I just bought a printer!!

Here are some more photos of the controlled burn from last year, because of Rinko Kawauchi's fires.

I hope that one day I can make magic like Rinko Kawauchi TT_TT

"In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.

"She speaks of the between-forest. This is because, in the same valley as her village, there are two forests which join. Yet the preposition between belongs to forests in general. It’s what they are about. A forest is what exists between trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it."

"It’s a commonplace to say that photographs interrupt or arrest the flow of time. They do it, however, in thousands of different ways. Cartier-Bresson’s 'decisive moment' is different from Atget’s slowing down to a standstill, or from Thomas Struth’s ceremonial stopping of time. What is strange about some of Jitka’s forest photos – not her photos of other subjects – is that they appear to have stopped nothing. In a space without gravity there is no weight, and these pictures of hers are, as it were, weightless in terms of time. It is as if they have been taken between times, where there is none… In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer’s imagination: for they are like another creature’s experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us, somewhere between past, present and future…"

From John Berger's introduction to Jitka Hanzlová's book Forest. Taken from here.

Some newer work by artists I love:

Eva-Fiore Kovakovsky
Eric Marth
Danielle Mericle

View of my house from Sand Mountain.

Mom and her begonias, 2008?

Sullivan Swamp from above.

Oksana's family album with the headless knight on the cover, containing photos from before the October Revolution. Her grandpa told us stories of the people in the photos, Ukranian Jews living in the Soviet Union. I felt so privileged to listen. I urged him to write the stories down one day, but he said he wouldn't. I think he felt that no one would understand.

Another one of that tourist cave in Thailand.

Dad's ever-pilfered grapes.

This is where we buried my dog at Reed Creek.

Pussywillow branches for sale before Palm Sunday.

At Whitetop.

"Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion, said: When we were walking along the sea one day, I was thirsty, so I said to Abba Bessarion, Abba, I am very thirsty. Then the old man prayed, and said to me, Drink from the sea. The water was sweet when I drank it. And I poured it into a flask, so that I would not be thirsty later. Seeing this, the old man asked me, Why are you doing that? I answered, Excuse me, but it's so that I won't be thirsty later on. Then the old man said, God is here, and God is everywhere."

From Desert Wisdom: Sayings From the Desert Fathers, translated by Yushi Nomura.

Indulging my love of foliage!

Dad at the ridge.

Some more from the reservoir.

More Reed Creek.

At the park where I work, right along the Appalachian Trail, is a little pearl of a high-elevation bog. You could walk right by it without realizing it's there.

At Reed Creek.

Edit: Found another one of the bamboo patch!

Some hemlocks.

The lake is drained in the spring before the thaw raises the water levels again, and for a little while you can see old tree stumps and even bricks from old buildings that were flooded by the dam.

In early 2012 I got a little obsessed with the Novosibirsk Reservoir on the Ob River, aka "the sea". My city, Novosibirsk, emerged at the turn of the 20th century as the site of the Trans-Siberian Railroad bridge over the Ob. In the 1950s, a hydroelectric power plant was built on the river, creating a 100 mile long artificial lake. The grand undertaking flooded several villages and part of the city of Berdsk, as well as swaths of fertile land and forest. For all that flooding, the hydroelectric dam is actually pretty small and doesn't meet the city's full electrical needs. However, the construction of the dam was a bonus when physicist Mikhail Lavrentyev was looking for a place to build an academic center with "an attractive site, railroad connections, and plenty of electric power". So that was the origin of Akademgorodok, where I grew up. We spent the summers at the beach on the reservoir. The lake has its issues, including pollution and erosion, but that's not how I experienced it. Anyway, I took some photos. (I'll be adding more soon.) I'd like to be there for an algae bloom one year!

My hard drive crashed, and through much effort by my dad, the files were recovered. Thanks, dad!!

 

Horse chestnut tree
torn hole
stitched around the edge with grass stalks
moving in the wind
Trinity College, Cambridge
24 July 1986  

Andy Goldsworthy