Basically Good

Into Darkness. And back … #3

The other night I sat at my desk. In the dark. And I cried. For reasons I don’t want to get into here, and it didn’t matter really.

What matters for now is that I started the computer, opened Lightroom and looked at the photographs from Normandy. We had been there last fall just before the storms hit. And I knew there would be something there. I had brought back photographs from the beach. Abstracts showing sand and water when the tide was low.

And somewhere in there I found this. And instantly the title came to me.

Where my tears go.

I didn’t know what that meant then. But it felt right. And I started editing the file in Lightroom and later using NIK Silver Efex.

It had to be dark, it had to be timeless. It had to show the textures. But it didn’t need a whole lot of processing. I didn’t need to worry about sharpness that much. This image was full of mood. Of gesture.

And when I was done and sharing it to Instagram, i found the music to go with it as the fifth in the list of suggested tunes. “Reverie” by Claude Debussy.

Listening to the dreamy solo piano and looking at the photograph, with the events of the evening still being felt inside me, I found more words.

“When I sit in the dark and can’t even reach myself, so you can’t either, don’t be afraid. Fear is an old friend and all we do there in the shadows is talk and then he’ll leave.”

Without even realizing it at the time, I quoted Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence: “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” It wasn’t my intention, but it was there and made it to the surface,

So now I look at the photograph, listen to the music and read the words, I can see that moment again. I can see all those moments when I asked myself without any words where my tears would go.

I can see now the transition from right to left. From the firm to the fluid. And back again. I see a connection between those sides and that they need each other. And most of all I see a beauty and therefore maybe a reason to not feel bad about me crying.

I now have this photograph to remember. I have it as a documentation for what was there in my room in the dark with me. I did it right after I felt that. And maybe it meant something that I began doing this months before that evening. Or maybe I have been doing this even earlier. Years ago when I picked up my first camera. Or even earlier. Decades ago.

When I started breathing.

Into Darkness. And back … #2

So I was discharged last week from the day clinic I was being treated at for my anxiety, depression and panic attacks and during the last week I was frequently asked by the therapists as well as my fellow patients what I was expecting to happen once I got “out”.

Of course I had asked myself that very question. Because the inner child was raising it. What are we gonna do? Who is going to help us then? Will it not be the same once we leave the protected space of the clinic? Would we be afraid again? Would we be able to face the fear and cope? And that would have been the moment to start thinking again. And to identify with those thoughts.

It’s been three days now. I am sitting at the table of a cottage we rented for the honeymoon we didn’t have back when we married. I am looking out in the garden and the trees are swaying in the wind. The storms of the fall are coming to Normandy. There is a dramatic sky overhead as the sun is getting ready to disappear.

I have felt something in those three days. Saw myself. Saw us. What we and I could be. Both positive and negative, And I didn’t shy away from answering those questions.

We’ll live, my boy. We’ll help ourselves. It will not be the same, because we have a choice. We will be afraid again, because it is a part of being human. And we were able to face the fear and cope. We always were.

We were once born healthy and free. Something happened. And it’s not like it just happened to us.

If you are talking about depression, anxiety, substance abuse and dependence and trauma, you are probably talking about 80% of the population.

Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow, Childtrauma Academy

We have been reliving this past again and again and went back to the basement every night to watch those movies on end. And it made us believe that was us. That’s who we were and ever will be.

If that would have been the price to live with the days coming up, this seemingly endless stream of moments, that at least would have been logical. Maybe not the best solution, but a solution.

But we were scared of the future as well. Because we were trying to imagine it, while we were still here. The future never came. Just when you thought you had it, it turned into Now and it was gone.

It is so hard to accept, because it is so life-changing that it scares the bejesus out of us. That there is just this moment. And this one. And this one. That this is all we have to live. To love. To act. To create. And that there are more truths we need to learn to accept if we don’t want to be grabbed by the throat by anxiety every day of our lives and to find out the moment we’re dying that we missed out on so much, because we were hiding from the truth.

