duality

I'm in the early stages of updating one of my web sites... not ready to upload yet, but with several pages recoded. This process is turning out to be an excellent way to drag some things out into the light where they can be examined.

It's perhaps easiest to explain by looking at recent photographic subject matter. On the recent Chicago trip, I was periodically immersed in the local gothic counterculture, shooting portraits of various individuals. Today, at home, I drove up into the mountains just south of town, in the rain, and shot landscapes.

There will be both landscapes and portraits in the updated website, and there may be a fair amount of very recent work... although I'm feeling a need for another weekend of shooting to complete even the landscape part of this, and even that will be subject to a refresh before long. A concept can only rarely be adequately examined in a day or two.

I'm faced with juxtaposing a duality; the city, complex, artificial, and teeming with humans, in some ways a vision of nihilism; and the land, nature, seen through the simplicity and minimalism of zen.

As always, there are places where these things overlap, where they connect. However, I need to make a temporal jump to do that.

The gothic counterculture I've so recently photographed is a creature of the recent past, born from the ashes of post-punk less than 30 years ago. Certainly it draws on much older ideas, although these are often presented almost as repetitive caricatures. With a few exceptions, there isn't a lot of depth involved in those older symbolisms.

However, if one looks not at the music-based counterculture, but at that older influence... one anchored in literature, in architecture, in philosophy... it goes back at least 400 years, and it's not really an urban thing. It's perhaps not entirely natural either, but once a rural English estate provided a perfectly acceptable habitat for these explorations of the darkness.

Nature too has it's shadows, particularly in the rainy season. I still have some work to do as far as reconciling eastern and western ideas, but I'm accustomed to this. Things need not fit together perfectly, it's just fine if they complement each other instead, leaving a middle ground to explore, a place where new ideas can spring from this cautious intermingling of different cultures.