Breathing Light Issue #85

1.Koorero Timatanga-Frontispiece

2. On expressing metaphors

3. Waiata mou te Ata-Poem for the day

5. Koorero Whakamutunga-Endpapers

Frontispiece

Koorero Timatanga

Atamaarie e te whanau:

Good morning everybody

How do we mark the passing of the seasons of the year?

Perhaps it is via our devices or the calendars that enslave us. Maybe it is by a subtle shift in the light, colour, and intensity.

Or perhaps it is in something more commonplace and ordinary.

If we have the eyes and heart to see it.

Each morning, when I get up in the dark to make Sarah’s lunch for her and bring her coffee, I note the imminent arrival of daylight. Ever so slowly, the singing bell of the incoming day is pealing away the dark skin of the night.

Ka whiti te raa.

It is day. The sun has risen.

On the beautiful, still, autumn mornings here in Kerikeri spiced with a hint of frost and a lovely chilliness, I impatiently await the arrival of the first shafts of sunlight. Finally, the sun slowly levers itself above the horizon and lavishly paints the kitchen interior with a deep, buttery gold light. It only lasts a minute or two, and then the saturated hues fade to white.

 And the day began its journey.

A couple of issues ago, I shared a picture of that light falling on a different part of the room, some 40 degrees towards the east.

I looked at the light and realised that the sun was moving north for the (our southern) winter. It was seeking warmer climes. In many ways, that first light was a seasonal sundial.

When we become sensitised to the colour (hue), direction and quality of light, we become aware that we have an inbuilt sundial for the day and an inbuilt moondial for the night.

Our tupuna (ancestors) have known this since time immemorial, before the Gregorian calendar and machines like watches, clocks and digital timekeeping devices.

Which led me to another thought.

What would we do if all our clocks, watches, etc., suddenly became inoperative?

 Would we adjust and cope?

 I suspect we would.

On expressing metaphors.

Each morning, when I arise, usually before sunrise, I like to go for a walk up the hill to the small grove in the cul-de-sac across the road. It is a time for karakia (prayer) to remember who I am and where I am and to give thanks for making it to the front end of yet another day. I will often turn and face the glimmer of day’s arrival above the horizon to the east. I will feel into the night and its passing, and the blistered silence that comes from the fact that there is no traffic in the night is clear of the chaotic energy streams of human beings awake and consumed by the labyrinth of their individual purpose. Walking allows me to assemble my thoughts and plans. Someone once said that angels talk to a man when he walks, and, in many ways, that is true for me, especially when the Muse of Words is talking to me.

On my way up the hill, I pass a messy (at least in my human mind) garden full of plants allowed to do their own thing. The house owners at the top of the hill are not gardeners, and I am grateful for that because it allows me to watch the passage of time and the passing of the year. Right now, as I write this, sitting on one side of my computer is a cup of coffee and on the other side a desiccated leaf I picked up from the footpath. These two are contrasting metaphors because a morning cup of coffee talks about life and beginnings. At the same time, the leaf tells me that all life is circular, that all things intertwine and interlock, and that everything is a cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Across the summer, I have watched the leaves fall green and full, and then the leprosy of time passing gradually drains the memory from them until all that remains is a series of intricate lacy veins. The joy of being an artist and using a camera is that I can document these continuing, overlapping stages, preserve them in another way and for a longer time, and then share what I have observed. Perhaps the camera is a way of cheating the relentless metronome of time.

On my way back from one of my walks, I glanced up into the rafters of the small forest. Of late, I have found myself raising my gaze from the world at my feet to the world above, from the wonder of Papatuuaanuku, my Mother the Earth, to the glory of Ranginui, my father the sky, the ruler of my upper three chakras.

Five leaves dangled from the branches, clinging to the branch that had given them birth, becoming desiccated and soon to fall. I stared at them in wonder and prayed that I would return with my camera before they made their way to the forest floor. Somehow, their perfect irregularity struck me as a metaphor for our transition through life, from beginning to end and then beginning again.

Part of the joy of postproduction is having sufficient tools in the toolbox to realise in concrete form what comes to mind.

Sitting at my computer with the raw capture, I asked the image what direction it would like me to take it. Then I remembered a plug-in I had not used for quite some time. It had rolled to the bottom of the toolbox, hidden underneath the spanners and screwdrivers of my digital process.

With the advent of AI, the latest versions of Photoshop offer me all sorts of possibilities. Now, I can create anything I wish, including conjuring up images from nothing, should I choose to do so. However, the photograph as a document means that I cannot stray too far into the imaginary but rather stay grounded in a space between Earth and Sky.

