Petrograph Gallery

Monday, October 17, 2011

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 6

One day I went hiking on the South Rim Trail and

stepped into a miracle.

My footprint

Not my footprints (fossil footprints of an ancient creature whose name I did

not record; let's call him Leon).

The miracle had nothing to do with my footprints or

Leon's. Here's how I described it in my journal:

Grand Canyon Journal

Sunday 30 January 2011

"Wind "

You walk and breathe and walk and breathe. You breathe without thinking.

You're doing all your thinking and feeling with your eyes. The Canyon's

beside you and what you're thinking is how to mark this place on your soul

and make it matter. Make it rearrange your bone structure and your

metabolism. Make you get up in the morning for sunrise, which is some-

thing you've almost never done.

You're thinking these things and you're aware, on and off, that it's hurt-you

bright and that the innermost of the four layers you're wearing, the sweaty

one you thought you'd have to shed, is now essential in all this wind. You're

thinking that your hands are swollen from swinging as you walk, and too

cold at the same time.

You walk and breathe and walk and breathe. On a curve in the South Rim

Trail, tearing over low scrub oak silhouetted against the bright distance,

comes a gust screaming in. You don't know it's coming. It hasn't reached you

yet. Milliseconds before it arrives you stop walking and yawn, unexpectedly.

Walking is tiring and you're on mile four, maybe five, and the wind has

wearied you. As you open your mouth and inhale--a big intake of sharp

January air--the wind hits you with a high-pitched, hollow, beautiful, fluted

howl.

And there's your miracle. You're startled out of your skin. For that portion

of that second, until your relentlessly logical, you-damn-well-wished-it-

wouldn't brain shatters the harmony, you and this place are the same thing.

You're startled because your lungs suddenly had superpowers and sucked

the air straight from the Canyon, and it came rushing to them with a

surprised yelp and it filled you to your soul's brim.

This really happens to you. It's a memory, it's not a fiction, not a metaphor.

For one split second of flawless harmony, the wind was inside you, not out.

You were this place.

These were some of the things I saw on my walk.

And I met these people, too, about 10 minutes before I yawned. They were all from Hawaii, and they were freezing.

The hike had got me thinking about scale: my lungs

sucking the air out of the Canyon. The shock of contrast

was what stayed with me. I wanted to print my shadow

shots in a way that was true to this place, that captured

the shock of scale and the immensity of erosion. And

the beauty of shadows. And I thought to myself, Hey,

self, why not print the shadow images on beach

pebbles? So much of the Canyon rock is lime and sand-

stone, products of ancient oceans...I decided when I got

home I would collect tiny white beach pebbles from the

Atlantic seaboard and print them with images of

thousand-feet-long black shadow streaks from the

Canyon. The results, together, might look lie abstract

Native American geometrics...

An idea that I haven't pursued: the shadows printed as musical

notes on a scale

This is more like it. A series of shadow-printed pebbles...

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Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.