In this issue

1. My Print of the week

2. Frontispiece

3. Making a Likeness-a Fork in the Road

4. Waiata mo te Ata (a poem for the day)- Love Like Water

5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

6. Endpapers

My Print of the week

I have come to believe that every place has its own season, that time when it addresses in its Sunday best.

The Maniototo, the place of my birth, is at its best and autumn and winter. The rich autumn colours, the golds of poplars and the richness of trees from foreign lands play a counterpoint to the cooling earth.

Fiordland, however, wears its finest finery in winter. The warmer seasons are predominantly browns and greens; however, the colours shift towards blues and yellows as winter approaches. Gone is the drab camouflage of spring and summer, and the air takes on a diaphanous sensuousness, coating the mountains, rivers and valleys and singing blues and whites.

It is wonderful to rise before dawn and make my way north and the halving darkness to the bottom of the Eglinton flat. I stop, park my car, and wait for the first light. I stomp around in the vibrating cold, feeling the numbness in my toes and glad for the two pairs of gloves and the warmth of my armpits.

I am alive. My nerve endings remind me of that.

On the morning when I made this image, an anti-cyclone was parked above me. There were no clouds and wind, only long skeins of mist, their faces turned upwards, slithering softly along the valley floor.

I waited for the first coming of light to touch the mountaintops and then begin its slow drift downwards to the base of the mountains.

The great photographer, Sam Abell, maintains that the art of photography lies in the art of framing. You can never beat the tyranny of the picture frame, but you can have a powerful influence on what it contains and what is contained within it.

And therein lies the joy of being a landscape photographer, of making the likeness of the conversation between you and the land.

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

As I've written before, each week, when I set about writing the newsletter (there has to be a better word to describe this weekly missive-suggestions welcome!), I am never really sure what direction it will follow. Often it will begin with a thought or a dim concept that floats in from somewhere out there. Usually, it arrives a day or two beforehand as I prepare myself for what has become something of a sacred duty. Some weeks, especially lately, so much has been going on that committing myself to paper (screen?), Makes me cringe good morning and want to call into bed and pull the covers over myself.

Yet I'm very aware that this is an essential part of your week for some of you, and you look forward to it. Well, at least you tell me that.

And that is reason enough to continue.

So, welcome to Issue Thirty-Two.

I'm going to call it the Blue Edition.

It follows its process.

First, I place the Fevered Mind links, which I've been gathering up for the last week or so, trying to find material that will be of interest and achieve my mission of ruining perfectly good coffee.

Sometimes it works.

Then the Print of the Week, and then I move on to the main body.

Winter is coming to Fiordland, and I see it in the lengthening shadows on my lawn, yellow light with a hint of blue, and a snap in the air. Then, finally, after an unforgettable summer, the weather begins to turn, and the tradewinds start to flow across the land.

Both of our big lakes are lower than I have ever seen them, and endless days of sunshine and drought are about to change.

For the next 2 to 3 months, constant winds from the west will be spilling rain gathered up from the Tasman Sea onto the mountains. As a result, there will be moody skies, many rainbows, and colossal drama.

I can barely wait.

Then, somewhere around June, the weather will settle, and we will have clean, crisp days like freshly washed sheets brought in from the washing line.

Every place has its proud season when it is at its most glorious.

For Fiordland, it is winter.

When snow ices, the mountains and the shadows turn a deep Prussian blue.

Bring it on, I say.

Making a Likeness- a Fork in the Road

I have always loved the phrase "making a likeness".

Those of you who have read back into the history of photography, right back to the beginning, will know that this is the phrase used to describe the act of photography. The term "taking" is an example of an advertising slogan becoming embedded in how we do and think about things.

In the early 1830s, when photography began to take off, its first Kaupapa was about documenting the world around it. People used photography to make accurate records of the world they saw and the things going on in it. In the beginning, it was a medium for documenting geography, geology, and to a lesser extent, culture.

However, what drove technological development (think: here is a way to make money) in the medium was portraiture. For the first time in human history, human beings could make an accurate likeness of themselves and each other. Before that, portraiture was the province of the professional portrait painter, who was paid to ennoble anyone who could afford it (in this case, the nobles and wealthy). The poor and man on the street had no such opportunity.

Photography took off. Many of the great studios would have multiple camera operators (the term photographer didn't come until much later on). Having made an appointment, your likeness would be made, and you would be shuffled quickly through the system. However, once you had the photograph in your hand, you had an indelible record of person(s), place and time.

I have a collection of photographs from my father's family, dating back to 1840, barely five years after the medium had begun to take off. They are small photographs, each beautifully annotated in copperplate, and they give me a sense of my ancestry.

