I love the way monochrome and a little desaturation reveal the movement, structure, and contours of the forces at work in these images of water meeting an equal power: in the Columbia River Gorge, the foothills of Eastern Oregon, and above a snow-covered Icelandic shore.
These are images of the Bonneville Dam Spillway, salmon and steelhead, waterfalls, a deserted highway at the end of a powerful snowstorm, and an aerial sunrise.
I appreciate the x-ray translucence and approachability that can be found here in the enormous, dangerous, and inherently inhuman--even as these same hazardous shallows and depths provide inspiration, literal power, and a mystical reminder and imperative of the necessity to look beyond ourselves. Subjects like these sit at the intersection of resources and transcendence. This location is somehow very specific and special to the Pacific Northwest. It speaks in the rhythm of currents and directly to being.
I've made my home here for almost twenty years, but I come from the New York metropolitan area. So a subtle perpetual and enduring sense of wonder and also a little fear at being a immigrant in a land that has embraced me and my inner wildness is a crucial ingredient.
It could be argued that water--as a totem, as a resource, as an antagonist, as a partner--lies at the center of the mandala of Pacific Northwest life. I hope that this series opens a new or wider kind of pathway into your relationship with the abundant, the industrial, the ancient, and the quenching.
Even when water is still, we know its incredible, inevitable and (to the spirit) magical capacity not only to move but to change state. So when we capture that fleeting movement in a still image we are magicians, we cheat mortality, we get to keep something that cannot ever be held.
Water is always a story.