity to experience a similar reverie of nature's beauty and/or a "spiritually awakening" as I had at their age (mission accomplished on both counts!), and (2) to give myself an opportunity to re-experience memories of a bygone time that I now, and will always, cherish. It is in the unabashed failure to achieve this second goal that I wish to focus on in the words that follow.

Despite my longing for - and all my earnest efforts to recreate - the exuberance of my youthful adventure, and though there were certainly moments during which time's ineffable veil parted just a bit to reveal to my mind's eye a dim indistinct sepia-like 'print' of what I saw 42 years ago, the sad truth is that I was thoroughly and at all times aware of being inextricably mired in a 51 yo body, with all its attendant life's bumps and bruises, experiences, and never-ending responsibilities; a fact that my 10 yo self could neither fully anticipate nor fathom! Try as I might, and cliche-ridden though it may be, I found it impossible to recapture the essence of my remembered youth. Except - that is - through watching my children dance to the tune of their own blissful reverie, and by engaging in photography.

What I yearned for most of all (from my experience as a 10 yo) was what I remember as a pure innocence of being; a joyful and unconscious participation in nature's rhythms. I had absolutely no concerns, no worries, no pressures of life (or panic over whether - after enjoying the "view" at 12K ft on Colorado's trail ridge road - I would be able to safely drive a 12 foot wide RV down twisting hairpin turns in lanes barely a foot wider and roads that fall off 8% grades and plunge thousands of feet down on either side!). I remember just "being in the moment," playing, laughing, hiking, splashing in lake water, and pausing on mountaintops - with nary a conscious thought - to gaze out into the infinite expanse of our western landscapes. But there were far too many distracting and nagging thoughts intruding into the 51 yo version of my younger self to allow such innocence (though memories of how easy - how effortless - it once was - and is, for my children! - reminded me that it is not the state that is inaccessible, but my all-but-convincing left-brain attitude that makes it only appear to be inaccessible). In truth, it was not my 51 yo body that was the problem, but that I had forgotten that the "I" that had experienced all those wonderful things in 1970 has not aged at all. 

Rather than quietly and gracefully surrendering to the flow of time and nature, I was, so to speak, swimming against the tide, desperately trying to turn back time to reinsert myself into a long-deceased body and mind so that I could re-experience the past exactly as it - and I - were back then, 42 years ago. But my soul was already where I needed to be; where I was, in 1970, in 2012, and whenever - and wherever - else I need to be. It is a timeless, yearning-less state forged by a numinous connection between self and nature. And, as so often happens (with me, at least), photography reminded me of my foolishness. 

The child does not yearn to return to anything, or to any time or state; it simply delights in being, in experiencing. As I tuned out my incessant left-brain confusion, and refocused my attention on the beauty around me, my hand instinctively reached for my camera, and all yearnings ceased. Numinous self-actualization...

"It's also helpful to realize that this

very body that we have, 

that's sitting right here right now... 

with its aches and it pleasures...

 is exactly what we need 

to be fully human, 

fully awake, fully alive."

- Pema Chödrön (1936 - )

New Book Published: The Art and Life of Sam Ilachinski

After nearly as long a gestation-period as my first book required (that one, published in 2001, was on a decidedly technical subject - cellular automata - and took about a decade to complete), I am delighted to announce the publication of a new book - this one very much about fine art - about my dad's life. 

"I like to paint," is how my dad - Sam ("Slava") Ilachinski - almost always answered the question, "What do you do?", along with the minor variation, "I liked to paint," if asked about what he remembered about his childhood. These simple phrases serve as perfect epitaphs to this preternaturally gifted artist, who spent virtually all of his 75 years creating magnificent works of art. 

Born in 1925 in Taganrog, Russia (birthplace of Anton Chekov), my dad's family lived in Germany before emigrating to the United States. Making homes first in Jamaica, NY, and later in Sea Cliff, Long Island, Slava became a renowned and much sought-after art restorer, and an even more gifted artist. Many expert observers have likened his more abstract work (that he focused more and more on in the waning years of his life) as an additional layer to Kandinsky's already transcendent vision of color and energy. 

Sadly, almost incomprehensibly, my dad passed away on March 30, 2002, after a very long and painful bout with several forms of cancer. Seldom has a soul so bravely fought the miseries of this disease, or faced each new setback with as profound a grace and humor. Despite his enormous physical difficulties, Slava never strayed too far from his beloved studio, even as the already brief stretches of time his poor withered legs were able to support him kept right on diminishing. 

Everyone who has known this brilliant and humble man knows that they are forever blessed with the memory of a soul who, via his art, brought all of us a step closer to God. His eye for beauty, his deep resonance with nature's sacred patterns, and his gentle humility will be missed more than words alone can possibly convey. 

