Yesterday I had a wonderful and thought provoking experience. I spent the morning hiking in the woods of Acadia while photographing three of the carriage road bridges—Hemlock, Waterfall and Hadlock Brook. It was my second venture into these woods. My first…had been in an area that is very popular with visitors and there was little solitude. Yesterday, I was alone.
There is poetry in these forests of Acadia and the silence provokes philosophical thought. I was inspired and enjoyed my work.
I thought about what it means to see as an artist, or as a sensitive being for that matter. I thought how important it is to recognize things not merely for what they are, but for what they are not and for what they seem.
In fact everything that is, exists in many forms…there is formal identification—what is generally accepted as reality. There is perception, which can exist even without language, as when a speechless child observes something for the first time. There are associative identifications that all of us make, such as the identification we might make of a tree that looks like a birch when it actually is an aspen.
Then there is the identification we make of a thing by calling to mind what it is not. A tree, for example, is not a lamppost, though in fact it could become one. (Oh, there's another kind of identification—recognition of what a thing can become.)…
Then I thought about the space things occupy and the negative spaces that surround them and which are so important to artistic composition. That led me to a realization that there is something terribly inappropriate about our concept of "nothing." What is nothing if it is not the absence of something, but…