Dusk Series

“The Dusk Series” deconstructs conventional photographic representations of landscapes. I began working on the series at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire in Autumn, 2014. After a day of writing I’d go for a walk in the woods at dusk and try to take photographs, but they were always out of focus due to the low light. One day I finally decided to stop fighting the hour and the season. I extended the shutter speed and quickly moved the camera up and down as I shot. I looked like some kind of strange bird, pecking on the edge of the woods.

The results astonished me. I hadn’t taken photographs of what I’d seen, but of the moment the imagination moves, hoping to grasp something beyond itself, bigger than itself, which can’t quite be viewed or captured. The thing that Scottish poet Annie Boutelle says in her poem, “Liminal,” is “so imperceptible / one perceives.” These photos caught the blurred moments between day and night, seen and intuited, light and dark, and “focused” on moments of transition rather than stability. If humans could experience geological time, these images would be what we’d see in the blink of our lifetimes. They looked less like photos than abstract pastels, giving them a hand-made quality that deepened the bond between seer and seen.

Please note that they have not been altered in any way on the computer; they are exclusively created with movement and light. To date I have created images for the Dusk Series in Wales, New England, Nova Scotia, Oregon, and the Brazilian Amazon.

“Shedding Light,” Guernica
Click above for more about the Dusk Series and “The Blink of our Lifetimes” exhibition noted below.