The encouragement to open a photography website has not been an unreasonable one. Makes sense on its face. I take a lot of pictures. Many people would enjoy them. Some would even buy them. But these perfectly reasonable reasons aren’t reason enough for me.
Now I know why. Can I explain it? Reasonably? I hope not. But here goes.
My father flew airplanes. Cool ones. At least for a small boy who knew nothing of war nor of the brutality between people. Airplanes, my father’s airplanes, were exotic. And amazing. And …. Up there. Until my 40s if I heard a plane, I looked up.
When I turned 30, I realized I was yearning for the West Coast of the US. When I was 40, I learned that vistas, long views, over lively terrain was an essential ingredient of my spiritual landscape – hence the West Coast, or, in fairness to the topographically challenged, open waters.
When I turned 50, I had committed to realizing fantastic structures through 3d visualization. These visualizations leaned heavily on well taken photographs of materials. I took the camera and went texture hunting.
My texture bounties were thin in favor of moody skies, wispy moments, quirky light. I haven’t been able to stop pointing the lens at these phenomena since.
These are the facts, or less concretely, the events. These are the parts of the story I can cram into word packages.
But why me? Why now? What is it about cloudscapes?
I know less about this than anything else about me. The events, the words, do not fully explain it. Maybe reasonably they do. But not fully.
To fully understand, I have to be of no mind. I have to abandon reason. I have to be carried away. I have to feel more than think. I have to listen more than speak. I have to move, puzzle, fail more than sit. I have to enjoy more than understand.
Clouds form as they do because, science. I love science, understanding, being swept up in the grandeur of the Atlantic Gyre. But that’s not why my lens is drawn to them.
I take pictures of cloudscapes because the Earth is playful.
And that is beyond reason.
