When I first began to use the phrase "close encounters" for my photographic aspirations it was probably an implicit reference to William Blake’s line in Auguries of Innocence, “to see a world in a grain of sand”. With time the camera became a way to explore the geography of what caught my attention and leave a trail of those investigations which usually involved the natural world. Though the acquisitive nature of photography is implicated in the phrase “capturing images”, the experience for me is more about receiving than taking. Photographic technology has become highly complex but my process is primarily about a sensory awareness that precedes judgement and a felt sense of the perceived image that guides my expression. When the best circumstances prevail, with a camera or in post-processing, I continue to think of the experience as a close encounter – in which intimacy is accompanied by expanse. In those moments making photographs is a way to savor the thrill of wonder and perhaps convey a sense of wholeness in what often seems like a fragmented world.
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In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation.
Frederick Sommer
The secret was to get inside whatever I was looking at...it simply meant making it more itself so that it became more evidently unique!
John Berger
The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.
Paul Cézanne
All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.
John Coltrane
When the wind blows the grass whistles and whispers in myths and riddles, and not in our language but one far older.
Mary Oliver
There is nothing inorganic...The earth is living poetry.
Henry David Thoreau
We can perceive things at all only because we are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive. We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh and that the world is perceiving itself through us.
David Abram
All poets in the moments, long or short, of poetry, if they are really poets, hear the other voice. Nothing distinguishes a poet from other men and women but those moments – rare and frequent – in which being themselves, they are other.
Octavio Paz
Each is intimately connected to the bottom and extremest reach of time.
James Agee
What we all want in our lives is ... a sense of active participation within life itself, and a way to put ourselves into accord with the mystery out of which we came and into which we will return.
Emmet Gowin
The sheer presence of materiality -- vast and deep, everything and everywhere!
David Hinton
World and mind, mind and nature, self and other, our breath and the atmosphere are not separate from each other.
Joan Halifax