Vesper Light
"Vesper Light" by Eric Rennie Medieval monks sanctified time by setting aside specified periods during the day for prayer, which they called the daily offices. In much the same way, landscape photographers are attuned to the advance of light and darkness in the natural world, since that is their subject. Their world is not cloistered, and there are usually no bells to summon him to prayer. But at its best, their work becomes a form of prayer, only they sanctify light rather than time as such. Much of my work is done at first light, a period the monks would call prime. Here I am working at the other end of the day, during the period the monks refer to as vespers.
Newness of Life
"Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. 21:5) I am old. Once you get to be my age, there is no denying it, unless you are “in denial,” as they say. And I would rather be old than just be an old fool. Being an old fool robs you of one of the chief compensations of age, which is wisdom. The reason wisdom comes with age is that you have seen it all before — or at least enough of it to avoid making the same foolish mistakes all over again. Part of me identifies with the world-weary author of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, who first observed that there is nothing new under the sun. “All is vanity and a striving after wind,” he wrote. Tradition holds that the author was King Solomon, although biblical scholars think otherwise. Whoever he was, he talked like he had seen it all before. Life is a wearisome business, he maintained. He has pursued pleasure to no good end. Wealth has provided no satisfaction, and even wisdom has brought only vexation. He has toiled ceaselessly with wisdom and knowledge and skill for riches that will eventually go to someone who did not toil for them and may be a fool besides. In the end, the wise man dies just like the fool, and both are soon forgotten. Solomon long anticipated Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who lamented, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” The sun has risen more than a million times since Solomon allegedly said there was nothing new under it. Pleasure, wealth and hard work are presumably no more worthwhile now than they ever were. Even wisdom proves unavailing if it does nothing more than reveal that all is vanity and a striving after wind. But if I am able to step out of my dull routine and pay close attention to life as it actually unfolds from moment to moment, I am astonished to discover that each moment is still sui generis. There is a biblical phrase that describes moments like this: newness of life. At my age, the adjective “new” rarely springs to mind when discussing my life. After all, the sun has risen more than 26,000 time since I saw my first sunrise. So what could possibly be new under it? And yet I find, especially when I have a camera in my hand, that the world can still appear brand spanking new. As a landscape photographer, I am often out and about at dawn’s early light. At such times it hardly matters that I am hobbling about on arthritic knees, or that I only see clearly because I have had cataracts removed. When the sun spills over the horizon, I often feel like I am privileged to be eyewitness to the dawn of creation, with birds singing like the morning stars that sang together and the heavenly beings that shouted for joy when the Lord laid the cornerstone of the earth in the Book of Job. At such times I know what Marcel Proust meant when he said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Portals
"Alex Among the Lilliputians" by Eric Rennie This photograph is one of 41 images selected by writer and curator Elizabeth Avedon for a juried competition called "Portals: Windows, Mirrors and Doors" at the PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. The show runs toguh Deceber 26, 2020. The charming little subject of this photograph is my then five-year-old granddaughter Alex, who was on an expedition to the Kid City Museum in Middletown, CT. exhibited at the A Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas and at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex Junction, Vermont. Nostalgia
"P-Town Trolley" by Eric Rennie My photograph, "P-Town Trolley," is on exhibit this month at a juried competition called "Nostalgia" at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS. This shot was purely opportunistic. I was standing on the sidewalk in Provincetown, MA some years ago when a tourist bus rolled up and came to a brief stop right where I was standing. The photo gods must have been smiling on me that day. The resulting image was pretty much what you see here, except that I desaturated the color a bit to give it a nostalgic feel. A Flower Blossoms for Its Own Joy
"Illuminated Lilly 3" by Eric Rennie Ask a botanist why flowers bloom, and you are likely to get a long-winded answer about bees and pollination and co-evolution. Ask the bees, and you are likely to get an answer similar to Willie Sutton’s when asked why he robbed banks. (“Because that’s where the money is.”) As far as bees are concerned, blossoms are where the nectar is. And if bees and flowers evolved together so the bees wind up inadvertently pollinating flowers while they gorge themselves on the nectar, that really is of no concern to the bee. Now ask a flower why it blooms, and you are likely to draw a blank. Their blossoms open unprompted each spring. The flowers act without reflection or premeditation, as surefooted as a tightrope walker on a high wire. They are presumably heedless of all those bees hovering about. And yet the bees’ seemingly aimless buzzing from flower to flower is essential to the flowers’ pollination, which is of concern primarily to the aforementioned botanist. If we must ascribe a motive to the flower’s blooming, we might turn to Oscar Wilde. He wrote, “A flower blossoms for its own joy.” This remark came in a letter in which Wilde argued that art exists for its own sake and for no other purpose. “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless,” he wrote. But whereas the uselessness of art might stand, those “useless” flowers feed bees, which make honey. They also pollinate the orchards and fields that feed humans. In suggesting that flowers blossom for the sheer joy of it, Wilde might fairly be accused on falling prey to the “pathetic fallacy,” that is, ascribing human emotions to plants, animals or inanimate objects. It is, of course, humans who find joy in the blossoming of a flower — not the least photographers like me who try to capture their beauty in useless works of art meant to bring some small measure of joy to others. This, needless to say, is of no concern to the flower or the bee — and only of concern to botanists who happen to be connoisseurs of art. Yet I strongly suspect there may be a bit of co-evolution involved in our interactions with flowers, which humans have been cultivating for thousands of years solely because they are beautiful.
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