Seven years ago I posted some words about photography and the tiny butterflies I had started to see. I said then: Sociologists say we now only see the world through the lens...
I am not sure they are right but I do know that tiny skippers, azures, hairstreaks and bronzes became part of my world when I bought a camera with a slightly better zoom.
Now I stand here, at the edge of the woods, inside the fields, wishing mosquitoes and ticks away, so that my hand and the camera may not shake. Wishing time stand still... hoping to be their witness. I want to capture them, as a photographer would. No longer believing, like my mother once did in the old days, that trays decorated with butterfly wings were cool. I want to name them, define them, clearly establish my knowledge. I know now they are the tiny manifest I seek. As if these creatures could save me, grant me grace in this ephemeral infinity.
". . . why name them [rock formations]? . . . Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone--they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us. . . . Through naming comes knowing . . . . And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains . . . and it is we who are lost." Edward Abbey in “Desert Solitaire”, 1968.
Today, so many years later, I feel my universe has changed and expanded to see through many more lenses, not all of them comfortable ones. I see history at every turn, programmed teachings and language as matrix of almost impossible multiple lives. And life is no longer certain but the right action is becoming somewhat more clear. ^--^ Not so many abstractions, please! It is like, I can simply no longer prune branches on a shrub in the garden, chop off stems after flowers bloom, even cut flowers to bring them inside, for no other purpose than my greedy skewed aesthetics of beauty. The notion of tricking plants to bloom again by dead heading them brings me to cows that breed so as to give us milk... and that is all they do. The cow children get slaughtered for tender beef and the cows get mated for more milk. Native bees build nests inside hollow stems, some queens winter underground... tiny eastern tailed blues hatch on grasses that have not been mowed and feed on clover flowers that measure a few millimeters... Yes, things have changed a bit.
The photographs here were all taken this year, in the last two weeks in August, when the season started to shift, ever so subtly. I now use a Nikon Coolpix p900, with a great zoom and a manual option. Gifted to me by a very dear friend, it lets me take photos of hummingbirds on pet photo mode. Love it!
I also love social media quotes and apparently Henri Cartier-Bresson said once that cameras do not take photographs, our eyes do. I agree. In my world, photography is about communion of souls, not about technological extensions.
Now you are close to my world. 40 years staring into microscopes at minuscule worlds. Glory!
Love it, and feel it and hear it on the building blue moon.