A blog about photography & transformative art
An artist knows how quickly light changes. Landscape painters are keenly aware of shadow movement. Painting outdoors is a humbling experience. Nothing stands still. The universe speeds up and becomes elusive, as if it were aware that someone was trying to capture it.
Gasping for breath on steep inclines, I tend to chatter to myself on the trail—especially when the trek gets tough. Maybe it's the endorphins, the energy drink, an over-baked brain, or simply oxygen deprivation. Anyone who listens gets an earful.
Legs wobbly from the fourteen miles of the previous day, it takes a new mile on this new day to get the rust out of my joints. There's little warmup. We're heading straight up the ancient Vishnu Schist. Almost two billion years old, these rocks are the strangest I've ever known. They vibrate with a kind of heavy energy. Gnarled in black and magenta, the rocks sucked us into them and the release from their pull takes much effort. One is silent in the compressed heat of the inner gorge. It's as if the energy that forged this metamorphic rock were still present, still glowing. The base of an ancient mountain range, these rocks were gashed by the upstart Colorado River in recent times (from a geological perspective). It's almost like they resent the intrusion. They seem grumpy this morning. Or is it just my legs?
There are spots on the Tonto Trail where the path fades to nothing. Experienced guides tell us to follow the path of least resistance, it's where the Tonto always goes. In the constant heat of this rolling plateau—halfway between Grand Canyon rim and Colorado River—the trail morphs into a sentient being. If it were a person, it would be skinny. Very skinny. I find myself talking aloud to the Tonto. Curiously, it talks back.
Deep in Grand Canyon the sudden realization hits us. We smell it. We look up and see it. Rain clouds. Early September means monsoon season—we get a taste of it most every year. A sudden ghost wind confirms it. We swallow hard and wait for thunder.
The clouds grumble at first, like a grumpy lion who's been awakened from his hot-afternoon nap. The ghost wind hits us again, licking us with its cool wetness. The desert sucks the wind dry and stillness returns, but the clouds grow by the minute. Dark, Darker, Black. Stillness always precedes thunder. We wait.
It is time to migrate to a warmer place, at least for a few weeks. Regular readers of La Macchina Fotografica have probably noticed a drop-off on the regularity of our posts as of late. Life has become complex and it's time for a vacation. When we return at the end of September our posts will resume with vigor. We promise to resume our prolific nature.
The confluence of major life events has had my head spinning with a special kind of disorientation. It is hard to keep track of where I've been, where I'm going, and exactly where I am. Contemporary life does not allow us to feel the passing of loved ones, nor appreciate aging and illness. More likely, it merely forces us into task-based activity.
Banks, lawyers, doctors, creditors, insurance agents, advisors, and accountants. Oh my. I dream about them and not in a good way. When someone dies, gets sick, or infirm, it activates an entire industry, like switching on an silent-and-ready, gigantic machine. Those of us left in mere mortal state navigate through the morass, unable to deal with the actuality of loss. There are too many forms to fill.
One doesn't touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Most every day I look through my images to see what resonates with me. Today I stopped at this photo taken in Parma a few years ago. Italian graffiti is so much more imaginative than what we generally find in America. It's angrier, wittier, and often more poignant. Don't touch a wolf in the midst of revolt. Words of wisdom with a hint of Italian drama.
When I was a very young boy, a neighborhood kid used to come to our back door, asking me if I wanted to play with him. He always had a big smile and a runny nose. He was a pleasant kid with a bad habit. He would draw telephone poles in my books. For some reason he was obsessed with them. We'd be playing in my room, I'd get distracted, then turn around to find a book filled with crayon-drawn telephone poles. Hundreds of them.
Head stuff swimming around in the skull—if I don't get out and move, my brain moves around inside itself. Kinetic energy. I've been on the phone too much, blabbing with far-away voices. Recorded voices, technical-support voices, customer-service voices. My brain goes round and round, trying to grasp the post-modern world. It isn't working.
