Submerged Sunrise of Wonder
Illuminated Dandelion 1 by Eric Rennie Abraham Lincoln once quipped that God must really love the poor, because he made so many of them. The same might be said of dandelions, which brighten suburban lawns unbidden every spring. Dandelions are classified as weeds, perhaps because they require no cultivation and are not easily eradicated. But what did they do to deserve such ignominy? They have undeniable aesthetic appeal, albeit short-lived — hardly disqualifying in itself. Plus, dandelions are edible, exceptionally rich in vitamins and minerals, and can be made into wine. They have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over a thousand years, and they remain a staple of various herbal remedies around the world. Their lineage is impeccable, having been brought over on the Mayflower for their medicinal properties. So, apart from their unfortunate tendency to trespass on well-manicured suburban lawns, what’s not to like? Small wonder that the essayist nonpareil G.K. Chesterton used the dandelion as emblematic of what he called the “submerged sunrise of wonder” in life. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Chesterton was not afraid, as he put it, “to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.” He stated that “the primary problem for me… was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendor of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.” Chesterton seized on the lowly dandelion precisely because it was despised, then held it up as a sacred object. In his autobiography, he called attention to “the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.” He added, “The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed." As a landscape photographer, I generally do not seek out sweeping vistas. My subjects are usually much closer at hand, including objects I can pick up and hold in my hand. I often use a macro lens, which allows me to get in close, sometimes only inches away. When your subject fills your viewfinder, it makes no difference whether there is only one of them in the world or dozens sprinkled across your front yard. You are forced to see it for what it is, shorn of any context. And if you are paying the least attention, more often than not you will be astonished. One morning some years ago I was out for a walk when a Bible verse came to me out of the blue: "What God has made clean, do not call common." The verse in context applied to Jewish dietary laws. As an Episcopalian. I am not bound by such dietary restrictions – or at least none that my doctor hasn’t recommended to keep my cholesterol and glucose levels down. What could this verse possibly mean? I had been walking along a stretch of road that skirted a golf course near where I live. It was early in the morning, and the sun had lit up some wildflowers growing by the side of the road. I stopped to look, momentarily transfixed by their beauty. I made a mental note of where to find the flowers again, so I could come back to photograph them. They were just common wildflowers growing by the side of the road. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” I realized in that moment the Bible verse that had popped in head was more about what I should be seeing than what I should be eating. Chesterton had seized on the common dandelion as emblematic of all that was despised in the world. But he might just as easily have held up the common rung of humanity, many of them poor and despised. Lincoln was right in saying that God must love the poor because he made so many of them. And he commands us to love them as well. For starters, we must not call them common. We must learn to see them for who they are, creatures made in God’s image.
The Beauty of Decay
"Cotton Hollow"(2015) by Eric Rennie One of my images, entitled "Cotton Hollow," appear's in the Chateau Gallery's current exhibition entitled "The Beauty of Decay." The image depicts a 200-year-old cotton mill taken in 2015 at the Cotton Hollow Preserve along Roaring Brook in Glastonbury, CT. The show runs until April 1 at the Chateau Gallery in Louisville, KY. Here's a link to the exhibition: https://chateaugallery.com/exhibitions/the-beauty-in-decay. Nature's Refrain
"Japanese Maple after Rain" by Eric Rennie As I’ve gotten older, my world has gotten smaller — a not uncommon phenomenon among people my age. You’d think this would be problematic for a landscape photographer who must be out and about to practice his craft. I still mange to get out and about, just not so much nor as far. At the same time, I find I’m more alert to subjects closer to home, sometimes no farther than my own front yard. For some time I've had my eye on a Japanese maple outside my kitchen window. When it rains, I watch silver droplets dripping from dripping from its rain-slicked reddish leaves. A few times I’ve gotten out there with a camera and macro lens that allows me to photograph the leaves close up. But I had not yet captured anything as good as what I see in my mind’s eye. Then one day recently, the sun broke through right after a rain shower, and I thought my moment had arrived. In short order I was parked under the tree with my camera and tripod. I framed my shot and pressed the shutter. Nothing happened. I checked my settings and tried again. Still nothing. My heart sank. The camera’s battery was dead, and I had no backup. Equipment failure — to say nothing of human error — is an occupational hazard among landscape photographers. Not to mention to the vagaries of nature itself. But it’s not as if my battery failed as Big Foot sauntered across my lawn. I knew that my moment would come again; indeed, the sun broke through after another rain shower only a few days later. As another Connecticut resident, Mark Twain, quipped long ago, “If you don't like New England weather, wait a few minutes.” Landscape photography makes you very aware of what naturalist Rachel Carson was getting at when she said, "There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter." Dawn comes after night, and tomorrow it will be the same. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And likewise the seasons, spring after summer, year upon year. With such precision do they arrive — sunrise, sunset, summer and winter solstices — that you can time them to the second. All of which comes in handy if you’re a landscape photographer who must be out and about. It is one thing if I intend to photograph the Japanese maple in my front yard. Then I have only to look out my kitchen window to see the lighting conditions. But if I have to travel any distance, I may wish to consult an on-line app called an ephemeris. Just plug in any date and time of day, and it will show you on a Google map the exact angle of the sun in relation to what you want to shoot. Nature consults no calendar or timepiece, so how is it able to function with such uncanny precision? The short answer is that the earth operates as a giant metronome that marks time for everything on it. Since our planet started spinning 4.5 billion years ago, dawn has come after night some one trillion times, slowing by only 1.8 milliseconds per century during that time. The earth is tilted 23.5 degrees on its axis with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun, which accounts for the changing seasons as it tilts toward and then away from the sun on each circuit. All plant and animal life is governed at the cellular level by circadian rhythms (from the Latin circa diem, “about one day”) keyed to the earth’s rotation on its axis. Individual cells react to changes in light and temperature from the resulting cycles of day and night. These circadian rhythms ensure that everything is done in due season: the mating, the budding, the blossoming, the pollination, the nesting, the hatching, the birthing, the flowering, the molting, the migrating, the hibernating. Humans are no exception. Circadian rhythms control our body temperature, along with cardiovascular function, metabolism and sleep patterns. We begin to see why, as Rachel Carson said, we find the repeated refrains of nature so infinitely healing. We do not exist apart from nature; it literally pulses through our veins. From the earth’s orbit around the sun, to its ceaseless pirouette day by day, to the circadian rhythms that animate all life on this planet, we are all dancing to the same tune.
