Tag Archives: Trees

JUNE 6, 2015

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Softening

Some moments are rich with meaning and yet so simple as to be ordinary. Gianni was walking down the road with his son Giovanni, a 24 year old who, like many young adults, has been in revolt against all the values of his parents. It’s normal. And Giovanni has a tough act to follow with his father, who is rooted to the Tuscan earth like few people I have ever met. Often they are capable of a give and take that is complicated.

But this year something has changed, and as I watched them go down the road, in the glow of the last light of evening, I saw what could on the one hand be just a cliché, but in reality is the softening of differences that maturity brings. It was beautiful to me on all counts.

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MAY 25, 2015

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A Meadow

We were driving to Rome for a shoot I was to do at Cinecittá, when along the way we passed this meadow. It was perfect timing, as nature was calling, so what better place to stop and take in while letting out.

The abundance of wild flowers, the heady perfume of the meadow on a warm day, the gentle roll of the land, (they call it dolce, sweet) even the march of trees across the space, produced a peculiar sensation of awe and tenderness in all three of us as we stood on the verge of the meadow and looked in.

How often I have been stopped by something purely visual and yet encouraged to ‘take it in’ by the olfactory message that was being given off by where I was. I have learned to trust this instinct, this dream, or trance state, produced by the union of the whole sensory palette of seeing, hearing, smelling. Sight is not alone in our experience of place.

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MAY 24, 2015

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Sudden Light

It was a sudden light show. I moved from tree space to tree space watching it play out; where was the strongest sensation, what made me gasp? A few steps into the next pairing I saw the shadow of a man who was nearby, fall on the trunk of the cypress, and it was a sudden jolt of a new possibility.

There were others too, of the trees alone, and some are strong on their own, but this one made its way into the considerations for this blog. maybe on another day I would feel differently. Photography is like that.

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MAY 22, 2015

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Moon Song

This is the old barn we live in Tuscany. I saw it every day during that first year and no matter what angle, or what time of day it was, the place kept on surprising me. It’s so interesting how many aspects any place can have. All you have to do is keep looking and the seeing of it quickens the blood.

This Quercia, or what the Italians call an Oak, seems fairly nondescript by day, but that evening it sang to me under the moon.

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MAY 18, 2015

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Anniversary Day

One day a year Maggie and I travel Once More Around The Sun and find ourselves on the road where we were married 14 years ago. It is a road enclosed by tall Cypress trees, male and female trees mixed together for the last hundred years, or more and whose shapes tell you the difference. The female trees are rounder, thicker, taller, and have small, round, fruited pine cones the size of chestnuts, all over them. The males are slender, not s tall and seem to bend in the wind easier. They certainly are the inferior looking part of the species.

We always go for a walk there at the time of day that we were married, around 6 o’clock. Some days it’s sunny, as it was on our day, and others, as in this image, cooler, clouded over, grayer. We have had it every way and it doesn’t matter what kind of day it is, it’s still our day, and we always make the most of what we are given. Which, as you may have heard me say before, is what is at the heart of the photographic experience; ‘make the most of what you have.’

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MAY 14, 2015

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Simple Forms

There are moments and places that speak to me out of their simplest, most elemental nature. It could be the light – as it often is for me – or their form; mysterious, pure, layered, intricate, organic, ancient… This sunny space between two dark buildings announced itself, as places often do, by making me gasp when I turned into the lane, and when I gasp I know I am in the right place, or the right moment. I trust that gasp to be something from my source speaking without words. Words come later, but in the moment there is only the intake of breath that means, Now!

These simple forms; the house fronts in the light, the pair of quintessential Tuscan trees, the cypress and the pine, the face full of ivy on the building on the left, that flawless blue sky, the blush of pale color on the sunlit facade, all of these ordinary facts combined to make something ineffable, yet felt with the precision and economy of a Haiku.

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MAY 7, 2015

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What Catches the Eye

Who knows why any one stops any time, anywhere? Why this trough, which is probably a truck tire track, filled with rain water in a gravel-bedded parking area. But there it is, the puzzle that all photographers deal with all the time. Something catches the eye, with no rational reason for it. Maybe it was the color of the light as the day waned, which, when seen against the new green of the hills at that hour set off the slightly warmer feel of the gravel, or perhaps it was the piece of sky that made its poem in the trough, falling to earth in a way that made me pause. These are the mysteries of this remarkable medium that so many of us are in dialogue with, and that makes it is so compelling.

So the dialogue continues.

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APRIL 30, 2015

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Walking Stick

We had packed the house for a May 1 departure back to Tuscany. We were nearly done with the last details when Maggie walked out the door with this little walking stick I had bought a few weeks before. Why I bought it I had no real idea, just that the stick itself seemed to have a kind of ‘character’ that I felt might make its way into a still life; slender, with a small, knobby head, and a lovely flexibility that made me want to do a little dance when I picked it up.

It’s the kind of stick that as soon as one takes it in hand a transformation occurs; turning one into a Chaplin, or Chevalier, or a dandy, a fencer, a hoofer… and Maggie was no different as she strutted out the door and did her little jig and spin for me. At moments like this one can see their intimates in a new light because the playfulness and theatrics are revealing in sudden and fresh ways. Although with Maggie I am fortunate to have a partner who is always ready to play, and so I see different characters quite often. Still, if there is no camera in hand the transformations are lost to time.

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APRIL 28, 2015

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Zing

No matter how many times I passed this field the ‘call’ from the space zinged me. And yet there is nothing there that has any remarkable element that defines the space as special. It’s just a low lying field with a scraggly border of mixed trees. No eloquent stand of poplars bending in the breeze, no spreading oaks or cypresses marking the space, no ‘features’ that gave me reason to look again. But I always did.

Perhaps it is this innocent quality that we need to be attentive to in the world at large. The minor note that resonates deep within us and calls us to attention for reasons that remain somewhat undefined or illusive. That way the call is purely from something native within each of us, which is vulnerable to being awakened by simplicity rather than by more formal or intellectual values.

From these lessons a secret may be learned about what it is that constitutes our inner voice when we hear it call out to us from unexpected external sources.

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APRIL 14, 2015

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The Wonder of It

The snow bursts of cherry blossoms in the Luberon Valley drove me mad! The scent of the blossoms, their whiteness in the newly warmed spring air, the way they shivered in the faintest breeze, called me in close, as if to stand inside their space was to bring me closer to spring itself.

This search for the essential nature of anything that calls out to me has been my long time practice, and I find that in moments like this I want to be part the experience, not photographing it from the cool distance of the observer, but becoming integrated in it somehow. And this tree – one of many in the long lines of orchard trees – brought me close to that kind of trance state, where I stood, spellbound, and felt as if I could have stayed forever watching the barely discernible flutter of petals, while listening to the steady hum of the bees.

It almost doesn’t matter to me at that point what the photograph looks like in the camera, what matters is keeping the simple wonder of it all alive.

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