Many artists have come and gone, of course, and many creative people remain in our midst, but never again will the world's beauty be quite so radiant, and the portal to the spiritual realm quite so wide and inviting, as when this quiet, visionary genius was immersed and reveling in the creative process in his studio. 

My mom and I offer this book on the art and life of Sam Ilachinski both as a loving tribute to a beautiful soul, and as a portal for others to discover - and marvel at - the precious gifts he left behind.

The Art and Life of Sam Ilachinski by Katherine and Andy Ilachinski | Make Your Own Book

Postscript. In a bit of Jungian synchronicity (insofar as it was completely unplanned, at least consciously, by me), after nearly a decade of effort - writing, archiving, digitizing (old slides and film), restoring old pictures, and so on - the final words of the text and images for display were inserted midday on father's day, this past Sunday. My muse could not possibly have chosen any better day to mark the formal completion of this labor-of-love project.

"Synesthetic Landscapes" Portfolio Book Published

"…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?" - Wassily Kandinsky

Those of you following my blog must know that - over the last few years (dating back to Dec 2009) - I've been consumed with capturing what I call "synesthetic landscapes." Synesthesia derives from the Greek syn = union + aisthaesis = sensation, and means "joined sensation." Such as when something that is ordinarily "seen" is tasted as well; though this hardly does justice to the psychological, creative - even mystical - experience of synesthesia (which I possessed until about the age of 10, during which I "saw" numbers as colors, the most common form of synesthesia). 

My experiments to recreate some semblance of these memories of the experience have technically consisted of using one "reality" - consisting of shallow depth-of-field, extreme macro (1x - 5x) photographs of mundane everyday objects, from curved reflecting metal surfaces to translucent colored glass bottles and glasses - to evoke an experience of another, less "obvious" landscape of the mind's eye. The result is synesthetic in the sense that, just as synesthetes use two or more senses other than the one nominally used to designate a given experience of an object to add to their experience of its ostensible "reality," my experimental images are designed to collectively evoke glimpses of surrealities by adding other - visually nonliteral - representational dimensions to our direct experience of reality.

The result is also an experiential synergy between two ostensibly different (but fundamentally intertwined) realities: one literal, and external - i.e., reflections and/or refractions from common everyday "things" - the other implied, and internal - i.e., ineffable landscapes of the imagination. (I should add, and emphasize, that while all the images in this series look like they are severely "Photoshopped," this is emphatically not so; digital manipulations are all deliberately confined to global curves, local tonal adjustment, and occasional noise removal. What you "see" is what is / was "really there," although what your experience of "it" will be ... will be whatever your "eye" and/or "I" will make it ;-)

Synesthetic Landscapes by Andy Ilachinski | Make Your Own Book

And so, for those of you interested in exploring my ongoing experiments with "synesthetic landscapes," I announce the publication of two portfolio editions: one small (consisting of about 40 images), the other large (consisting of 105 images, which includes all of those that appear in the "small" version). Both versions physically measure 7-by-7 inches (although a larger 12-by-12 inch version of the small portfolio edition is also available), come with soft- and hard-cover options, include an introductory essay on synesthesia and photography and an end-notes section that describes the process I used to capture these images (though this process continues to evolve, of course), and include a low-cost eBook edition (that is available as a direct download for Apple's iBooks).

"Color is the key.

The eye is the hammer. 

The soul is the piano with its many chords. 

The artist is the hand that, 

by touching this or that key, 

sets the soul vibrating automatically."

- Wassily Kandinsky

Photographs Not Taken

Astute readers may have noticed that not too many new blog entries have appeared here in the last few weeks. The reason, as always, is due to the constraints imposed on my life outside of photography (the side that pays most of my family's bills, by far;-) The two sides rarely interact, though on occasion - and usually unexpectedly - partly intersect. Such as happened yesterday, when - while being introduced to speak at a scientific meeting (on a distinctly non-photography related subject) - the person doing the introduction turned to me and asked whether my slides will include samples of my photography? My mind was so far from photography at that moment (indeed, I was deeply immersed in my usual minute-before-giving-a-talk inner meditation ritual), that I hardly reacted at all and certainly had no idea what to say. I managed to stammer something banal like, "No, no, that's just something I do on the side." Which is, of course, both literally true (if one measures such things in terms of "time spent"), and emphatically false (if the metric is "soulful nourishment gained").

However, neither metrics nor the "scientific talk" I gave yesterday is the focus of this short (and new!) blog entry. My wish is merely to point out a wonderful little book - called Photographs Not Taken - whose subject and insights are very apropos, given the recent constraints on my ability to do photography. The book is a collection of short essays - by a wide range of photographers - about moments in space and time that never became photographs! Oh, how well I (as all photographers can, at one time or another) resonate with those moments. Maybe we've forgotten our camera, or our tripod, or filter; maybe our camera froze at an inopportune moment; maybe the subject of our gaze shifted its position, or flew away, as we were preparing to take the picture; maybe a gust of wind blew that perfectly composed image into the mists of time, or that sudden burst of sun from behind a cloud ruined the perfect exposure. Or maybe, as has been the case for me for more than a few weeks now, everything is in its proper place and perfect working order except me. Lately, my mind has been so filled - and exhausted - from day-job angst, equations, computer code, briefing slides, and more angst, that about the only images I've managed to capture have been quick-grab iPhone images of some older prints of mine I have hanging in my office to send to a friend.

