“Photograph silence” he asked ?
OK, I’ll give it a try:
———–
I saw the silence slip away
as the dawn, rushed in
effortlessly;
revealing
the daffodils mute;
in awe
of the wondering sparrow’s
“twee…
twee
…eeet ?”
now silent.
again.
———
I am a still photographer, my photos are silent and final. Yet gardens are not. They change with every glance of the eye, with every breeze, every play of light, with every moment of time. Our perceptions in gardens change constantly: fragrance wafts in, winds stroke our skin, sounds perk our ears.
A garden is a sensual experience that single images have trouble describing. When we capture a moment of time, the camera always lies, fossilizing a view-finder’s fantasy. So making a garden silent is an easy, even unconscious assumption. To make a photograph say silence is a challenge.
I wasn’t even thinking about making a photo when I made my first morning tour of the garden, but my friend David Perry’s own blog posting about silence must have been working on me. Suddenly a bird called out and I saw the silence of what remained. I grabbed my little camera.
But what I got did not sing to me at all, so I began to do a bit of manipulation:
I took away the cold color of an overcast dawn and enriched my initial exposure. These are easy things to do with any digital image tool and now I had an image that was beginning to be pleasing, but was not giving me any sense of silence. And the piece of hose I did not see as I was thinking about silence, now shouted at me.
So I cropped the photo a bit to balance the shapes that my pergola provided, retouched the hose, and then darkened and desaturated the color and overall exposure (while keeping the daffodils the same with a mask).
I now see the silence of the daffodils myself, but perhaps because I was there: I had heard the sparrow, I had seen the daffodils stand in awe. In the silence that remained, I had heard the beauty. So I added a poem.
I guess I cheated a bit to try and describe that moment. The camera can be so inadequate.
Silent. Again.
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