Picture a Brand New World
The title of this entry is taken from an advertising slogan cooked up by the best-selling mystery writer James Patterson when he was still a creative director for the J. Walter Thompson agency in the early 1980s. You may be forgiven if you have never heard of the slogan or the product it advertised, a Kodak disc camera that never really gained much traction in the marketplace. Yet Patterson was sufficiently pleased with his word-smithing that he mentioned it in a memoir published 40 years later. As it happens, I think “Picture a Brand New World” is a nifty bit of advertising craftsmanship, even if the product itself never really lived up to the promise of Patterson’s words. As a photographer, I can tell you they succinctly capture what I try to do when I pick up a camera. It may sound pretentious to say so. By this I do not mean to say I try to see the world in a way that has never been seen before. I mean that the world itself is brand new, and I try to see it the way it is. The author of Ecclesiastes said long ago that there is nothing new under the sun. According to tradition, this Old Testament work was written by King Solomon — reputedly the wisest of Israel’s king — more than 3,000 years ago. The sun has risen more than a million times since Solomon said there was nothing new under it. The things Solomon complained about then still plague us now. So when he says he has seen it all before, there are ample grounds for his lament. When I say I try to picture a brand new world, I’m referring not so much to what I see as to how I see it. Any geologist can make a good case that the rock on which we’re standing has been around for billions of years. But when I look through the viewfinder of my camera, I am seeing things with new eyes, which makes everything new. I don’t often photograph sunrises, because it’s hard not to produce a cliché. But when I’m up with the sun, I don’t care if it has risen a million times since King Solomon. For me, it is still the dawn of creation. “Behold, I make all things new,” the Lord proclaims in the New Testament’s concluding Book of Revelation. The Greek word kainos, translated as “new” in this passage, does not mean new as opposed to old. Kairos means “new” in a qualitative sense, as an advertiser might use the term, as in ”new and improved.” When God Almighty says he’s making all things new, he’s not conjuring up something out of thin air. He’s restoring it to its original condition. It is the world as God created it.
Scale
"Illuminated Mountain Laurel Blossoms 1" by Eric Rennie I was out walking in the state park at the end of my street and came upon a mountain laurel growing by the side of the path I was following through the woods. The bush had clusters of pink and white blossoms, like tiny umbrellas not yet fully open. I broke off a sprig and brought it back home with me. I put it in a small crystal vase and began photographing it under a beam of white light using a macro lens. A macro lens enables you to photograph flowers the way Georgia O'Keeffe painted them: larger than life. O’Keeffe was not a miniaturist in the usual sense of the term. Her subject matter might be small, but she painted her flowers as big as a mountain or a skyscraper, which she also painted. O’Keeffe, who grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, spent much of her early career in New York City, where speed and size were the order of the day. Who had time to notice a tiny flower growing in a bustling metropolis dominated by skyscrapers? “Paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it,” O’Keeffe remarked. “I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” As a young artist, O’Keeffe had fallen in with a group of “city men,” as the onetime farm girl described them, notably the gallery owner and photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, and his protege, Paul Strand. From them she learned first-hand about such photographic techniques as close-ups and close cropping, which enabled her to fill her canvases with objects that we normally think of as quite small. O’Keeffe had made an important discovery about the uses of scale in her art. When we talk about scale, we are normally referring to human scale: how large an object is in relation to how big we are. A mountain is much bigger than a human being, for example. An artist would normally have to reduce the scale of a mountain considerably just to fit it within the frame of a picture. However, the artist might depict the mountain in relation to something much smaller, like a house or a tree, in order to convey some sense of its actual size relative to a human scale. Landscape painters of the Hudson River School frequently used this technique in the 19th century, as did the photographer Ansel Adams in the next century when portraying Yosemite’s Half Dome. For all practical purposes, human scale means how an object appears to the human eye. The retina — itself only 30-40 mm in diameter — admits light from an enormous range of objects from the microbes to whole galaxies. Using a variety of lenses, including those found in microscopes and telescopes, I can photograph any of these by adjusting my distance from the subject. Not long ago, NASA released the first infrared photographs of deep space from the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope. There were more stars and galaxies in these images than anyone had ever been seen before — and the photos were taken of a patch of space no larger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Lately I have spent much of my time photographing objects on the other end of the scale, like those tiny mountain laurel blossoms I brought back from my walk in the state park. I photograph them for the same reason Georgia O’Keeffe painted them, because they are beautiful down to the smallest detail. I hope that my images will do them credit, but I take no credit for their existence. “God is really only another artist,” said Picasso, who ought to know. From my experience I can tell you that God -- an artist whose canvas is the whole universe -- is also an exquisite miniaturist.
|