These photographs were taken during my travels in 2014 in Ladakh, Tibet, Ireland and in the Canadian Rockies, and were exhibited at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in 2015.
I have long been influenced by Eastern thought and thus try to approach my subjects from a "not knowing" perspective, forgetting the camera and leaving behind my busy, analytical mind. This practice allows entry into the liminal, or "thin" places between the corporeal and ethereal, moving between the familiar and the strange. I like to tell stories. Sharp lines, true colours and literal depictions do not concern me.
As I look at a mountain, a nomad child, a river or a friend, they look back at me and change me in myriad ways. When I take a photograph, I am bowing to the person, the place, and to the world in gratitude and in wonder. I read once about a Zen monk who made a practice out of bowing to the dust......
Life is short. For me, image making is a way of inhabiting and expressing the transience, and the ordinary grace, of the world. The practice of photography allows me, on occasion, to dance in the thin places where everything sings.
“… there is only one subject… this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and these beings are the organs and masks of divinity.” Jorge Luis Borges
Note: Don Domanski kindly gave me permission to use excerpts from his wonderful poetry collections with one of the photographic series in this exhibit.
