Michelangelo reportedly said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” This idea is certainly applicable to photography. I create an image by removing or reducing from the photograph what is not the image. Another way to look at it is that I extract from the data collected by the camera. Regardless of how you put it, however, I midwife the image. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/Wanting.” The image exists in the world but is somehow hidden; sometimes in the clutter of our heart’s inability to see what is in plain sight. As Goethe said: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”
| 14. Hurrahing in Harvest |
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| SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise |
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| Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour |
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| Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier |
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| Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? |
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| I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, |
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| Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; |
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| And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a |
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| Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? |
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| And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder |
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| Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— |
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| These things, these things were here and but the beholder |
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| Wanting; which two when they once meet, |
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| The heart rears wings bold and bolder |
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| And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. |
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No. 50, I Am But a Midwife
Michelangelo reportedly said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” This idea is certainly applicable to photography. I create an image by removing or reducing from the photograph what is not the image. Another way to look at it is that I extract from the data collected by the camera. Regardless of how you put it, however, I midwife the image. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/Wanting.” The image exists in the world but is somehow hidden; sometimes in the clutter of our heart’s inability to see what is in plain sight. As Goethe said: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”