I began to ask myself how I could talk about the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth in what had shown itself to me. How could I evoke the past, present, and future in a visual form?

An app I have not used in a long time suddenly rattled its way to the upper levels of the toolbox. Exposure X5 is a plug-in with an incredible range of “looks” that reference photography from its beginning, making it easy to evoke the obsolete processes that were mainstream in the medium’s early days. I began reflecting on my journey through photography and the years I spent in the darkroom, exploring the more arcane corners of the medium as it was then.

Before photography finally settled upon salts of silver as the basis for film emulsions, there was also a vein that considered platinum and palladium for making an image. There is much to be said for wandering through the back catalogue of photographic history and its processes and bringing them into the modern digital world. However, doing this for its own sake seems a relatively empty attempt to find an edge and claw oneself in front of others who are content to float in the middle of the current. It is essential to have a reason for reaching for the antique and anchor it to something meaningful.

Anything else is mere illustration.

Listening to the file, I found myself reaching for Exposure (which has suddenly declared itself to be the tool of choice) and looking for a platinum monochromatic process that would point both to the past and the future, anchoring its feet on the circular timeline. Desaturating the background and brushing texture into it reached back into the watercolour traditions of the 19^th century. At the same time, the crisp, sharply delineated leaves passed through the finite traditions of large-format film photography into the remarkable processes available to us with the digital medium.

Ansel Adams talks about pre-visualisation, which is seeing the final image before you make the exposure. As he puts it, the negative (raw file) is the score, while the print is the performance.

Is a finished digital file a print?

No, it is not.

It only has substance as a concrete object, a work on paper that can be picked up and handled.

The textural quality of this work tells me that it wants to be printed on handmade Japanese washi paper, itself the product of a thousand-year-old printmaking tradition.

Waiata Mou Te Ata-Poem for the Day

Moon and Palm Leaves song

Sliptoeing up the hill

I pause greedily-needily to gather in lungfuls (and lungs full)

of decayspiced autumn-scented air

and press my heaving heart back into place.

I wobble on feet that have shuffled hesitantly and uncertainly through the slowblack slurry of the night

and

breathe myself down into my Mother’s womb.

Only then

is it safe to look up.

The palm fronds are splaying wide-fingered across the sky

and slowly windsweeping away the night.

The halfmoon half-unmoon

peers tentatively through slippery clouds

and the ebony shadow of the palm fingers,

while off to the left

the staccato overarch of the Milky Way,

which has been drawing nearer since the Beginning,

composes impossible braille symphonies

in polka-dotted rhymes of flickering blue.

EndPapers

Koorero Whakamutunga

I am still experimenting with Breathing Light, with what to include and what to leave out.

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Most days, when I get up, I scroll through the various feeds on my phone, noting the chaos and turmoil in the world. These days, I spend less and less time on it because what I read is inevitably sad and unhappy. I cannot help wondering if all this doom and gloom is a deliberate ploy on the part of the media to keep us involved and in a state of fear.

Fortunately, the balance comes from the small things I observe in the world around me, in a bumblebee asleep on a flower (that seems to have become a bit of a recurring leitmotif for me when I look back across images I have made over the last few years).

It comes from the wonder of planting broad beans in the garden, watching them burst through the soil, tending them, and knowing that they will bear fruit, which I can turn into food.

New life brings new possibilities.

The circular journey of life, death and rebirth is shown to us daily in the simplest of things.

Perhaps the message of life lies not in expectations of the future but in releasing the baggage of the past. And we all have baggage.

Over the last 18 years, as I have moved around, living here and there, constantly on the move, I have found myself reducing the amount of stuff I have amassed, each time giving stuff away as I make my next move.

It is about to happen again. I will be returning to Te Ana-au next week to pack up my stuff and move permanently north. Hopefully, it will be the last time, allowing me to finally settle amongst my people and my tupuna and find another way to serve them.

As Mahatma Gandhi put it,

“If you want to see the change, be the change”.

I am deeply grateful to the natural world for reminding me of how little I need, of the importance of looking and listening and celebrating the gifts given each day. It reminds me that at the closing of my cycles around the sun, my body will return to Papatuuaanuku, my mind will return to Ranginui, and my wairua will travel on to a new body, mind and journey.

Wherever you are on your own path as an expression of IO Matua Kore, the Master of All, may your days be filled with wonder, joy, and a celebration of the infinite cycle of life.

May the coming week bring you love, strength, insight, truth, and peace, the only things we may ask of our Creator. 

As always, let us walk gently upon our Mother and be kind to each other.
He mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou.

Much love to you all,

Tony/Te Kupenga a Taramainuku