We will be sick. We will get old. Everybody and everything we loved and cared about will change and be separated from us. And we will die. There is nothing any of us can do about it. We can just see that this is true and get it over with.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Stop expecting. Stop anticipating. There is nothing to do in this life other than living. Being happy. Making others happy. Seeing the treetops sway in the wind. Hear the surf half a mile away. Taste the sea on your lips. Hear the music. Step back from everything and realize that it is you looking out of these eyes into that garden. That you are the space for all this to happen in. That there is no better place to be living in than where you are right now. That you are you wherever you go and all you will ever have is with you every moment of your life.

It’s been three days. And I was alive. Breathing in. Breathing out.

This is about questions. Those you get asked, but more importantly, those you ask yourself. The ones you ask yourself might be the same you get asked as when you are confronted with some questions you might find you don’t have an answer or at least not one that is good enough. More questions will arise once you have started this whole business of being aware of who you are, what you are, what you do and why and how you do it.

You might ask yourself why even bother and that would be the one question you’d need to answer, but those questions and the thinking about them in order to find some satisfying answer might be the best thing you can do for your photography.

There is for instance the question of what you do. Whether someone is trying to start a conversation at a cocktail party or it is you asking yourself what the hell it is you are doing. The first might be satisfied with “I am a photographer”, if not you’ll have to specify commercial, landscape, fashion or whatever it is you do. But is that good enough as an answer for yourself?

I always found it a bit strange to describe “in a sentence or less” what it is I am doing. And “photographer” really doesn’t cut it for me. I write. I play music. I think (way too much). There is so much more to it. I don’t think there is a single word or a short sequence of words that can say it all. I also won’t take the easy way out and call myself an “artist”. That word doesn’t mean anything to me, so I can’t use it.

My friend Toni Lovejoy once called me a “natural poet”. Merriam-Webster defines a poet also as “one (such as a creative artist) of great imaginative and expressive capabilities and special sensitivity to the medium”. With that I can live.

This is just one example of the kind of questions that will help you in your photography and also in your life as I think these are connected and what I think, feel and do as a human being will also find its way into my photographs.

What is important if you want to evolve as a human being and a natural poet, picturemaker, dancer, writer, musician, painter, photographer, ………. (your word here), is a sense of direction.

It is really crucial to try to find a sense of direction in life. I’ve been often walking in the Himalayas for many days and it is not always fun, (…) but if you have a sense of direction, every step is a kind of joy in the form of effort.  But if suddenly I get lost, (…) the despair and exhaustion sets in. Why should I walk a few steps more? I am not even sure if they are taking me nearer or further away from my goal.

Matthieu Ricard “The Skill Of Happiness”

To determine a direction, a general direction at least, you need to know where you are and where you want to go. Whether you then move along a straight line to get to your destination or a winding road, does not matter. Whether your path is straight or winding might say something about you, but it does not really matter if you don’t want it to. Also, the destination might change once you get started, you might redefine your goal once, twice or dozens of times along the way. As long as you stay on course and make sure you always have an idea about where you are, you can’t go wrong.

In ultrarunning we had a saying that I think very much applies to photography or any creative work:

90% is mental, the rest is in your head.

To find out where you are, I think you need to be able to look at what you do “not critically, or with self-deprecation or any sense of inferiority” and see what you really like and what not. What you would want to see in there which is missing right now. How you do things and why you do them like that. Whether there is a reason to keep doing it like that or whether something could be changed about it that would make the process feel more like “you”.

Once you start these questions, there is a chance you might see more things in everyday life, in books, in conversations, in paintings, in music, in any kind of stimulation, that can start another train of thought, that has some ties to photography.

So once you have found where you are and where you need to be, once you have that direction, you can make an informed choice about which workshop you want to book, which camera to buy, which software skill to learn and you realize that those are only tools. The important bit – finding out which thoughts and feelings are the basis for your personal creative work – has already been done.

