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The sun teased with her familiar fingers that stretched like heavy shadows over the unsuspecting ground. Golden tint, golden hour, the shadows receded back into the corners from where they tried to escape. Tangible poetry filled the spaces around us as we tried to capture and eternalise the moment.

In a spontaneous moment, unaffected by predetermination, the shadows fell in line with the dictations of the sun that threw its golden fingers across the earth.

We scattered in search of these faceless moments, dancing in the air that was drenched in and clothed with unfamiliarity, ignorance, innocence, and apprehension.

***

The afternoon sun really did cast a golden shadow over the small quart yard and I readied my camera. In this post, I want to share with you this rather poetic and artistic moment. These are rare moments, ones you cannot manufacture of produce. You can merely look, and the more you look, the more you will "get lucky" and notice these rare moments in which life provides you with everything you need for the perfect shot.

Please enjoy these photographs interspersed with my strange uncanny philosophical meanderings as I allow the shadows to envelop me, as I open myself to be touched by these rare moments.

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Playfull Autumn Shadows

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The flowers droop from the weight of the shadows cast by the sun that starts to drown in the afternoon's force. The faceless statue stares at nothing, much like the art we create to eternalise the flower, the water droplets, or the setting sun. Darkness is cast aside, forever laid to rest in the room's corners so that light can forever shine on the subject in the centre of our attention. Motionless, eternalised, immortalised, the flower will never produce seed, and no bee will ever set its legs on the flower. Forever, the dead eyes will stare at something we will not see.

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We are uniform in our differences, but this alterity cannot be methodised, copied, produced, manufactured, or cloned. This otherness is an insurmountable problem, one that cannot ever be solved - because in alterity there is always already otherness that cannot be comprehended, or understood. As soon as understanding follows, alterity is lost. Differences can, therefore, not be packaged and sold because that is the very problem that cannot be overcome.

We are always drenched in our otherness, even to ourselves. The solution, to get across this radical otherness schism is to relinquish it, to cover it over with sameness. As soon as this is done, difference, otherness, and alterity do not show as a problem. The loss of difference is a win for understanding, and as soon as something can be understood, it can be manipulated, shaped, and moulded into any form that the mind can conceive.

But that is the problem. The mind can only do so much. Whilst radical difference, alterity, otherness, unexplained and the incomprehensible allow for infinite otherwise, perhaps, maybe, possible...

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In the face of the other, I can see my reflection, and therefore I will not strike them. But isn't this exactly the subjugation of the other in their otherness? Understanding - subverting their alterity so that I can understand it.

But this also stretches to life itself, nature, the rare moments that escape my attempt at grasping or clasping it. Photography is therefore in some strange way the very essence of the problem: eternalising that which always escapes and evades solidification, rigidness...

The fleeting moment of a plant flowering is captured forever, therefore foregoing the opportunity to engage with the fleeting. Or, it eternalises that fleeting feeling, rendering it nonephemeral, permanent, the exact opposite of the fleeting brevity of the moment.

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The present moment is eternally trying to escape my grasp. But that is what gives the fleeting its poetic and tangible beauty. That is exactly why we want to photograph the fleeting so that we can effectively grasp and clasp and solidify it. Photography, in a strange contradiction, undermines the very nature of reality. But yet stranger is that these fleeting-eternalised moments are themselves fleeting and not what they purport to be. In the endless forever space that we created for ourselves, these photographs lose their permanence exactly because of their purported eternalised properties, and there is so much of it that itself becomes fleeting.

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Postscriptum, or The Brevity of the Endless

It is often said that there are many different forms of infinity, some larger than others. But isn't the opposite then also true, that there is infinity between the fleeting moment, and thus placing a definite timespan on the infinite? The infinite moments between the breaths of the poet as they ready themselves for the next verse?

The infinite becomes incredibly fleeting. How strange.

Alas, we can only deal with the moments we are alive and well.

I hope that you enjoyed these photographs and the strange musings that I threw all over the place. The moment the sun was setting and casting its beautiful yellow-golden rays over the quart yard was too beautiful not to photograph.

Happy photographing and keep well.

All of the writings, musings, and meanderings in the post are my own albeit inspired by the incredibly weighty golden rays of sunlight that struck me in the face. All of the photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and 50mm Nikkor lens.