Reverie
The condition of being lost in thought can feel deflating or enriching. These works were created during such moments in life. They are expressions of reveries tied to specific moments in time, having less to do with photography and more to do with sentiment.
In life, all leaves look the same. In death, each leaf decays uniquely: soaking in the stagnant pool of a mid-summer day, tracing lines through the white powder of a winter snowpack, vying for attention in the pile of any autumn day, struggling for breath under the weight of a new generation – the smug of spring. I do not actively seek them out; our paths simply cross. These brief encounters can alter the course of a day, a life. They are the leaves that refuse to be forgotten and every year I gather more. Every year the circle grows.
Michigan’s southernmost wilderness – Nordhouse Dunes – became a place of constant retreat during the first year of the pandemic. On that vast stretch of beach, a single stump grounded my every trip. At all times of night and in every weather condition I searched for it, drifting north or south with the current, mostly submerged one week, high and dry the next. The stump is a work of art without assistance and the search continues.
We came upon one another while wandering in a vast wood, two solitary animals. After a brief courtship of silence, we circled in wide berths and settled ten feet apart, me on my belly, squirming forward six inches at a time, an earthworm on a damp forest floor, close enough to touch, our breath in rhythm, eye contact through a 100mm macro lens, stitching you together one frame at a time, the most meaningful portrait I’ve ever made.
The moon overlooking the city asks:
Where did all your people go?
No schoolbags padding
children’s backs
no children.
No hugs of passengers
landing from airplanes,
no airplanes landing.
Walking alone in the park,
my answer has
each sheltering person
in a room
like a planet, keeping distance
from other planets.
They listen to the world inside them,
as the world outside orbits away
un-peopling shops and streets,
taking some of their loved ones, too.
They stand masked, staring at
the coffins of their dead,
weeping six feet away.
— Dunya Mikhail
During the first wave of the pandemic in spring 2020, I made single exposure photographs that blurred the reality of nature during that uncertain time. In partnership with Kresge Arts in Detroit, Literary Arts Fellows responded to the images through poetry.
Chaos & Calm: The time was well past midnight when I rappelled into Dairyland, a massive ice climb on the southern shore of Lake Superior. My breath hovered without movement, illuminated by a headlight that flickered once and then died, bringing chaos from calm. Guided only by the light of a gibbous moon, I began to climb as high clouds swept in. Darkness neared complete as I pitched a tent in the woods above. Well into the next day a winter storm raged, plastering trees in a coat of white, bringing calm from chaos. On that night that I’ll never forget, I forced creativity from the only camera I had, a point-n-shoot, in order to calm the chaos that raged within.
The Spot – Through a crack in the rock, through turbulent water, into darkness, I swim. The humid air heavy like breath. The full acoustic spectrum of a subterranean sea pounding my soul. The chamber itself a reward, a logical stopping point, except for that crack that keeps going, except for that which can’t be ignored. Probing deeper into the cold, to the ledge at cavern’s end – the spot – sucking and surging from knees to chest from head to heart. The way out is not the way in, an underwater passageway following the light rounding a bend past the crack full circle in which I swim.
The most complex autumn oak leaf that’s ever fallen in front of me, photographed as tight as my macro lens would allow, inverted to my favorite hue of blue.
Every summer I solo kayak around Grand Island, a several-day retreat of self-reflection where my most meaningful interactions with nature occur. In Trout Bay, at the base of a sandstone cliff, a razor-thin beach separates Lake Superior. It is a cathedral where I often stop. While lying there brimming with emotion, my head fell sideways to meet the gaze of a frog half-buried in sand, inches away. For a long time we laid there, the two of us, and not once did you flinch or blink or otherwise acknowledge my presence.
While hammock loafing one late-summer day in Huron National Forest, I re-read a book about the structure of the universe in which Albert Einstein is said to have loafed for a year in his youth, “wasting” time. He went on to formulate the general theory of relativity. With that thought in mind and an afternoon left to waste, I began experimenting with the only tools I had, a monocular and a point-n-shoot. By holding the two together, a partial circle emerged in the camera’s viewfinder. By adding movement across the forest landscape in combination with a slow shutter speed over which I had no control, images resembling distant planets emerged. I made nine of them, one for every planet in our solar system before Pluto was evicted. Had I not read the book, I would not have made the images.
In early March 2020, before lockdowns, I was quarantined by my employer because of contact with a person who attended a conference of thousands of people where one person tested positive for COVID-19. So I found myself inside for 11 days. The rules of my self portrait were simple: only shoot photos of the night sky from a skylight window and only use one photo from each night in whatever composite emerged. I yearned to feel the touch of the moon, but it never touched back, suspended in time and space eternally.
November 3 – 38 leaves, 38 stems and 38 hearts for 38 years of life. For a brief period of time that typically aligns with my birthday, the Boston Ivy vine that lives on my brick house peaks in saturation and hue across the autumnal color spectrum. As midlife approaches, this annual die-off is a reminder that beauty peaks past its prime.