Knowing this, you’ll find yourself to be more confident about what you are doing and to be really in charge of where the journey is going. And so you can see me hiking through the fields or taking the bus downtown and I am as hard at work on expressing myself creatively even without a camera, a guitar, a notebook, but using the one tool that is so uniquely me. My self.

If you are interested in discussing these kind of things in more depth, follow me on instagram @holgermischke or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/holgermischkephotography) to learn about my webinar towards the end of the year.

Into Darkness. And back… #1

I haven’t had panic attacks for some 9 years I guess. But last week I was out on the fields convinced I would fall. That my legs wouldn’t support me anymore. The same legs that have run ultramarathons up to 70 miles and have suffered through Ironman triathlons. But it wasn’t just that those once powerful legs threatened to give in. I was convinced that this was it. That I would kick the proverbial bucket there and then. Panic was back in my life.

When I wake up in the morning, my hands shake and when I start thinking about why that is, it doesn’t take me long to arrive at the conclusion that whatever it is, it will be fatal. Whenever I plan on leaving the house, the panic knows and it whispers in my ear that I can’t go, that I can finally break down and of course that I will die.

I have been there before and in the meantime I have been reading about that a lot, talked to several therapists and have enjoyed when people told me how reflected I was. How I could speak about my mental health with such ease and how wonderfully calm I was. And all the time the pressure was building up and I think a part of me knew that all that time. But some other part was referring to all the information I had and all the help and how all that and my intelligence would be enough to keep the horror at bay. It wasn’t.

The older you get, the heavier that baggage becomes you haven’t sorted through. So you run.

Bruce Springsteen

I had all the resources. I had friends. I had therapists. Access to all kinds of information and the brains to process all that. And most importantly I had and have Christina, who even though she had a lot on her plate as it was, was always patient and caring when I was down or worse than that.

What I didn’t have was the willingness to really change something to get well and finally be happy. I was afraid of changing anything. You’d rather stay in the misery you know than risking changes even if those could lead to something better. I was still listening to that other part which was telling me we were working on it. Until that first attack last week.

I think a panic attack is your body and brain telling you something is seriously wrong and since I hadn’t been listening for so long and ran from really changing something, it tells me using fear. Extreme fear.

A fear that is based on the fear we all have. The fear to get old, to become ill, to be left alone and of course to die. I can’t escape any of that and the earlier I make my peace with that, the better.

It’s challenging. It is hard. And sometimes it feels like I won’t make it. But I know that’s still that fear in me talking. That’s a child talking that’s still hurting and who thinks that those wounds will never heal.

I never considered myself much of an optimist, but I see this as something I need to do but also as something that will teach me a lot about me and life in general and that will influence my photography greatly. It will also tell me why I did what I did. As a photographer and as a human being. And that’s something I can’t wait to figure out.

To be continued…

“You might discover through Edward Weston’s work how basically good you are, or might become.”

Ansel Adams 1965 (in the Aperture Edward Weston Monograph “The Flame of Recognition”)

This quote by Ansel Adams is one of those that kept me thinking for years, that I felt I never had completely understood, but which also seemed to allow for more than one interpretation. One of these I will be talking about in this article. Somewhere towards the end all of this kind of unexpectedly comes full circle. Like so many things in life.

For now I’ll go back to a mid December morning two years ago when I woke up to fog over the fields with the sun just coming up in the east, casting beautiful light and promising to dissolve the fog in no time. I got up, got the camera and the dog and headed out.

Not far from my house I found the road disappearing behind some trees into the fog, leading lines from an electrical line running along the road and one of the poles being lit up by the sun on my right. The resulting image is a good example for what I want to talk about as I didn’t have any idea at capture what this was going to look like. I wasn’t pre-visualizing at all, the image just took me as think it should be. What this photograph could and should be only dawned on me later. As something else did.

