Its been a while. I have been on a year long tangent. In 2023, I attended the pinhole photography exhibit “Camera Obscura” in Regen, Germany, I was astounded by the mysterious quality of pinhole images. Though I have seen pinhole images before, this exceeded anything I had seen before. I acquired a pinhole camera and shot over one hundred rolls of film in that year, with each roll consisting of mysterious self portraits.
As any photographer knows, self portraits are one of the hardest things to capture. We see beauty in others, in nature, but rarely in ourselves.
I was already in a creative flow, working on a book of these ethereal images when I asked I asked Martha Casanave, an award winning photographer and teacher of pinhole photography to write an introduction. Her feedback was instrumental in helping me to reveal the connection between myself and my photography. I took another look and started writing Poetry as a way to understand the meaning for each photograph.
I realized that my photography and my poetry were one and the same. An internal dialog about the world around me. This is my journey into Mystery.
“Long and tumultuous is the journey from unconsciousness to the waking spring of total awareness. Our lives are fleeting, and the memories of that which was, or could have been, a constant drain and distraction from knowing ourselves and the world in fullness. We are now, and have been in the most fleeting and disconnected period in all of history, and because of this, art, the greatest force for the imagination ever devised, has risen to meet it. We live only to die, survived only by those things we created with love. Some say its a tragedy, others a comedy, but I call it The Epoch Ephemeral.
”
