I tend to get inspiration for my images and series of images from literature. When I say literature I don’t mean Shakespeare but rather turns of phrases by accomplished essayists, critics or poets for the most part, but interesting phrases can come from anywhere. This holiday season I gave myself a book by Todd Hido, The End Sends Advance Warning.

It’s a gorgeous book and Todd Hido is an amazing photographer. I”m a big fan of his work. On one of the images there is a scrap of paper on a warn, wooden fence with the following written on it:

“Light as it falls down from the sun onto our random world defines everything perceptible to the eye by constant accident , relentlessly changing. A splendid spot of light on a fence is gone in a matter of seconds. A tone of light is frailer in essence than a whiff of roses.”

Where did that piece of splendid writing come from? There was no attribution anywhere in the book. The note in the image seemed more like a graphic addition and not something the photographer actually photographed. Hmm… this couldn’t have been some found piece of genius. I did some sleuthing and after some time searching on Google I found this article on American Suburb X:

The essay is an excerpt from a book of essays by Guy Davenport; The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. That piece of genius was Guy’s. Guy Davenport was a significant writer and artist of the 20th century. He befriended a number of artists, most significantly for me he befriended Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the eccentric and highly influential photographer from Kentucky best known for his “Lucybelle Crater” series. Meatyard was a student of Minor White and for me his most significant works were his Zen Twigs and No Focus series of images. These pictures were all about seeing, new ways of seeing, of sensing the world around you. He was brilliant.

The essay continues (from the quoted passage above):

I have watched Gene all of a day wandering around in the ruined Whitehall photographing as diligently as if he were a newsreel cameraman in a battle. The old house was as quiet and still as eternity itself; to Gene it was as ephemeral in its shift of light and shade as a fitful moth.

There is some guidance in these words for my imaging pursuits for the following year. Something along the lines of randomness, ephemerality, the way light defines the world.

A note on the opening images to this post. The image is of a hibiscus bud with a ray of light hitting it just so as it starts to open I had never seen it before and this miracle of light happened as I was drinking my morning coffee on Christmas day. I ran upstairs to get my Nikon Zf and ran down, focused and pressed the shutter twice. Then the light was gone.