When I looked through the photographs of that morning, I found the one with the disappearing road and the light coming in from the right. I knew there was something about the capture, but I couldn’t put my finger on it yet. I liked the composition, the setting and the fog. But I didn’t really feel where to go from there. So I converted to monochrome and there it finally happened. I found a mood I … well … didn’t like, that’s not the word. At the time I didn’t worry about it too much not coming up with the right word. I didn’t have to explain why the final image looked the way it did. Not to anyone but me. And for me the feeling I had with the result of the conversion to black and white and further processing was good enough.

It turned out that with this photograph I felt it was done when the mood had nothing at all to do anymore with the sun slowly dissolving the fog on a mid December morning. It was dark now. Gloomy. Breathless and promising something I didn’t want. It showed an unnatural darkness which was more than just the absence of light. It came from the inside. It felt like the anxiety I felt in me for years now. It was real.

But I kept coming back to that question. What was the right word? Which one would do now and ever? How do I define, describe and explain the point in processing when I am convinced I’m done? From a technical standpoint that varies with every photograph. Some need more work, some less. But there is something emotional that also determines when I can lean back and the pressure is gone. When I am satisfied. When something within me is satisfied.

Is it the artist in me I have to satisfy? Then again I never called myself an artist. The term feels so abstract to me, I don’t really know what I would have to feel about me to identify with that word. So I turned to simpler words. I often heard the word “storyteller” used, but finally I settled (if I had to chose one) for the title of “picture maker”. That at least is what I am doing. And by choosing between those two I came closer to answering who I am satisfying when I think my work is done. What it is I want to to achieve with my photographs.

One could argue that I could be a picture maker and also be a storyteller. Often photographers talk about stories their images are telling, messages they want to convey in their work. Don’t get me wrong – when I make my point now about what I think I can do with my images, what I hope is in there when I’m done working on them, I am not claiming to have found the ultimate truth which you would have to simply accept as fact. I believe this is different for everyone. What is not different is the need to be aware of what we are doing and why we are doing it in order to develop as a human being and therefore also as a photographer (storyteller, picture maker, musician, writer, artist, whatever you want to call it). Those are forever and undeniably connected. The evolution of you as a human will always need and contribute to the evolution of you as a photographer and vice versa.

So I thought I was a picture maker and not a storyteller. What made those two sides of the coin for me was that I thought of what you can transport in an image, preferably a print. I cannot directly convey a message that I have predefined. As a writer I can do that, I can simply describe in all necessary detail what it is I want the world or at least the reading world to know. And if I don’t want to sound like a science textbook I will use tools like metaphors and a certain vocabulary to inject beauty and above all mood into what I am writing.

As a photographer I can not describe my message in all detail. Whatever I use in creating my photograph, the best I can hope for is to find something to put in there, be it at point of capture or in post, that will make me emotionally respond to it. Again either at point of capture or in post. I can try to recreate the feeling I had when I looked at the scene that wanted me to record it. Or I can find another maybe even stronger feeling when I am editing the photograph. By making it into something I wish it could have been or by trying to have it reflect what I feel like when I am look at it. Whatever it may be, that was my answer to the question about when I am satisfied. When my need for emotional response is satisfied.

And then what? Then I am hoping whoever looks at my photograph will also feel something. Will have an emotional response. But it is very unlikely that this response would be exactly the same I had when making that photograph.

Some of us use words to prepare for or support a certain mood when presenting their work. I like to use a strong title for the photograph as well as two or three sentences maybe going along with the images. Not to explain an image, the photo and the text have to be strong enough to stand on their own. I see it as an invitation. I show you what I thought, what my mood was and now it’s on you to give us something to continue the conversation that started with the picture I made and the words I wrote.

I see this as an opportunity for viewer and photographer to establish a connection. What I want is for the viewer to do more than just consume the image like an ordinary product. I want them to find something in themselves that would wake up when they looked at my photo. But that would take someone who is capable to be touched like that.

