In W B Yeats’ The Second Coming, he begins:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times is a series that I have been shooting for a long time. When I began the series I had been photographing nature only sporadically, but my increasing unease in the world led me to choose the natural world for tutoring. I tried to keep foremost in my mind the question of how I might distill the natural world’s organic profusion into minimal yet emotional imagery.
Ultimately, I was looking for a means of relief from the constant grappling of humans against nature, an antidote to the high barometer of conflict, a specific visual approach that would suggest, not shout, that might lend a degree of quietude and a point of contemplation, a sotto voce conversation between ourselves and our world.
The concept for the title Black Haiku: Poems for Dark Times originates from my reverence for Japanese haiku. Haiku is a minimal poetic form that does not rhyme. It does not always comfort. It does not conclude. But it does distill. It does invite meditation on the luminance within the ordinary. Most importantly to me, it dwells upon the beating heart of place.
My hope is that the viewer will find that these images possess an enigmatic and emotional quality; that they will decipher my pursuit of the philosophical dilemma of how much light is required to dispel darkness and just how it is to be found and held close.