So, Photographs Not Taken well summarizes my body of work over the last several weeks ;-) But it also reminds me of other genuine "Photographs Not Taken" moments I experienced in the past, when, even though I was in the right state of mind and soul, and had perfectly well functioning camera and gear by my side, the photograph I wanted to take - the photograph I needed to take - I did not take, and is now gone forever. The photograph I am thinking of - more precisely the series of photographs I could easily have taken and never did - happened between 25 and 30 years ago, when my dad (an art restorer / artist) was still in his prime and worked at home in his upstairs studio. Except for this one precious photograph, I do not have any other visual record of my dad working as an art restorer in his studio! I have written before about this being the single greatest regret in my life as a photographer (thus far); namely, that I had never trained my eye and camera on my dad while he worked in his studio. A regret that stings only deeper each year that passes since he passed away 10 years ago.

Readers interested enough to look up the essays in Photographs Not Taken will be treated to many stories similar to mine, that range from whimsical, to personal, to tragic. Of course, the book contains no photographs (at least of the conventional variety ;-) and even the typesetting is kept to a bare minimum, the focus being squarely on the stories themselves. Collectively, these wonderful stories teach us what we must do to become better photographers. They remind us that we are - in each and every moment of our lives - immersed in an infinite field of ever-changing extraordinary and timeless images; and the fact that we have or have not a camera, or want or do not want or cannot use it, hardly even matters. Just look, revel in what you feel, and remember.

What Else a Thing Is

Since the beginning of the year, I have posted about a dozen and a half images from a (still evolving) portfolio with the tentative title Synesthetic Landscapes. The concept for this portfolio actually dates back to Thanksgiving 2009 (which my family and I celebrated in my in-laws' home in Coral Gables, Florida, and which I can date so precisely because it is the time my eye was first drawn to color-infused reflections in my mother-in-law's Nambe-like metal salt and pepper shakers). So the portfolio by now contains many more images than those I have had time to post. Indeed, I will likely self-publish a selection using Blurb. What I wish to explore a bit in this post, however, is - if you, kind reader, will indulge my usual predilection for philosophical musings and/or ramblings - is what my experience of capturing images for this portfolio reveals about the fundamental nature of "what a thing is, is-not, and may-be."

Let me start with this beautiful image of a print by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724):

It depicts a story that has many variants and reaches back into Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu stories. The poet John Godfrey Saxe immortalized the core idea for the western world in his poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant," that starts out...

It was six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind

...and (eventually) has the men "see" the elephant as a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope, depending on what part of the elephant's body they touch and probe...

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

A wikipedia article highlights some of the many uses this story (in all its myriad forms) has had as a metaphor in physics, biology, and religion. I view it as a provocative stepping stone for asking (for the moment, in the context of photography, but ultimately probing something rather deeper): "What is a 'thing' really?", or - better - "How fundamental an understanding of 'reality' does our privileged 'view' of it provide us with?"

Suppose you are asked to take a picture of a water glass (say, from the kitchen). What would you do? The simplest, most obvious, approach is to point your camera in its general direction and go "click." The result is a photograph of a glass, but - like the blind men groping at the elephant - the glass will have been captured from a single vantage point, using a fixed aperture and exposure time, with perhaps a filter sandwiched between the glass and our lens (maybe a polarizer to "cut out" some of the glare). Assuming the photograph is technically well executed, it can certainty serve as an adequate representation of  the glass, and others may use your image as a "symbol" to denote the "real" glass. But what - and how much - of the "glass" (and everything it "means" as an object in this universe) have you actually captured in your photograph? Your image is less an "image of the glass" than it is an "image of the glass taken by [substitute your name] taken on date D under conditions C using camera X with setting S." Your image - any image - is but one possible image of essentially an uncountable number of possible images that could have been taken of the glass.

Which image 'best' represents the glass? None, all, and one, depending on one's point of view and ontological predilections. The answer is none, because "privileged observers" are an anathema (at least to physics). There can be no "best" observer, or "best" image. Images may contain more or less useful information (for a certain goal), but - absent such an externally imposed constraint; i.e., an external aesthetic - no one image is "better" or "worse" than any other. The answer is all, because if an objective measure of "better" or "worse" cannot be defined, each image must be treated equally, and the set of all possible images - collectively - objectively defines (the visual representation of) the colored glass. And the answer is one, because there is always at least one aesthetic at play, namely that of the photographer. The photographer is a de facto privileged observer, and the "best" image is the one that best reflects the photographer's aesthetic. 

