Resonance and Reverberation

Resonance begins and ends in silence.

Resonance and Reverberation is a series of photographs about the nature of sudden insights.  These often come in ways that bypass the logical, contemplative mind; they pierce through the surface of one’s usual mode of existence, and find a deeper truth.

The images in this series were taken from a moving car, on interstate highways across the United States. High speeds catalyzed an intuitive collaboration between emotion, intellect, and action--recognizing, in a split second, a resonance between the totality of what I was seeing, and an inner truth.  With visual elements in the viewfinder changing so rapidly, there was little chance to think or compose.  I restricted myself to clicking the shutter only once--taking a single exposure on slide film, using an old manual camera, (no 'bursts' of multiple exposures).

My task was to remain as open and attentive as possible, and poised to act when a resonant chord was struck. This idea of resonance can be compared to the way a tuning fork is used to tune a piano.  When a key is played on a piano and its sound corresponds exactly to that of the tuning fork, they resonate at the same frequency.  Similarly, the images came from a correspondence between what was inside of me and what I saw for a split second outside of me, through the lens.  Resonance goes in both directions; it is a mutual relationship.   

Some of these photographs show both coming and going in one frame, which means that there must be a decisive point, also embedded in the image, where one shifts into the other.  Where does the future turn into the past?  Breathing in becomes breathing out. An inflection point, like where a curve changes direction. Or a mathematical limit, which can never be defined precisely with a number, but can only be continuously approached, towards infinity, with more and more numbers after the decimal point.  Perhaps this is similar to an intuition that one pursues, without knowing exactly where or what it is.

I aim towards what lies at the heart of these elusive seeds of recognition, which resonate and reverberate in my own human experience, but offer no personal narrative. These images invoke key moments in a journey but neither origin nor destination.