Deep Breath, Some Photos Of Life In Bristol

Some photographers take reality… and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Ansel Adams

It has been a very busy couple of months here and I fell behind on a number of things. But one of the most difficult has been my lack of photography of late. One of my great loves back in Montana was to hike up the mountain just outside my door to watch the sunset. I would sit motionless on the trail, overlooking the city with the sun falling silently behind the distant mountains. I could hear the city ahead of me and the birds, grass, and occasional deer behind me. It was a powerful reminder of the two worlds we live in every day: the one of human hands and the one of nature. Try as we might to live wholy in the first, the latter will always catch up with us.

And, given my attempt to focus more on Buddhism in general here over they last year, I haven’t posted too many photos. But, just as I used to hike a nearby mountain, I realize that I’m only a 5 minute run or 15 minute walk from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, where I can get a pretty good view of Bristol’s sunsets. So I’ll try to make this destination a regular place for my early evenings; to breathe, to reconnect, to let go, and to play in the creativity of photography.

Here are a few of my recent photos with words of inspiration from the greats of photography (and literature):

“Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.”

– Elliott Erwitt

“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer”
― Walter De Mulder

“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.”
― Edward Weston

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
― Alfred Stieglitz

“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ”
― Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
― Robert Frank

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down….”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag