Petrograph Gallery

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

GRAND CANYON

AfterImage Series

Post 9

I left the Grand Canyon on 15 February 2011. I was sad to leave, but it was time to go home to Massachusetts and shovel snow.

Visually and metaphorically, the Canyon's shadows came with me, in my mind and my mind's eye. I loved the way they slashed through the rock and made it disappear, except at noon, when they vanished themselves. They seemed to have powers of instant erosion, replacing what was hard and solid and sure with what was suggested and mysterious and unknown. The shadows became emblems to me of the imagination, and the creative process itself.

Gail, a friend I met on a hike in Wales, told me about Carl Jung's thoughts on shadows. Jung, she said (while hiking through an abandoned slate mine) believed that everyone carries a shadow, a part of the self that is rarely expressed; the more the shadow edges into a person's conscious life, the better. The darker the shadow, the deeper the repression. And that, as we've learned, is the stuff of all kinds of problems...

I've been thinking about this. What would be hidden in the Canyon's shadow? What does the earth have pressed into its subconscious? I could do worse with my time than keep thinking about this.

But these are more recent thoughts. When I returned home from the Canyon in February what hit me was the scale of my everyday, East Coast life. Shadows here are attached to trees and people; they're not repositories of wonder. The horizon is near, and I'm within an hour of three state lines. We live not on, but in, a small scale, not a large one.

This reminded me of the idea I'd had of using beach pebbles as the surface on which to print my shadow photos. Transmute the great to small. Bring the Canyon and its immensities into the zone of my own tiny life. And bring it back to its roots in the sea; because without primeval seas, there would be no Canyon rock.

And when you think about it, coming back to the shadows themselves, we tend to think of shadows as being linked to the past--the days and memories and ghosts that stretch behind us in darkness. And yet, it occurred to me, shadows are actually projections of the self into the future. Light first strikes whatever object casts a shadow, before it strikes what the shadow is cast upon, below or next to it.

So our minds place shadows in the past, but our bodies cast them into the future. Once and future touchstones of what was, is, and can be. I can't imagine a better emblem for the erosive magnificence of the Grand Canyon.

So in March I gathered up a host of beach pebbles that Marguerite and I had collected along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada, in 2008. Here are some of them before they were printed:

And here's where they come from:

I printed them throughout the spring.

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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.