As a visual geographer, I map an area through symbolic images, investigating its identity and mythology. I have returned many times over the years to Manoa Stream, in Honolulu, Hawaii. The stream drops down from the tropical rainforest below the Koolau Mountains and traverses the broad, and historically significant, Manoa Valley. Today, houses cover much of the valley - what was once rich farmland supporting taro cultivation and, later, rice. Almost unnoticed, Manoa Stream slides along behind the back yards, on the edges of the human settlement. Here, the distinct shadows that emerge from the greater darkness, the tree branches that arch out to catch our eye, the volcanic stones that now lie exposed, the sun’s rays that move across the valley to highlight and then bury event after event, and the water itself, continually passing, expanding and contracting, its level and speed changing day by day - all of these play their part in the ongoing drama. They create shifting forms that catch reflections from our mind, portents or omens that reveal vistas into buried paths of thought. I use my camera to explore and chart the various layers of strata in this shifting world, seeking to release the sacred from the secular. In Chicago, I photographed in the Wooded Island part of Jackson Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the late nineteenth-century. He intended to build a natural area incorporating "the elements of mystery through effects of aerial perspective, and the complicated play of light and shadow and of reflected tints in extended composition" (1893). He desired to create effects "like that of music, which is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given the form of words," (1880) in order to influence the imagination of viewers. I found this landscape conducive to my own interests. I looked for situations where I could understand its more emblematic character, a surreal world grounded in the subconscious mind. I worked particularly along the edges of the days where the sun, so extreme in its angles, lay stress over the landscape, extending or shrinking the shadows. I set out fields of interpretation, seeking to encompass what I saw in calligraphic forms. |
