There are always those whose default inclination is to negative a good thing. The snide, superior and in their own opinion more worldly wise, use their wit to unpick the delicate stitching of other people's wonder, admiration and way of looking at the world. A good example is the much maligned sunrise and sunset photos posted on various social media. They have been called the Marmite of the photography world, they are spread across countless screens as if no one had ever seen one before; and you love them or hate them.
The nay-sayers have a point, though it is a small one, and it is still in danger of finding pleasure whining at other peoples pleasure. Once photo-shopping, image editing and enhancement have done their work what is left is usually spectacularly improbable as a recognisable image of a natural phenomenon. That is a valid critique.
But the photo straight from the camera, minimally touched and innocent of insertions, spot fix and filters, whatever its merits as a photo in the eyes of others, has for the photographer at least, the joy of remembering. And then, to take time later for contemplation of what was seen, and why it seemed important to allow that memory and that image to linger in the mind, and even touch the deep places of longings left too long unacknowledged.
Which brings me once more to photographs in a time of pandemic. I take very few photos of sunrise, I'm doing other things early morning. I take some photos of sunsets, though not all that many. But the sky, clouds, horizons, now these I photograph with the same enthusiasm as others go out to bag another sunrise or sunset. The one above was taken in semi-darkness, after a long hot day by North East Scotland standards, the street lights unable to compete, but willing to compensate for the disappearing sun, at least for a while, until sunrise. This second one is a photograph of clouds, which may seem obvious. But in the driest period for decades for this time of the year, the parched foreground, the distant clouds framed in blue sky, and the newly green trees in the middle ground, coalesce in an image of both uplift and yearning. We are still waiting for decent rainfall!
Lock down by definition limits horizons, and makes the familiar a slow-growing exercise in tedium. New horizons, the sense of our place in the landscape, and our freedom to change and adjust our environment, have become our way of life in what we too uncritically call the developed world. The abrupt loss of freedom and closing down of travel was a necessary public health imposition, but it has come at considerable cost to our emotional, relational and economic health.
Reflecting on that cost, and what is is we lost when movement out of our own homes was so limited for nine weeks, I was in no doubt the primary loss was the freedom to see the special people in our lives; family, friends, and those whose presence nourishes our sense of self and worth. But a close second was the loss of liberty to go where we wanted, to move from here to there, to yield to those impulses to be elsewhere and see what was there that was of interest.
The sky is one of the constantly changing features of our landscape, and for me a significantly influential governor of my inner mood. This view is from our daughter Aileen's resting place, half an hour's walk from our door. I have found the long weeks of lock down, social distancing, reduced horizons and limited life choices, have opened up new experiences of grief, as all these cumulative daily losses of freedoms and ways of living, have reinforced some of the deep longing and loss that is now part of who I am as a man and a husband and a father clinging to love, gratitude and memories. The photo, with neatly trimmed foreground and receding hazy horizons, splashes of ostentatious yellow, Loch Skene in the centre reflecting blue on blue, and a summer sky over landscape Aileen loved; the whole scene captured a moment of emotional clarity when joy and sorrow in that instant were not opposites, but an inner duet playing the music of the heart in three movements, pensive gratitude, patient hope and sustained love.
That's what a photo does. It captures a moment. The coincidence of outer image and inward imagination in the mind of the person who looks, and doesn't always know what they see, but sees it is important. All the photos here were moments of insight that became later reflection, the fusion of eye and imagination, when the sky lifted the view beyond the earthbound and mundane realities of walking during lock down. The result is a new way of seeing things, this time through our inner viewfinder.
Such photographs are often moments when thought merges into prayer. Not the carefully articulated kind that can be offered in public worship; more the prayers that are longing personified, sorrow accepted, gratitude felt in the deep places, and hope persisted in from a heart hanging on to trust in God as default setting for life:
Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,
Unuttered or expressed;
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.
Prayer is the burden of a sigh,
The falling of a tear
The upward glancing of an eye,
When none but God is near.
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