Portrait photography, to my mind, is the true backbone of the medium. All the other genres are, in a way, the body built on the skeleton. Yet, despite its intrinsic importance in the saga of the human journey, it remains one of the most feared and fraught.

I had a mentor for twenty years, one of the Grand Old Men of New Zealand photography, a man both revered and feared for his blunt directness. Yet, despite his apparent roughness, Richard Poole was a deeply sensitive man with a genuine love for human beings and the human condition. As my mentor and friend, he taught me things about portrait photography I have yet to see written down or appear on a YouTube tutorial in my twenty years of learning from him. These are the subtle things, like how close you place a softbox to your subject to make the skin glow or how the subtle placement of the head could change the meaning of the portrait. He also taught me a lot about people's psychology, how to get the best out of the subject, and how to look for that indefinable and precise moment when it all came together. When you saw into the soul of your subject, and they allowed you to photograph them as they were.

One Sunday morning, Dick phoned me.

"Let's go for a drive", he said. "There's something I want you to learn."

By this time, he had taught me an enormous amount about studio photography, how to work with three lights or to make a single light do the work of three. I knew how to work with the main light, fill and backlight. I learned how to work the lighting ratios between them. I knew how to study my subject's face and its phrenology and choose the appropriate focal length for that person. Again, this is something I have never seen written down.

This particular morning, we headed to the gardens around the Homestead at Ilan University. He led me through the trees and rhododendrons, looking up as he went.

Then he explained to me how to treat a park setting as an outdoor studio. He showed me where the main light was (a gap in the trees), where the fill was coming from, and how the small opening in the background pushed enough light onto the subject to separate it from the background. Then he made a Polaroid of me to prove his thesis.

I got it.

It can be a terrifying and terrible responsibility when somebody asks you to "do" their portrait. Perhaps that is why it is one of the least popular genres. So few of us like the pictures others of made of us, and the thought of having to interact with a real human being is, for many of us, scarier than staring at the landscape. Which never criticises or answers back.

You can't make a portrait of any substance or depth unless you interact with your subject profoundly and intimately. Anything less than that is mere decoration or illustration. Or, worse still, a portrait of the photographer and their ego.

Decades ago, I came to a fork in the road. On the one hand, I could follow the path of making beautiful portraits or following the land's song. I dithered for about five or six months and then went with the whenua (land). Time, circumstance, and opportunity led me to explore the essence of the land.

Just recently, in the last few months, my exploration into the world writ small began to peter out. I realised my intense investigations were coming to an end. There was nothing left to say. The great English artist, David Hockney, puts it this way:

I knew there was a new road to follow. However, I wasn't quite sure what it was. But I knew it was coming. And so, it was a simple case of waiting until the opening became clear.

Then last week, Sarah asked me to "make a picture of me". What an honour! Whenever another beautiful human being asks me to make their likeness, I will do my best to oblige.

The time came, and the moment came. So I wandered around the garden, mentally thinking about the Kaupapa, feeling about how it should look. And there it was, just around the corner. I looked for the main light, I looked for the fill light, and I looked for the subtle hint of the backlight which would illuminate. The photographic studio outdoors.

The likeness made itself. When you are in the Zone, then things happen. The whole portrait took me perhaps two minutes.

"Are you done already?" She asked.

" Oh yes. All done."

The pressure of >1000 weddings teaches you to work accurately and fast.

But here is the thing. The little secret that so few people know and few know how to utilise.

When you make somebody's likeness, you are never making a likeness of that person.

Or, indeed, a likeness of yourself.

You are making a likeness of the relationship between you and them.

A likeness of the space between.

Waiata mo te ata (a poem for the day)- Love Like Water

Love Like Water

Sometimes

she brings her love

in the form of slowslithering raindrop snakes

 sliding down the pane,

 painting slow liquid hieroglyphs

on the breathfogged window of my heart.

Sometimes

her love rolls and spoils

and toils relentlessly

in the skirl and swirl

of seaweed tresses in a tidal pool.

And

sometimes

her love arrives like a wave,

following a longpouring path through the ocean of the night,

rising and rearing up

in a wide-eyed wondering loom of light,

before bursting apart

and tenderly flooding

the silent sombre sepulchre of my soul.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Straight to the pool room: a love letter to The Castle on its 25th anniversary — theconversation.com

The phrases “Tell him he’s dreamin’”, “That’s going straight to the pool room”, “How’s the serenity?” and “It’s the vibe” have become Aussie staples. These now-classic quotes all come from The Castle - voted the best Australian film ever in a recent poll.

