Is it a distillation process? Or is it like carving circles into a pile of sand on a stormy day? In the past few years I felt it was important to press the shutter of a camera several hundred thousand times; I gathered little specks of what was caused by the motion of the universe in public or private moments. I jumped from point to point to point inside of the awesome explosion of things and ideas, the ever more complex dream or imaginary game of the gods.
As I continue, this is not a journey to discover conflict. It is not a journey to bring back something that could feed others’ lazy hunger for sensation. So many out there are employed to deliver just that; entire media empires push through a finely ground bitter sweet mass of danger and threat through their various outlets; narrated, illustrated and at times perfectly disgusting. What the large audiences have grown an appetite for is an outsourced and globalized simulation of an eventful and meaningful life on the edge.
What I look for is something quieter and subtler, more intimate. I constantly hunt for moments between moments, for the built up, a tension, a transition, a flow. I look for the soul in the living creatures and inanimate objects I encounter at various distances, and all around the planet. The process of taking a photograph is truly preverbal. For the right composite of layers to be captured, I need to shoot long before I think. Or I need to anticipate and align myself with the immense forces of the universe, dance with them and then emerge on the other side with something that looks like a gentle natural something.
The world and the universe will obviously eventually lose resemblance of what we know it as today. But while this happens, and while the universe gives birth to a new self, a certain range of layers comes to the surface. And it happens just about everywhere. Right now, whatever “now” might be.
Here are a few of the pieces pulled out of the collection. They are arranged to form a circle. We enter as the wind blows water and dust particles across the sky, and after a journey, we come across a woman letting the wind unfold a transparent scarf between her hands. How much of the world is man made? Or in the larger sense of things, how much is not? And are we experiencing a distillation process? Or are we riding a dust speck away from a center of a brilliant explosion. Or all of the above?
Beijing, April 2014
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