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First, an explanation. In reflecting on my trip to Wyoming, it sometimes seems to me that it was more like a trip into a world that can not be shown for what it is, unless one stands before it oneself. This reminded my of something Susan Sontag wrote in "On Photography:" "Americans feel the reality of their country to be so stupendous, and mutable, that it would be rankest presumption to approach it in a classifying, scientific way. One could only get at it indirectly, by subterfuge—breaking it off into strange fragments that could somehow, by synecdoche, be taken for the whole." I like that word "synecdoche"—one of the consequences of modern English usage is that we have lost grand old words like that. "Synecdoche"—a part of something representing the whole. I often felt like that was at best what I could do with an image: use some part of an experienced view to stand for the whole (which could not be shown in an image—of course this is in some sense always true). So the image below is a synecdoche of the Tetons:   Robert Adams: "Form in a picture is justified by our experience of wholeness (coherence) in life, and if we are to be convincingly reminded by art of such experience then shape in the art has to be believably tentative, as fragile as meaning seems to be in life, as problematic even as the future is for {those who cast their lines into the sea or who raise a child}". (Modified by CN)
 Inside the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa—they've added a new "sculpture."
 My son and his family are here: spent a couple of nights on Madeira Beach with them. Fair, not exciting sunsets, but still, I don't see them really here on the east side of the Pinellas peninsula.
 Sunset from my window: Florida has its charms! However, last night, reading Peter Matthiesen, led me back to the Tetons with passages like this:
"The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning; the mountains are. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing we share . . . In the tent entrance . . . I watch the darkness rise out of the earth. The sunset fills the deepening blues with holy rays and turns a twilight raven into the silver bird of night as it passes into the shadow of the mountain."  After several weeks of the mountains of Wyoming, I thought a reminder of what can be found here in Tampa Bay would be appropriate.
 The much (over?-)photographed Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, Tetons National Park
 "O beautiful for spacious skies . . . for purple mountain majesties" and for those who care enough about the land and have the good sense to preserve large portions of it from greed and indifference. Happy 4th, everyone!
Above: Mount Moran and the Oxbow Bend of the Snake River. |
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