Our subconscious, reality, and the supernatural intersect at some point in life. If not during our active years, if we're lucky, then maybe as we lay dying. It is in the lamentations, over 23 years, in a small farming community while caring for the old and dying that I picked up the camera, again, after a fifty-year hiatus.
I felt it time to rejoin the celebration of life, at its peak, to involve myself in other life processes besides flowing with the intractable unveiling of the seasons, sharing in the simplicity, fortitude and resilience of rural America; and suffering the loss of once sturdy and robust farmers who weaken and die.
In 2015, I returned to Chicago from the farm and, with a Leica, immersed myself in urban life to experience people's sharing of public spaces, their interactions, the expression of the human condition in a highly dense environment; finding a new way of seeing.
With renewed enthusiasm and vigor I left my comfort zone to shoot the present moment and engage the viewer with the shared human experience behind the images leading to the proverbial one-thousand words. Or, as a friend put it, "finding a certain calmness about the photos, yet, they are fluid and active and alive."
After all, reality bereft of colors hints at the subconscious which, in turn, may allow us a peek at the supernatural. Is it possible, then, to discern mystery in mere gestures of the moment, to find "that intersection?"
Perhaps.