The caveat is that the resulting picture is not necessarily a picture of a "glass" (since the photographer may wish her image to convey something entirely different). Rather, it is a "picture of a glass taken by photographer X (at time t) for purpose P." This ontological distinction is often overlooked. Because an image is itself a physical thing and conveys information about another physical thing, we tend to interpret what we see in pictures literally: "this image shows a glass, and now, having seen it, I 'know' what this glass looks like and therefore what it is." And yet, this is so obviously not so. Taking a cue from the blind men and their elephant, we ask: What other "views" of this glass could we have, under what conditions (of the glass and our own inner thoughts and feelings), such that we gain a fuller, more complete, understanding of what the glass really is? 

What does all of this have to do with images on this page and kitchen glasses? These images, along with the last 16 or so Synesthetic Landscape images that I've posted on my blog in the last few months, are all "privileged views" of colored water glasses borrowed from my family's kitchen (captured using either Canon's EF/100mm or extraordinary MPE/65mm macro lenses, and using only naturally reflected, transmitted, and refracted light, no "Photoshopping"). Yet none of them depict a "glass" as such (indeed, I hope that for most viewers this will come as an unexpected revelation of what the images "really" are ;-) They are all attempts to pay homage to Minor White's well-known credo to take pictures of "what else" a thing is. Pictures of colored water glasses they all may be, but they are also each fleeting glimpses of other-wordly realms, of wild aurora borealis, arctic seascapes, sunsets, spring and summer meadows, and deserts. And, as well, they are - collectively - all snapshots of my ongoing efforts to grope my way toward understanding what a "water glass in my family's kitchen" really is.

I also imagine that somewhere in these synesthetic sunsets and meadows there is an image of the very same water glass that got me started on my aesthetic journey. And deeper still lies an image - only an image? - of my own eyes staring back at me. What is "more" or "less" real: the glass, the meadow, or the photographer? And are there - really - truly meaningful distinctions to be drawn among the three? Or is the universe but a vast, ineffable, self-created, ouroborian broth of nested self-perceptions? A recursive loop of void and substance? The elephant groping for its own meaning? A cosmos observing itself observing?

Symbolic Omniscience

"The basic characteristic of any artistic expression is the ordering of a visual impression into a coherent, complete, living form. The difference between a mere expression, however intense and revealing, and an artistic image of that expression, lies in the range and structure of its form. This structure is specific. The colors, lines, and shapes corresponding to our sense impressions are organized into a balance, a harmony, or rhythm that is is in an analogous correspondence with feelings; and these feelings are, in turn, analogues of thoughts and ideas. An artistic image, therefore, is more that a graph of emotions. It has meaning in depth, and, at each level, there is a corresponding level of human response to the world. In this way, an artistic form is a symbolic form grasped directly by the senses but reaching beyond them and connecting all the strata of our inner world of sense, feeling, and thought. The intensity of the sensory pattern strengthens the emotional and intellectual pattern; conversely, our intellect illuminates such a sensory pattern, investing it with symbolic power. This essential unity of primary sense experience and intellectual evaluation makes the artistic form unique in human experience and therefore in human culture. Our closest human experience is love, where again sensation, feeling, and idea live in a vital unity."

- GYORGY KEPES

Education of Vision

“For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.” 

- STANISLAW LEM

Solaris

Poetics of Space

"House, patch of meadow, oh evening light

Suddenly you acquire an almost human face

You are very near us,

embracing and embraced."

- RAINER MARIA RILKE

"Our house is our corner of the universe... it is our universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty... The house, like fire and water...[recalls]... flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasure of former days... We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection... The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace... The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

- GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Transcendent Order

"When we say that order is transcendent, we mean to say that somehow, the order makes contact with some other reality, or some other 'something,' which lies outside of and beyond our normal experience. We need a word for this something. It is hard  to find a suitable word, since, by definition, the something is beyond normal experience - and presumably, therefore, outside the range of things which have ordinary names... I use the word 'ground'  to refer to this something.

The ground is imagined to be a pure reality. It is a state of reality, or substance, which is in the universe, but not accessible to normal perception and normal awareness. It is, however, not assumed to be distant. It is generally assumed to be here where we are, and even more real, more authentic, than the reality we normally experience. It is thus supposed to be a state of matter, or state of things, or state of existence, which is more fundamental - and of which one might say that 'the universe is really made of this stuff.' All this is 'the ground.' It is the ground beneath our feet, the ultimate ground of substance on which all things stand.

