‘Unstill lifes’ of the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon provides a dramatic view of both time and space. Standing at its edge, I can see all the way down to the Colorado River gorge, where its 1.7 billion year old rock is one-third our planet's age. Rising up from the gorge nearly a mile is a stunning array of sedimentary colors, tones and shades, each representing advancing and retreating ocean coastlines' deposits of yet another layer of sandstone and shale, right up to the top, where I stand on the most recent layer, Kaibab Limestone, deposited about 250 million years ago.

As incredible as it is to see this colorful
evidence of nearly 1.5 billion years of elapsed time, it is just as dramatic to see such an enormous volume of space so clearly delineated by the canyon walls, plus, weather permitting, another 40 to 80 miles beyond.

Growing up ADHD, I have lived always with a hyperawareness of time's passing. For me, "there's never, ever been enough time".
Paradoxically, I'm obsessed with a need to convey motion within `still lifes'. Moving my camera during exposure, allows me to capture more data within the frame than when the camera is still. All of my images are single frame, and I limit my image manipulation to `in camera'.

For nearly forty years, I have been experimenting with how motion can alter elements of an image: camera stroke's direction versus the flow of the landscape can emphasize texture, while the stretching and blending of color and light deconstructs details, enabling me to replace the frozen moment with a fleeting one. Having never felt we see statically, I am driven to convey my visual sense of the passage of time: Accelerated Landscapes... Unstill Lifes...

On another level, I feel learning to visually deal with more data is analogous to what confronts us all today -- the ever-increasing onslaught of more and more information, which in turns leads to one of the most
prevailing refrains of our day --

`There's simply not enough time'.

GUNNAR PLAKE