Reconciled Time were created with a Hasseblad film camera during the quietest moments of Prospect Park, Brooklyn when this natural environment turns into a luminous land, undetermined, existing somewhere beyond our perception. The waves of sodium vapor light shape and transform the space around the trees, creating an entrance into a world where trees take on human qualities and the space is structured by time – time expands and contracts inspiring an imperceptible fragment of life.
The park working as a sanctuary for human well being during the day and becomes a restorative haven for nature at night. Speaking a language of spirit and health of breadth and forgiveness, of a time that that is changing and never definite. Time revives it, allowing it to engage with its own dynamic energy, anthropomorphizing the trees drawing them out of their enigmatic world.
When I am shooting in the park I am inspired by Charles Olson description of poetry and feel the same way about making theses photographs. He saw poetry as a dynamic transfer and discharge of energy, encouraging responsiveness to nature. He encouraged his audience to look beyond himself and open themselves up to the larger forces of nature. I am trying to create an interwolvenness of things, in and out of the natural world. Like light, poetry attempts to establish a connection between our visible world and the metaphysical; between our industrial world, the natural world and our precarious existence within the two. like Charles Olson and Charles Tomlinson
Time holds these surreal states together.
Our fundamental need as humans for the natural world, the primordial in us is what attracts us to the park, the therapeutic powers of the natural world, releasing the toxic elements of our industrial urban world allows for a meditative and contemplative psychological space. Where at one time we might be opposed to varying cultures the park prepares us for harmony. It effects a change in our disposition and mediates a collective atmosphere.
Charles Tomlinson once said, “The poem tries to celebrate the fact that the help we gain from alien phenomena – even water, in which (after all) we can’t live – the help is towards relation, towards grasp, towards awareness of all that which we are not, yet of relationship with. It is a help that teaches us not to try merely to reduce objects to our own image, but to respect their otherness and yet find our way into contact with that otherness.”