I’ve begun a new journey in my life. Where it takes me I’m really not sure. It is a journey I must travel. I’m chasing light wherever it leads me.
Since the beginning of human awareness humans have attempted to document events through images, either using a stick to trace out lines in the sand or by using simple paints to capture a likeness or motion on a cave wall. The first written languages were a series of pictographs written in ink on animal skins, pressed into clay tablets, or chiseled into the blocks of stone. History was being recorded.
Modernity brought upon changes to the process and the medium. Today the automated device we carry around in our pocket records almost every new record of history. Images splash almost instantaneously across any and all digital screens. We are inundated with events happening in real time from the other side of the world. Yet, we search for authenticity.
This summer I set out on a quest to record an event happening only one time. Capturing the image of the Milky Way Galaxy in full bloom across the New Mexico sky. You might think for a moment and say no that’s not the case. One can walk out into some less light polluted spot and point up at the night sky and point to the Milky Way in all of it’s grandness sprayed across the heavens. But, in reality the vastness laid out before us only happens at that one moment, and only one given space.
Our planet, the point of our observation lies in the very outer reaches of the vastness of all of estimated one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. And all of it is in a continuous motion. Planets dance around stars, stars dance around stars, all dancing in one big circular movement. A cosmic waltz around the center.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
I had to wait to leave. I spent the whole day packing. Trying to figure out what to take and what to leave behind. Not sure I settled on what I loaded, but it was definitely too much.
My plans were to head west to my brother’s house and pick up the new registration, before heading to the coast to shoot some long exposure night photography of the gulf. The next morning I would head north to Arkansas to pick up some magic mushrooms from a friend, before heading west across Oklahoma, stopping to photograph along the way. to When I got to Monty’s I found he had placed it in his briefcase and the briefcase was with him at his job site in Port Arthur, Texas.