Color not only establishes wholeness as a single quality, a oneness beyond structure.It begins to establish a connection with this ground. The inner light we experience in the cases of great color seems to penetrate beyond normal experience, reaching through to this ground, showing us this ground, making us feel the ground... the experience of inner light reveals an ultimate world of existence as it really is, perhaps, and shows us a glimpse of a reality which is more profound, more beautiful, than the one we experience every day...[it is the] first direct experience of the I."

- Christopher Alexander

The Nature of Order, Book 4:

Luminous Ground 

Transcendental Mirrors

"Bodies of still water are

themselves like minds;

transcendental mirrors, 

Platonic cameras

to catch and hold 

the phenomenological long enough 

for the onlooker to grasp its reality,

the eternal thing behind it."

- David Mason Greene

The Frail Duration

"There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about his sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, dreaming still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness."

- Herman Melville

"The Pacific," Moby Dick

On Seeing

"The child has to learn how to separate out the images which assail the newly-opened retina... a whole series of 'senses' are necessary... 

A sense of spatial immensity, in its greatness and in its smallness, disarticulating and spacing out, within a sphere of indefinite radius, the orbits of objects which press around us; 

A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through the endless chain of events and measureless distances of time which a sort of sluggishness of mind tends continually to condense for us in a thin layer of the past; 

A sense of number, discovering and grasping unflinchingly the bewildering multitude of material or living elements involved in the slightest change in the universe;

A sense of proportion, realizing as best we can the difference of physical scale which separates, both it rhythm and dimension, the atom from the nebula, the infinitesimal from the immense;

A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish in nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth without upsetting the physical unity of the world; 

A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible developments hidden in extremely slow development - extreme agitation concealed beneath a veil of immobility - the entirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things; 

A sense, lastly, of the organic, discovering physical links and structural unity under the superfical juxtaposition of successions and collectivities.

...we have only to rid our vision of the threefold illusion of smallness, plurality, and immobility for man effortlessly to take the central position... the momentary summit of an anthropogenesis which is itself the crown of a cosmogenesis. No longer will man be able to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither will he be able to see mankind unrelated to life, not life unrelated to the universe."

- Teilhard De Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

Music of the Eyes

"What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is 'real'; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(1908 - 1961)

"Perhaps art is just taking out

what you don't like

and putting in what you do.

There is no such thing 

as Abstraction. 

It is extraction, 

gravitation toward a 

certain direction... 

It is nearer to music, 

not the music of the ears, 

just the music of the eyes."

- Arthur Dove

(1880 - 1946)

Celestial Melodies

"...above all, I perceive in me with joy, a new tone, sounded by a violin within my innermost being. Its strings are tensed or relaxed through simple differences of temperature and illumination from without. Yet from deep with our being (an instrument that the conformity of habit has condemned to silence), there appears a song - out of those derivations, out of those vibrations -  from which all music arises. The weather, on specific days, leads us perchance from one sound to another. We rediscover the lost melody, which - as we might have guessed - appears with mathematical necessity, and which we, without knowing it, sang from the first moment on. Only these inner modifications - inner, despite the fact that they came from the outside - renew the outer world for me."

- Marcel Proust

Remembrance of Things Past

"It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlit night, when all waves rolled by like scrolls of silver, and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the brow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea."

- Herman Melville

Moby Dick

Illumination and Purification

"The outcome is this...the whole conscious being is open to spiritual experiences of every kind. It turns toward spiritual truth in thought, feeling, perception, and action; it is adjusted to respond rightly... The second thing is the free influx of all kinds of spiritual experience, experience of self, experience of God and of the divine creative power, experience of the cosmic consciousness, a direct contact with cosmic forces and with the hidden movements of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy, union, inner communication and various kinds of reciprocal relationship with other beings and with Nature as a whole, illumination of the heart through love and devotion, through spiritual joy and ecstasy, illumination of the senses and of the body through higher experiences, illumination of dynamic action in truth and love, purification of mind and spirit, heart, and soul."

- Emma Kunz

(1893 - 1963)

"Complete consciousness is present to us at all times, every moment, but we reject it in order to maintain our prejudices, our ideas. But sooner or later we will relinquish our ideas in favor of response... Life is consciousness of life itself."

-Agnes Martin

(1912 - 2004)

Hermeneutic Mysteries

"I see photography as an extraordinary means to undertake an exegesis of the Real, prompted by the first and literal level: the image of the evident objects. Any subsequent new meanings are discovered and rendered manifest through a hermeneutic process unfolding from the limited surface of the photograph; new interpretation will spring from the depth of the apparently flat surface of its image.

...

As with the sacred texts, all levels of meaning of a photograph are contained within its boundaries, simultaneously present to be discovered and revealed. Through a photograph we may see and transcend the object, moving further from its literal sense.

...

We are the interpreters of a great mystery: we belong entirely to reality and are part of this mystery.

...