And that’s were I come back to what Ansel Adams wrote about Edward Weston and his work. What I quoted at the top wasn’t everything he wrote. A few lines above he wrote this:

“Look at his photographs, look at them carefully, then look at yourselves – not critically, or with self-deprecation, or any sense of inferiority. Read the material from his Daybook and letters so carefully compiled, edited and associated with the photographs by Nancy Newhall.”

What Adams is asking of the viewer (and reader) is no small feat. You should be looking at the photographs and read the words. And then you should look at yourself in a way that reminds me a lot of mindfulness. Don’t judge, forget about the context of his life and yours, don’t compare. Just take in what he created and then look at what is happening inside you. Whether there is something moving. Something twitching and slowly starting to breathe.

That’s what happened to me when I looked at Ansel Adams photographs for the first time. Walker Evans. Edward Weston. And more of those who came before me. I saw something in those that can’t be seen and I saw it because it wasn’t my eyes seeing. I felt something in their work, that made me dream and tell myself stories. Which reminded me of reading “On The Road” when I was 16 or listening to “Born To Run” and having to buy a motorcycle after.

I think I got an idea then of how basically good I was or might become. This is what Weston gave us. And those of us who experienced that and wanted to pass it on became photographers. Storytellers and picture makers. Human beings. 

Recently I listened to an episode of the “Creative Banter” podcast by Cody Schultz and Ben Horne (episode 17 called “Master Amateur”), which was among other things dealing with titles. Titles like landscape photographer or nature photographer which people give themselves or are given by others to pigeonhole what they do.

Listening to what Cody and Ben had to say about this issue was inspiring enough to make me finally write down my thoughts about this. I am constantly trying to figure out what I am doing and why I am doing it the way I am. To develop an awareness for what we are doing in any of our endeavors is one of the most important things a human being can do, I think.

I have more than once expressed that the term artist does not work for me. Maybe it would have in the original sense, as the latin word “ars” means “skill” or “craft”. But the way it is used, I can’t subscribe to that. So when you ask me what I am, you won’t hear me saying that I am an artist.

So what am I? And this is not concerning this fundamental philosophical problem including where we come from and where we are headed. This is about me as a creative person. Being a creative person is connected to so many aspects of me or us as human beings or just entities, but it at least limits what I am trying to address here a bit.

On your website, on business cards, on social media – you are always required to describe who you are and what you are doing in a word, maybe two. Artist. Photographer. Guitarist. Writer. Musician. Sculptor. Painter. Whatever.

The problem is that if you name yourself any of these, chances are you are not covering everything you are and/or do. I do make photographs. I do write. I do play jazz guitar. I lice. I breathe. I think. I feel. I laugh. I cry. I’m afraid. So what does that make me?

For one thing I’d say: “Don’t ask for a single word. I give you my photographs, my words, my music. I am even willing to give you time we can spend together so we can really find out who we are and can be for each other.”

But if you really need something short, my friend Toni Lovejoy called me something the other day I could feel I could embrace. And with a few words of explanation that’s what I’ll be if you want something short.

To me you are a natural poet.

Toni Lovejoy

Webster’s defines a poet not only as someone writing poetry, but as “one of great imaginative and expressive capabilities and special sensitivity to the medium”.

As photographs are never true reproductions of the world around us, but represent emotions we had as someone experiencing a moment and trying to capture the emotional essence, we need imaginative and expressive capabilities to create such representations. An extensive knowledge how to use a medium to create manifestations of these emotions is a must and a special sensitivity for one or more mediums will enable the poet to make use of the aspects unique to a certain medium and of the interaction of several mediums when used together in creating a piece.

To be a “natural” poet I think simply means is that if we are able to let the creativity flow without forcing it and trying to “learn” it, we realize that this ability was there all along. We all can be natural poets, natural lovers, natural philosophers. We just have to find it again in ourselves, find the possibilities, the sources, the truth, the capabilities and the sensitivity.

