Tag Archives: life upended by loss

Altered Horizons 51

For months my bags have been packed, ready for me to go flying off to some beautiful bright place. It seems like ages since I last flew. But I remember flying above Ithaca, watching the ground below as it stretched out endlessly and disappeared into the hazy horizon. That’s what I was thinking about when I fabricated this landscape. After inverting my favorite photo of an allium seed head into a negative image, I set it over a shot of my driveway that, on an early morning in April, was riddled with the remains of the last snowfall of the season.

The hills around home are greening up now. It’s getting harder to imagine ever wanting to leave here. Maybe next winter. Maybe I’ll fly away before the first snow of the season, before I grab up the camera and head for the driveway to photograph the new day’s pattern of white patches, believing it’s beautiful.

Altered Horizons 51

Reply to Robin

Altered Horizons 29

There were gigantic mountains of various sorted materials at the scrapyard. And one was gleaming. The photography students were being guided through the eerie landscape of Upstate Shredding in Owego, New York, a scene one might easily view as depressing, especially on a damp sunless day. The junkyard was filled with huge mounds of smashed cars, old abandoned appliances, and all the broken used-up detritus of modern human life. So I was drawn to whatever light I could find. As we approached the base of the glittering mountain, I noticed the ground was littered with softly shimmering metals, the remains of cutouts from the tops and bottoms of tin cans. Gold and silver riddled the muddy ground.

It reminded me of the time, as a kid, I discovered lots of quarters dropped in the street. It also brought to mind the line, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” For me, in the midst of all the waste, it was like finding a veritable treasure. I photographed the heck out of it. We all did.

Later, when I surveyed the images I’d shot, the mountain looked like a dark but gaudy pile of garbage under a dull sky. In Photoshop, I turned a picture of the tin-riddled mud upside down, inverted it into a negative, and pumped up the highlights to bring forth a moon.

REPLY TO ROBIN

Altered Horizons 11

REPLY TO ROBIN

Altered Horizons 1

When my life was upended by loss, I had to redefine myself and re-find my footing in the world. For a long time it took every bit of my energy just to keep myself right-side up. But, although my equilibrium was shattered, I discovered a strange fascination in playing with the up-rightness and stability of everything else around me. In my head, I flipped my surroundings upside down, inside out and helter-skelter, imagining new microenvironments. In a desperate attempt to rebuild stability and balance in my own life, I found myself concocting uncanny otherworldly landscapes.

A landscape, in its bare bones, consists of a sky that may or may not include a sun or a moon, and a ground that may be land or a body of water. The horizon line is the place where the sky meets the earth or touches the sea. It’s the horizon that intrigues me most because that’s the place in-between, where change happens, where all sorts of things are possible. The horizon is the farthest the eye can see. It is the limit or range of one’s experience, knowledge, or interest. The horizon also refers to the foreseeable future. Which is something I doggedly try to control these days.

Digital photography and Photoshop make it easy to indulge in this crazed fabricating of other worlds. It’s all based on reality as I photograph mostly natural elements with intriguing textures. Dropping the photos into Photoshop, I turn trees on their sides to become foregrounds. Oceans become skies. The sun is inverted into a black hole. A rock turns into the moon and an avocado becomes the sun. The tools in Photoshop allow me to invert foregrounds and backgrounds, and invent artificial horizons for these contrived landscapes.

Towards the end of designing each new scene, I build a frame around it. This part of the process is so satisfying. Therapeutic even. It’s like building a nest and carefully wrapping the whole thing up to contain it. To keep it cozy. And secure.

I call these Altered Horizons. Because everything in my life has been altered, changed to some different reality. Not by choice. But in these landscapes I can choose and control—A Someplace. A No-Place—Maybe you would say this is a fool’s-eye view of the world.