In a 1995 presentation that Michelangelo Antonioni made of Beyond the Clouds, the film that proved to be the last one of his life, he said:

...we know that beneath the image revealed there is another one more faithful to reality, and that beneath this image there is another one, and again a new one under this last one, up to the true image of the absolute and mysterious reality that no one will ever see..."

- Silvio Wolf

"Photography and Torah"

(quoted from The Edge of Vision, by Lyle Rexer,  p. 281)

Appearances and Consciousness

"The order and regularity

of the appearances,

which we entitle nature,

we ourselves introduce.

We could never find them

in appearances,

had we not ourselves,

or the nature of our mind,

originally set them there."

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason

"Cosmic Consciousness is ... as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe ... Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence - would make him almost a member of a new species."

- Richard Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness

Timeless Unity

"A timeless, limitless, perfect unity underlies all our feeling and thought, underlies every form of existence and every part of our self. We know this through a deep, inner awareness for which we can give no explanation or proof, because it is itself the source of all knowledge, proof, and explanation. Depending on our degree of personal development, this awareness in us may be obscure or clear.

In reason and in nature this highest reality appears to us in its internal and external manifestations. We feel ourselves to be a part of this reality. As creatures both of nature and of reason, we constitute an entity which contains both nature and reason , and thus partakes of the divine. This opens two different directions to our mental life. We may, on the one hand, try to reduce the multiplicity and infinity of nature and reason to their original, divine unity. Or we may try to represent the inner creative unity of our selves in an external multiplicity. In doing the latter, we exercise capability, in doing the former, we show insight. Insight produces knowledge and science. 

Capability produces art... [Art] owes its existence to the creative activity of the human spirit, and... sprung from a unity, it must itself be a complete, coherent, and quasi-organic whole."

- Carl Gustav Carus

Physiologist / Painter (1789 - 1869)

Nine Letters on Landscape Painting

Revery of the Unknowable

"Science of nature has one goal:

To find both manyness and whole.

Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,'

The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.'

This mystery grasp without delay,

This secret always on display.

The true illusion celebrate,

Be joyful in the serious game!

No living thing lives separate:

One and Many are the same."

...

We can never directly see

what is true, that is, identical with

what is divine: we look at it

only in reflection, in example,

in the symbol, in individual

and related phenomena.

We perceive it as a life

beyond our grasp,

yet we cannot deny

our need to grasp it.

...

The highest achievement

of the human being

as a thinking being is to

have probed what is

knowable and quietly to

revere what is unknowable."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe on Science

Discarnate Muses and Artists

"To take photographs. Such was the entry point into photography. Along the creek beds and waterfalls seeing was always possession and camera affirmed ownership. Since then other modes, other doors have superseded, for example, to make photographs. The greed, however, has never really disappeared. Ownership seems to be the force that opens all the other doors. Yet, possession is not all. As I become more in harmony with the world around, through, and in me, the varieties of time weave together. Chronological time, the time my psyche takes, and creative time were once always at odds with each other. Less so now that the manifestations of inner growth are seen to be set in my path as if by an invisible discarnate friend. When I have sensed his presence, the photographs, afterward, seem like footprints... his or mine is the question!" 

- Minor White

Rites and Passages

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

-Jorge Luis Borges

"Borges and I"

Inseparability of Life & Cosmos

"The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe ... clashes with his society's concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments ... The difference between Eastern and Western concepts of man and his universe ... extends beyond strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego- as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, "I came into this world." But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos, 'peoples' in the same way that an apple tree 'apples.'" 

- Alan Watts,

Psychedelics and Religious Experience

Dreaming with Open Eyes

"From the mast-head the mirage is continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud-banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into view, although it really is outside our range of vision. Worst of all is the deceptive appearance of open water, caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice-cliffs below the horizon."

- Sir Ernest Shackleton, South! 

(from Captain's log of "Endurance")

“...you go into a state almost like an aware kind of sleep, which means you’re all free, just let it be, let it become, and with tremendous compassion towards everything—maybe human beings, or nature, or objects—you incorporate. It’s almost like a... in Buddhism, you would say incarnation. You become things, you become at atmosphere. And if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do do it. And a musician can do it, and I think a photographer can do that too. And that I would call the dreaming with open eyes."

- Ernst Haas, To Dream with Open Eyes

Postscript: Kind readers/viewers wishing to learn the "truth" behind the surreal dream-like seascape depicted above, may reveal the unabashed "reality" by clicking here; but be forewarned that doing so will also unavoidably strip away all essential meaning. Perhaps there is an aesthetic / semiotic analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at play here, wherein one cannot simultaneously both "know" (the truth behind) something and "understand" it equally well ;-)

Dissolution of Consciousness

"Seeing is perception 

with the original, 

unconditioned eye. 