Find the poet.

It’s been raining almost all day, and Ben’s been gone eight days now. A day as good as any to finally sit down and describe an idea, a chain of thoughts, a philosophical concept, if you will. Let me just go downstairs, grab a glass of wine, and put on some Hard Bop. I’ll have to go through about 3,000 words of notes taken and find out how I got there when I first tried to put it into words almost two months ago. I think it makes sense to present the thoughts in the sequence I had them. As a bonus, I list which song I am listening to while I am writing each part.

Giant Steps / John Coltrane
Driving in my car on a mid-October morning, this whole thing started by taking two things I believe in and putting them together in a creative context, say … photography.

The one thing is that I do believe that it is always now, and that really is all we have. The past is a memory of nows that are gone. The future is something that will happen further down the road, but when it actually happens, when we get there, it will no longer be the future. When it finally happens, it is now, and it will be then when and where it happens.

Brilliant Corners / Thelonious Monk
The second thing is that I do believe everything is connected on another level altogether than what we think life is. This connection is beyond what we can imagine, grasp and describe using our mind. It is this concept that made me think that whenever I take landscape images I take selfies because I am in there and I take pictures of all of us because we are all in there.

To finalize this first stream of thoughts I abstracted it to the max and arrived at the thought that every image we all ever take is one and the same. Forget about EXIF data, they were all taken in the now, and the subject matter is always everything. So all of us are taking that one image again. And again. And again. You should realize though, that this should be nothing to feel frustrated about. It should rather be liberating.

The Preacher / Horace Silver
A week later I was in the car again, driving along the same roads and it was no surprise that my thoughts would be going back to what I was thinking about a week before and expanding those.

Thinking about the statement that all of us are taking the same image over and over one might argue how the image can be the same when they all look different. I wasn’t talking about Tunnel View or the Eiffel Tower here, I am not talking about the forms you see in all those images. On the surface, we might think that those forms are or can convey what the image is about when they really are not.

When I say the image is always the same I of course don’t mean we all take the same image of a certain subject matter at a certain time of day under the same circumstances. Maybe it’s a picture of us looking for ourselves in the world of forms, which is desperate and hopeless. We might look there because that’s what we identify with, but that doesn’t mean that would be where we can find ourselves in our images or in the “real” world.

Scrapple from the apple / Dexter Gordon
There is a difference between those two worlds we are dealing with, the world of forms and the world of space. Our consciousness is the space in which those forms exist and in which things happen, with these forms interacting. You might have guessed by now that the ego of forms is an illusion, us identifying with form can be used as an escape from having to realize that all of the things we can touch, describe and own are not real. Not real enough to carry us and help us answer questions we can’t but would love to avoid.

It’s really all about space. About the stuff that’s in between things and forms. And that was when I started thinking about Miles Davis.

Autumn Leaves / Cannonball Adderley
Miles Davis said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” It’s about what’s in between. The silence. As a photographer, you should be aware, that in photography it’s not just about what you photograph, what’s in focus, what is lit. It is also about what you do not photograph, what is out of focus. What is left in the dark.

The next step in this thought that is growing more and more while I spend time with it, this next step was even more interesting than the others before or after in terms of how it came about. All the other steps were thoughts, building on other thoughts before them, associations, and again, forms. This isn’t optimal, but for now, this had to do. This next step though came as a feeling and it was really hard to describe it. As it is something that can’t really be described and what makes it even harder was the excitement I felt when I had this impression.

Doodlin’ / Horace Silver
For some reason (the feeling didn’t give an explanation) I felt that most of the inspiration for a story about that particular image is in the darkness, in the space, in the notes we don’t play. This space, our consciousness as felt in our images, inspire not just one definite story about those images. There is not just one that fits. That makes sense. As it is the same image all over again, it is also the same story all over again. But another version, another incarnation if you will. There is only that one image and that one story. It is always now and it is always the same story really, but it can be told in so many ways.

