SELF PORTRAIT, BLACK ROCK DESERT
Friend:
In college, I was a student of philosophy. I
offer this fact not simply as a biographical curiosity, but because I've
come to believe that it was in fact this study that brought me to
photography.
Thinking can be a dangerous profession, if one devotes
one's life to it. For it is often the case that such a devotee is
lured into imagining that they have embarked on a quest for something more
real; something more 'true' than what is commonly found down here on
earth. Indeed, one may come to the conviction that one is
The danger in indulging in abstraction is that it can seem, after a time, that somehow one's life has 'snuck away,' and left behind only a sort of shadowy projection. This is an illusion, no doubt, but nevertheless, living in one's mind can result in the feeling that though one walks through life, it is but lightly, as if on stilts.
I was a lot like this.
Photography, I'm beginning to discover, can, by way of concentrated attention, allow me to attempt to re-consummate a relationship with a world that often seems to have left me.
It has been said that the "Fall" is a fall into forgetfulness. But what is it that we forget? We forget that the world is a place of precious things. We forget that this preciousness
has more to do with our way of
seeing than with the things themselves. The whole world is
look with wonder. We forget that we ourselves are of the universe; we've never left it! Discontentment stems from a desire for what is not. We forget that we lack nothing.
Photography is my attempt to remember. It is an attempt to stand toe to toe with my life... and embrace it.
I consider my successful photographs to be the ones that, however fumbling, somehow echo a moment of wakefulness; a moment of contact; a moment when, it seemed, I looked at the world and the world looked back. Or maybe it would be more apt to say that my successful photographs are the ones that echo, however faintly, a moment when there was no awareness of looking at all; everything simply was as it was, and that was enough.
I imagine that's grace.
Sincerely, in earnest,
Austin N. Granger
