The Stone Butterfly

Dog Rock at Sunset, Ring Mountain, Corte Madera, CA.

There are moments when the very earth beneath our feet seems a vast and frozen sea. It is almost unimaginable, that at some point long ago, rock itself was indeed liquefied, molten and animate. But here we can imagine it. The exposed metamorphic rock pictured above seems to be breaching through the surface of the grassy melange; which itself appears to be heaving like a great ocean swell. This rock, at over 20 feet tall, is a rare example of what geologists call a high-grade metamorphic - a rock that once plunged deep into the firey bowels of the earth where it was baked at high pressure and temperature, drastically altered in structure and composition, and then squeezed back up to the surface in an almost entirely new form. What we see here is like an ultra-slow-motion image of a stone caterpillar emerging from its chyrsallis. 

I have always been fascinated by stone. It is durable, beautiful and old. Every one is unique. Every one has a distinct personality. The smaller ones are no less fascinating than the large. But the large ones are truly magnificent. A rock such as this possesses an aura not unlike that of a large tree. Perhaps all great works of nature do. I find this photograph enormously compelling. And it was pure luck - a miracle moment of light that occurred just as the sun was about to set. My photography is purely intuitive. It is guided by serendipity and chance and my photographs are almost always hand-held. Because my camera is a surrogate eye, and I am interested in what crosses it randomly. I walk and I follow my instincts and my most interesting images always turn out to be accidents, not designs. Ansel Adams said he doesn't take photographs, he makes them. But that is not what I do. I stumble upon beauty and then rush to capture it. My images are ephemeral. They are gifts. And every time I take my camera out I am throughly surprised, and blessed. I realize that I don't *do* anything. I have no talent, no special gift; other than the gift of seeing, of vision. What I saw in this strange and beautiful rock was something that represents all that is great and mysterious, not just about the earth, but about living on it and living period. That's why I take photopgraphs, to celebrate living.

 

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Train People

Waiting for the train that will never come.

The stories that most photographs tell us are generally obvious and mundane but some beg for interpretation and sense. What is going on here? This is not some matronly woman with her shopping bag, walking home through the woods after a long day at her job as a hotel maid. But it could be. It could be anything you want. Photographs can tell whatever stories we decide to create for them, as we have long been reminded. The amount of words a picture is worth is in the eye of the beholder, and in this image there is much left to the imagination. The long, wishbone shaped object on the left is actually a pine needle and the woman is a less than an inch tall. She's a train lady, a tiny, injection-molded plastic figurine more commonly seen adding realism to model train sets. She appears to be standing on the threshold of some amazing new world, a through-the-looking-glass land of staggering proportions. She seems to possess an exasperated resolve to press on, despite the long overdue bus and her strange surroundings. Her slumped shoulders say this, the drooping belt of her raincoat. White stockings and a plastic grocery sack with a container of LoPlait, a LeanCuisine and a quart of 2% milk. The lonely spinster liberated from the late shift. A lunchroom lady who stepped through some wormhole and found herself lost in the Pleistocene epoch. That is the beauty of photographs. Or one of them. You fill in the blanks. Be it a plastic person or one of flesh and bone, their stories are unknown to us. But we're not very comfortable with the unknown or the unexplained. We create stories to protect ourselves from mystery. So Big Foot, the Bermuda Triangle and UFO's help us live with our fears and unanswered questions. But so do movies, novels and gods. We are master story-tellers. We have to be. Because life can be scary and overwhelming. It can get out of scale and become too big for us. But photography, the great artistic equalizer, puts the power of capturing and interpreting this life into the hands of us all. And it is that false sense of power and control which makes it so tantalizing. 

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The Unplanned, the Unseen and the Unexpected

Water beads on leaf, Valley of the Moon, Sonoma, CA

The property of water that causes it to bead into these beautiful little domes is called cohesion. Water molecules are polar, like magnets. They carry a positive charge on one end of the molecule and a negative charge on the other. So water molecules attract one another and bunch together into droplets like the ones in the photograph above. Each drop is like a tiny jewel and each is unique. Some seem to be perfect spheres while others are irregular blobs. The large blob at center acts as magnifying lens allowing us to see the veins on the surface of the leaf. At the upper portion of this large droplet we can see a perfect reflection of the sun and the gentle curve of the sky above. In these tiny beads of water, clinging to a decaying leaf of a tree that lies on a lichen speckled rock, is the image of a ball of burning gas 93 million miles away. Fire and water. Earth and stone. A fleeting glimpse of those elements that make life possible and a stunning reminder of the fragility of that life. When we are at our best, human beings cling to each other and reflect a different kind of light. We can, but don't often tend, to bead up into beautiful gem-like spheres. But we are not water molecules, and this photograph was not taken as a metaphor. It was a chance encounter with hidden beauty taken with a macro lens. The unplanned, the unseen and the unexpected often make for the most uncanny of photographs. And this one turned out to be the most surprising of the day. 

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The Tunnel Light

Photographer caught by the photographer, Battery Townsley, Marin Headlands

In the 1930's, as Hitler showed clear signs of imminent aggression in Europe and Japan was consistently clashing with China, it was prudent for the United States to build up coastal defense batteries to protect against what was then the greatest weapon known to mankind - the battleship. The Bismarck and the Yamamoto, Germany and Japan's most advanced and deadly fighting ships, were fast and deadly weapons capable of hurling high explosive armor-piercing shells, accurately, at ranges of over 20 miles. Such weapons could wreak havoc in a harbor like New York or San Francisco. To protect against this terrifying threat America built a series of shore batteries, like the one partially pictured above, to keep such weapons away from sensitive targets like the shipyards of Oakland and Maine. 

The man seen above is photographing the light at the end of a tunnel that runs beneath Battery Townsley in the Marin Headlands, just north of San Francisco. This lovingly preserved relic is a photographer's dream. Concrete walls, heavy iron doors, water stains and streaks of rust - all partially buried in the hillside overlooking the Pacific. Deer graze here where sentries once stood watch and coyotes live amongst the undergrowth. Once a month aging volunteers lead tours inside the bunkers; which the rapidly advancing military technology of the time had rendered obsolete only a few short years after this facility was completed. These batteries never fired a shot in anger and their guns were cut up and sold for scrap shortly after the war. What 's left is what was too costly to remove or destroy - the concrete walls; which were built thick enough to withstand an aerial bombardment by traditional explosives. Now they are being slowly eaten away by salt spray and rain. But men built these walls, and men lived within them, and the spirit of those men, and of that particular moment in time when mere bombs and shells were all we had to fear, still permeates this facility. It is haunted by more than just ghosts. The Manhattan Project yielded more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They proved that we could also destroy ourselves. In such light as this this, these old gun emplacements, with their long metal tubes projecting from their man-made caves of hardened sand and lime, seem as quaint as frontier forts constructed of logs. Perhaps that's what this photographer was trying to capture here in the tunnel. Or maybe it was simply the light at the end of it.

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