All of a Piece

Oh, the mornings! Sometimes they were as sweet and ancient as the dawn of time. Looking out at the pooled mist lying in the valley I felt the sea that must have filled this basin in the valley eons before the present.

What moments like this do to me is bring me to a stillness that daily life too often shatters. In that stillness the wonder of it all fills me up like the mist in the valley, and makes me linger and sail out of myself to the trance state we call ‘witness.’ And sometimes I don’t remember the actual making of the photograph because the whole experience is all of a piece.

This quality of being present is what I love about the act of making a photograph. Ideas, even ideas about things beyond what is in front of me, slip though the veil between me and what’s out there, and bring the experience inside so that outside and inside blend together like the rangefinder image in the Leica, until there is an alignment, a sense of the whole.

When I recognize and understand that moment of alignment the photograph feels authentic.

Later on that day (15th) I flew to Washington DC to meet with a group of collectors and to have dinner with my daughter, Ariel. We met at a restaurant in a complex in DC that was and looked so different from the Tuscan countryside I left 12 hours before, but which had in common some of the same color palette, but in the most exaggerated way.