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I have always loved the illusion of time passing in a photograph. I am fascinated by early 19th century photographs: the blurred faces of babies, the serious adults trying to hold still, while the wind blows through the trees in the background. It is as if a more substantial chunk of life is captured during those five or ten seconds of exposure than in the sixtieth of a second bits we have learned to think of as reality. When cameras were freed from the tripod with fast films it gave us Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment�, but something was left behind as well, we lost the sense of the eternal moment.
There is another reality the camera can see when it is put back on the tripod and allowed to look for a longer time. It is the time that surrounds us, but that we rarely slow down enough to see: the time frame of rivers, of clouds and waves, earth time.
I have a beast of an old wooden movie tripod I bought about thirty years ago; over the years my cameras have come and gone, but that tripod has remained. It is my connection to the earth, a platform for vision.
I have never had much interest in capturing the fleeting instant, I prefer instead to find a place to set up my tripod and to wait for the world to reveal itself in front of me. Like meditation or still hunting, it requires that I slow down and pay attention. Sometimes I am too impatient, and after an hour or so I think nothing much is happening, I pack up and go home. Other times, when I am in the right place and right frame of mind, the world begins to unfold like a time-lapse film of a flower opening. I begin to enter into the rhythms of wave, earth and cloud, a vast eternity in which human events are just a passing thought.
Trying to photograph eternal time is like trying to cut a slice of air, it continually eludes my grasp. I have used many strategies in its pursuit. Sometimes I work with a view camera, slow film, and filters to lengthen the exposures, which are measured in seconds, minutes and even hours. I often use a nearly obsolete type of polaroid film that yields a negative; this film lends itself to an ancient quality through the chemical deterioration that occurs around the edges in its processing. I occasionally allow this deterioration to continue for days or weeks, eating into the image itself, a physical reflection of relentless time.
As to my subjects, I have found fertile ground where the world is most active; clouds and thunderstorms have been especially good material for my work, though in Tucson they are of necessity a seasonal pursuit. Flowing water has always drawn me; rivers, streams, and lately the crashing waves of the northern California coast. With my son, who is a pilot, I have also had an opportunity to explore time on a geologic scale. From the vantage point of a small plane I am able to photograph events which take years and millennia to occur, scenes of both creation and destruction.
My technique, like my subject matter, is varied. I have tried to approach it from many different ways. I have used almost every film and format at one time or another, and sometimes made my own when the one I wanted didn’t exist. I work in black and white, in color, and in between. I use natural light, or sometimes I bring my own light.
I have recently begun experimenting with hand-painting my photographs with encasustics, a technique involving coating with hot wax that goes back 2000 years. It is a wonderfully organic, unpredictable process that creates a skin-like texture to the work and frees if from the confines of the frame. The techniques I use are not the point, they are merely vehicles of expression, a means to mirror the constant ebb and flow of the passage of time.
It is a mystery, this sense of time at once passing and yet standing still. I think it is this aspect of reality that photography illustrates best. Every photograph is a metaphor of time, a slice out of that endless stream. It is a picture of something that once happened, and yet in the picture it is still happening: the chaos and change and wonder of the world briefly contained, within the four small edges of the photograph.