Cantaloupe Island / Herbie Hancock
In what is omitted in the image you will see the space that holds the forms. A consciousness that is yours and also the viewer’s consciousness. A place where the inspiration for the story lies. A story you try to make your own. As I was thinking and feeling this, I was searching for meaning (as we always do). In the images, the forms, and the space. For something I could call my style. For a reason, I was doing all that. As we progress through this chaos, this onslaught of thoughts and feelings, we’ll see that we need to abandon that search. But more on that later.

Walkin’ / Miles Davis
It was interesting and exciting finding something out not by trying to think about it but discovering it by removing everything that is hiding it. Peeling back the layers and revealing something underneath that was there, to begin with. This was not learning but finding back what we knew all along.

So at this point, I am thinking the image is always the same and so is the story. The forms in the images are not the same, it is what the individual photographer thinks is attracting or makes for a story as an interaction of the forms with each other and also the space if the photographer is aware of that. I also got a feeling that the space, what lies in the dark is where the most inspiration for the story is hidden. I can’t tell yet why that is so, it is more or less a hunch, however strong.

Softly as in a morning sunrise / Sonny Rollins
There was a morning towards the end of October and I woke up to a thought about why I had this feeling that the next most important question was about the dark, the space, and what it was holding that was so important.

The word that came up was “identification”. In what we call real life we identify with things so we can define ourselves, which we desperately need to do to find our place in this world. So when you look at an image like the one I posted above (“In Transit”) you look at the things and start thinking about what it all could mean? What can I make of that? But it is not those objects that will tell you anything.

When I took that image, our bed was right next to it and I woke up one day, rolled over, looked at the thing and I thought I saw a picture. I didn’t think too much then taking it, so you shouldn’t think too much looking at it. Don’t try to come up with anything. The moment you think about the image and what could be in there, you’re wrong. The space in you, which has no thingness, your consciousness will react and understand.

‘Round Midnight / Miles Davis
Coming to the question of what the ultimate image is, I’ll have to go back to what the original idea was. I was thinking about an image that would touch you so deep inside, it would make you cry and you might not even know why. That was all I had when it came to defining what it was.

Eventually, I started to try and outline that a bit more and as a next step to try and find a way how to actually take an image like that. I thought it had to be oozing with ME, with the space and the space would become so very obvious and important and it would supersede the form. And somehow the connection that exists between us all and everything would come into play when the space would be emphasized like that. But how would you go about making the space stand out and so in your face that you have no choice but to look at it? And understand what it is? If I could only answer those questions I felt I could make you catch at least a glimpse of yourself. And that could make you cry.

The reason you cry could be that it feels disturbing or confusing to see yourself in there as part of a truth you haven’t started to understand yet. It could also be you’re crying out of gratefulness and relief realizing you’re not alone with those questions, answers, and beliefs.

Jordu / Clifford Brown
I don’t think I am at a point where I can say that I have a final answer, I am sure there are more questions to come. But I find them all to be interesting and kind of necessary. I can’t find myself leaving any of those unanswered.

As for the question of how to take the ultimate image, I am at a loss for words, which might be the only right way to tackle this. The answer I have arrived at now about what the ultimate image could be is one I am not comfortable with as I am aware that getting closer to that would mean a significant departure from anything I thought photography would be.

Cascades / Oliver Nelson
For the ultimate image, you might need to let go of many things you feel define you as an artist. We as photographers want to show individual views of the world we live in. We as human beings want to be an individual so bad in order not to lose ourselves. I want you to look at my photographs, read my stories about them and then find your own stories and feelings looking at what I did.

The ultimate image might be the one that doesn’t need any form or story. The ultimate artist could be the one who gives up being an individual and embraces the oneness of us all. Who shows you the ever-changing reality in all of us. And witnesses the story we all tell in all the ways it can ever be told.