It is a state of consciousness 

in which separation of 

photographer/subject, 

audience/image dissolves; 

in which a reality beyond words 

and concepts opens up, 

whose "point" or "meaning" is 

the direct experience itself."

- John Daido Loori

"We look at the world and 

see what we have learned to 

believe is there. 

We have been 

conditioned to expect... 

but, as photographers, 

we must learn to relax our beliefs...

if you look very intensely and slowly, 

things will happen that you 

never dreamed of before.” 

― Aaron Siskind

Mind and Mystery

"The state of mind of the photographer while creating is blank… For those who would equate 'blank' with a kind of emptiness, I must explain that this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed, pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition. Such a state of mind is not unlike a sheet of film itself – seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives life in it."

- Minor White

"In my search to find an opposite to reality, I discovered that if reality is the knowable and the potentially knowable, the opposite consists of things that the mind can’t comprehend. Among those things are keys to the existence of everything. The further we delve into what we are and what things are, the more mysterious we and they become."

- Wynn Bullock

Eternal Purity

"O King, you say that Atman is infinite. Well, that which is infinite must be unconditioned by time and space. Absence of duality in Atman renders it incapable of being a cause. A cause exists both before and after the effect, as clay does in respect of the jar. But, in Atman there is neither beginning nor end. Besides, a cause must modify or change itself to produce an effect. Atman being all and absolute is free from the possibility of change or modification. Atman is indestructible and immutable. It has never fallen from its nature. As there is no duality in Atman, so it is neither subject nor object. Nor is there any action in it. It is eternally pure like the blue sky or space. O King, and it is your own nature."

- Yoga-Vasistha

Where is the Universe?

"A Buddhist scholar named Nogaguna, who lived about A.D. 200, invented a whole dialectic and founded a school where the "leader" of the students would simply destroy all of their ideas - absolutely abolish their philosophic notions. And they would get the heebie-jeebies and see that the leader did not have the heebie-jeebies, that he seemed perfectly relaxed in having no particular point of view. 'Teacher, how can you stand it? We have to have something to hold on to.' And the teacher's response: 'Who does? Who are you?'

Eventually, of course, they discovered that it is not necessary to hang onto anything, to rely on anything. There is nothing to rely on because you are IT. It is like asking the question 'Where is the universe?'

Where is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there is no concrete floor underneath for the thing to crash, because the space goes out and out forever and ever and has no end.

What is it? What else could it be?

Of course, it is you."

Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Wynn Bullock: Color Light Abstractions

"Light to me is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe. My thinking has been deeply affected by the belief that everything is some form of radiant energy." - Wynn Bullock (1905 - 1975)

Wynn  Bullock is arguably one of the greatest fine-art photographers to have graced our world with his soulful mind, heart, and eye. He is also one of three photographers (of a bygone generation, relative to mine) that I deeply lament not having had the opportunity to meet and get to know personally (the other two being Ansel Adams and Minor White). Though I was certainly alive when Bullock passed away (and I was already "taking pictures"), I was but a young lad of 15, and had yet to appreciate the Buddhist transience of life and everything precious in it. Plenty of time to "get to know the greats..." (or so I thought)

How would my creative life have been different - what alternative paths would I have taken - had there been a chance to learn - and possibly muse with - such extraordinary artists; whose work I have learned to respect and resonate with on ever deeper levels as I grow into the late summer of my own life? Adams first showed me how nature can be seen as its own transcendent reality. And White how the best photographs are those whose "outer appearance" reflect one's "inner perceptions." But it was Bullock, whose work I came to know and admire deeply a few years after studying Adams and White, who (continues to) pave the way for my own creative journey; one that strives to combine - and transcend - the (nominally pseudo-orthogonal) aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of experience, thought, and reality.

Apart from living in slightly different times (I was born 55 years after Bullock) and different places (he on the west coast, I on the east), and apart from the fact that Bullock's work is well-known to almost all photographers and mine to almost none (outside of family, friends, and an occasional tip-of-the-hat from a kind reader of my blog), our respective histories and creative predilections share a few traits; I therefore feel an especially close affinity towards him. For starters, both of us were married twice, the first time rather unsuccessfully in what was more of a "trial" (in both literal and figurative senses), and not-at-all conducive to producing any kind of art - in Bullock's case, I was saddened to learn that his first wife thought his photography was a waste of time (mine was more understanding); she'd sometimes enter his darkroom to tear up his prints in fits of anger! In both cases, our second marriage found us soul-mates and muses.  Bullock's second marriage led to two girls; mine, to two boys.

