Window Seat
“What we call nature…is a poem hidden behind a wonderful secret writing; if we could decipher the puzzle, we should recognize in it the odyssey of the human spirit, which in astonishing delusion flees from itself while seeking itself.”
—Ernst Cassirer
When I get on an airplane, my expectation is to go someplace: business, vacation, visiting. I can work on a computer, play games, watch movies, drink, eat, sleep. When I look out the window from 35,000 feet, I can see water and the trace of flowing water; mountains; desert; cities; developments that were built or never built; roads; mining; human infrastructure: shifting light on lines, patterns, and colors revealed on the surface of the earth. The everyday shifts to something transcendent.
Process note:
Images were shot with a small digital camera from a seat on a commercial aircraft. Some images are single frames; others have been “stitched” together from three or more frames using an image-editing program. The sizes of prints are variable.
I received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award: Photography for images from this series in 2012.
