Photography satisfies my need to convey how I feel about what I see. Because I am hyper aware of movement in everything, I am consumed with the need to convey the motion I feel to others as my way of connecting visually.
To successfully overlay my images with a sense of the passage of time, I must align my felt-sense of motion with one or more aspects of the image I am capturing. I gain the visual harmony I seek by aligning my camera motion stroke with the flow I feel in the land.
Most photography renders our three-dimensional world into two dimensions; we are programmed to see in a series of static images. Since my first accidental foray into motion photography years ago, I have tried to layer time onto static images, and recently I realized I am also trying to expand a flat image into its three-dimensional body.
A few years ago, I spent several weeks on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Near the end of that trip, I decided to spend an hour and a half in a helicopter so that I could see the very vertical landscape from its more natural perspective, ranging from straight down to steeply oblique angles. And then, soon afterwards, I found myself in a tiny, light aircraft in Alaska, flying from Talkeetna to and around Denali, landing on Denali’s largest glacier, before taking off and returning to Talkeetna.
Spending hours looking at the land from that perspective, seeing not just the front of a mountain, but its sides, its back and its top, something permanently shifted in me. I realized that this is the way I see, what I have struggled to share with others. I now acknowledge this altered perspective of the three-dimensionality in landscape and in all of life. It is as though I have discovered a very new, deeply felt sense of the flow of beingness.