The most important traits we share have to do with our photography: (1) we are both opportunistic, taking advantage of family trips and outings more than Ansel-Adams-like dedicated month-long trips away from home (reveling primarily in finding and revealing the transcendent nature of everyday reality), (2) we both incessantly experiment with new modes of visual expression (perpetually seeking that extra "spark" to ignite a new line of aesthetic inquiry), and (3) we both heavily ground our photography in intellectual - sometimes deeply metaphysical - musings (invoking images of time, space, reality, illusion, ...); a fact that should be obvious (on my side, at least) to anyone who has perused just the topics of my blog entries, much less their substance ;-) Bullock's musings may be sampled on his website (lovingly crafted and kept up-to-date by his eldest daughter, Barbara Bullock-Wilson) and in a few of his books that are still available: (1) Wynn Bullock: The Enchanted Landscape, Photographs 1940-1975, (2) Wynn Bullock: Photography a Way of Life, and (3) Wynn Bullock (Aperture Masters of Photography). (Links to other references are provided below).

And so we come to the point of this blog, which is to introduce interested readers to an extraordinary new book of Bullock's color abstracts - Wynn Bullock: Color Light Abstractions - which also serves as a catalog of a traveling exhibition that premiered on May 15, 2010 at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel,California. I label this book "new" not only because it has only recently been published (in 2010), but because it contains over 50 color light abstractions that have rarely before been seen in public! Though Bullock was primarily a black-and-white photographer (another trait we share), he had experimented heavily, in the late 50s and early 60s, with color. Unsatisfied with the color printing at the time, few outside his family and circle of friends ever saw samples of this work, and even then mostly via slide presentations. Inspired and helped by a close family friend (John Hong Hall, to whom the traveling exhibition is dedicated and whose moving story appears in an afterword to the book), the heirs to (and caretakers of) Bullock's work undertook the prodigious task of organizing, restoring, scanning, and printing 50+ year-old Kodachrome color slides.

I will spare readers a "description" of these images, since whatever pale words I may attach to my "experience" of them will so distort their essence - inevitably altering the meaning the images would convey on their own if viewed by your eyes only - that to do so would be an aesthetic injustice on my part. Suffice to say that this collection of color light abstracts is nothing short of breathtaking! Were one not told of how these surrealistic, other-wordly images came to be (a word or two on that in a second), but was simply presented with the finished portfolio, with only the implicit understanding that the images were obviously produced by a prodigiously gifted photographer, one would be forgiven for believing that it was all "some Photoshop trick," albeit an astoundingly creative - indeed, visionary - one! The fact that these images were produced c.1960 using everyday objects like broken shards of thick colored glass, beads, jewelry, polarizing filters, and both artificial and natural light, makes this already exquisite portfolio all the more remarkable. A short description of his method appears here, and also in a superb 30 min documentary on his life and work, Wynn Bullock: Photographer.

I have written before of heretofore having only three epiphanous reactions to photography monographs, to which I simply went "Wow!" upon seeing, and which fundamentally altered my perceptions of the creative potential of photography as an art form: (1) Bruce Barnbaum's Visual Symphony (in the 1970s), (2) Fay Godwin's Land  (middle 1980s), and (3) John Sexton's Recollections (in 2006). To this short list I must now add a fourth, Wynn Bullock's Color Light Abstractions. This work is, in a word, a masterpiece! 

Additional references: Wynn Bullock's biography appears here, and a sampling of color abstracts that appear in the book appear on this page. A 3-min video may be seen here. A portfolio of some of Bullock's black-and-white images appears in Lenswork Issue #55, available in Adobe pdf). A few books may also be ordered directly from Bullock's website. Other include: Wynn Bullock (Phaidon Press), Wynn Bullock (Scrimshaw Press), Wynn Bullock Photographing the Nude: The Beginnings of a Quest for Meaning, and The Photograph as Symbol. As of this writing, copies of Photography and Philosophy of Wynn Bullock (by Clyde Dilley, published in 1984) are also still available.

Postscript: I stumbled across Bullock's color abstractions somewhat synchronistically (at an age close to Bullock's when he first started experimenting with color), insofar as I have recently also embarked on what has turned out to be a multiyear "color experiment" in (what in my case, I call) "Synesthetic Landscapes" (and that I have discussed before). Though the specifics of our methods differ, like Bullock, I am essentially driven to photograph light itself, not the physical forms that light makes visible or otherwise gives shape and texture to. My "color abstract sources" (thus far, at least) have been impromptu / makeshift "in the field" mini studios consisting of doors or bottles of rum (among many, many other everyday "things"); the best results are eerily reminiscent of the hyperreal dimensions discovered first by Bullock: realms of fluidic time and space, ineffably infused with mysterious luminescent protoforms of life and consciousness ;-)

Rhythmic Orders

"As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit."

"Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find the thoughts of men of science compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers."

- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)

Postscript: interested readers are invited to peek "behind the curtain" to see the "reality" behind the synesthetic landscape expressed above. I will soon have much more to say about this image, the (still growing) portfolio of images from which it comes, and how it all fits in - synchronistically - with a wondrous new book of Wynn Bullock's color light abstractions (from the early 1960s).