This article is best viewed via laptop/mac as the photo pairings side by side do not show up that way on the substack app.
Some 5 days ago I shared a set of photographs and some words from a wonderful morning walk that I had taken. It received a whole lot of love.
Thank you for that 🙏✨🙏✨
During the preamble to that photo-essay I said this.
Actually, I took more photos, and there is another set with a slightly unusual subject matter sitting in my drafts backlog right now. It will appear sometime.
Today is that sometime. Here is the set with the unusual subject matter. I think the article title gives away the game and is also quite creative if I say so myself. But just in case my wavelength is operating at a one-person-only frequency, these are photographs of a parachute which is usually hanging from the trees and serves as an umbrella over the fire pit on the site next door to where I live. In heavier weather it is ‘dropped’ and left hanging by a thread. Quite a stong thread.
Now before you scroll down to satiate your hungry photograph needs, give me a moment to apologise.
When curating the selection for this post, all of which were shot in colour, I tried a few black and white conversions in my editing software. I really liked them. I also really liked the colour and so I decided to post both versions side by side. When I was doing that I wondered what a horizontal flip of the black and white’s might create. This is the result. I have left a space between them but the effect is still quite interesting. And if you think that this was me getting carried away a bit…wait till the last shot.
The pictures are shown below with the unfolding of a poem by Sylvia Plath titled Mirror until the final image, which has an excerpt of a poem from the Translations of Han Shan’s Poems by Gary Snyder, titled Cold Mountain.
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Spring-water in the green creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silent knowledge – the spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness
This final shot is a mirror exploration of a pair of photos from above.
Thank you for reading today.
Ab-soul-utely stunning, a true marriage of words and images! I heart that poem, Sylvia too! Thanks so much for sharing, Paul. 🙏❤️🪞