The Secret Museum: Van Gogh’s Never-Before-Seen Sketchbooks — www.brainpickings.org

Given my soft spot for the sketchbooks of famous artists and private notebooks of great creators, I was delighted to discover that, unbeknownst to most, Vincent van Gogh kept one. In an 1882 letter to his brother Theo, he wrote: “My sketchbook shows that I try to catch things ‘in the act.

The Problem of Consciousness and Why it is a Problem in Physics — www.resonancescience.org

"I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter is derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

How a Brand Name Becomes Generic — www.nytimes.com

Pass the Kleenex, please. When you need to blow your nose, there’s a good chance you ask for a Kleenex, even if the box being handed to you doesn’t bear the Kimberly-Clark-owned Kleenex logo.

Marcus Aurelius on Embracing Mortality and the Key to Living with Presence — www.themarginalian.org

“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the great Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her beautiful meditation on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence.

Butterflied Leg of Lamb With Lemon Salsa Verde — cooking.nytimes.com

One of the joys of a butterflied leg of lamb is that it satisfies lovers of rare and medium-well meat at the same time. This is because of its uneven thickness. When you spread the meat out and roast or grill it at high heat, the thicker parts stay pinker than the thinner bits.

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators.

Smithsonian Magazine Announces Winners of Its 19th Annual Photo Contest — mymodernmet.com

A look at how we stayed connected during the pandemic took home the top prize at the 19th annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest. Sinsee Ho's timely photo beat out the 59 other finalist images, which were culled from over 47,000 entries.

Art Nouveau, the Ornate Architectural Style that Defined the Early 20th Century — mymodernmet.com

At the turn of the 20th century, a new architectural movement swept through Europe, creating some of the most spectacular monuments in history.

The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry’s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated — www.brainpickings.org

Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley considered what makes life worth living, insisting that in the midst of widespread death and despair, we must seek peace in the “murmur of streams, and the gracious waving

Aerial Photos Capture the Mesmerizing Enormous Solar Farms Around the World — mymodernmet.com

We talk a lot about renewable energy sources and moving toward a greener future. And in those discussions, solar power is at the forefront. But what does it actually look like to use solar panels on a large scale? Aerial photographer Tom Hegen traveled to three countries to take a look for himself.

End Papers

Over the last fortnight, a few chickens (vultures?) have come home to roost.

We decided to spend a couple of nights back in the Maniototo, where I was born. I have come to realise that the visits I make there, from time to time, are, in a way, about endings and beginnings. About resetting the clock.

We drove across from Te Anau, a minor journey (for me) of about five hours.

I was feeling a little tired but okay for all of that. Whatever okay means.

We were two kilometres away from our accommodation at Wedderburn and literally on the home straight.

I was looking forward to stopping for the day.

Suddenly I was across the road, sailing through a ditch, up the other side, through a barbed wire fence and into the farmer's paddock. Eventually, the car came to a halt. We drove out of the paddock, and, country boy that I am, I remembered to shut the gate behind me.

The car didn't seem that bad, despite my having snapped off two fence posts.

Eerily, I had been getting strong messages to make sure my car was insured (I hadn't been able to afford insurance for my car for some time), and I had taken out a policy only a few days beforehand.

We had the car checked out at a local garage, and the owner assured me that it would be safe to drive back to Te Anau.

On Friday, when I went to see the panel beater, I realised just how lucky we had been. Things could have been far worse; we could have rolled or had a head-on collision.

Anyway, long story short, it would seem that the car will be a write-off from the insurance company's point of view. So my beautiful Honda Odyssey, which has served me so well for four years, is about to leave me.

This leaves me with the problem that there won't be enough to buy anything decent after the excess and the bill for the fence without taking out a large loan. However, realising that we were kept safe from harm, I'm deeply grateful to "them" for their guidance and protection.

But wait, there's more.

I hadn't been feeling well for quite some time, so I went to see my GP. I had so many blood tests that I felt like the main course at a vampire's feast.

Anyway, the results came back, and one, in particular, has me somewhat worried. I can see a complex conversation with my GP and more tests ahead of me.

I am beginning to hate notifications from ManageMyHealth!

However, there is a blessing in all of this. I see it as (yet another) test of faith.

Of my faith in particular.

It is our glorious opportunity to work on polishing my soul.

I know that my troubles are mere vulture feed and that everybody is being put through the mill, ground smaller, more refined and more delicate.

So what can each of us do?

We can remember that the most incredible power in the universe is Love, which is unstoppable.

We can remember how blessed we are to be here in this moment and this place.

We can give thanks for the small but significant things, like being able to stand on the comfort of grass while we watch the Milky Way revolve in the heavens above us.

He whakawhetai.

Gratitude. The glowing child of Love.

Much Love to you all.

May you all have a wondrous, wondering week of wonder.

Tony Bridge

Sunday, April 10, 2022