G. Steve Journal

Ready To Receive

For two decades I was propelled by some unknown motive force which found me attempting to capture visually the essence of an area I’d been drawn to since first visiting as a boy — the Shawangunk Ridge.

As I peruse the images captured during this time I find myself fascinated by their beguiling nature – it seems I no longer have the ability and good fortune to encounter the array of visual beauty displayed in the portfolio of images from this time.

This observation by naturalist Henry David Thoreau may explain the phenomenon, though not why the change in perception might occur:

A man receives only what he is ready to receive… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be … it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life … His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.

 

Surprised

Even more than most creative media, photography poses a special challenge to shoot beyond the cliches, to discover – to "see" – something one had not been expecting.

As a photographer who's literally spent decades wandering through the natural world with a camera, this observation by Hanif Kureishi is exactly the sentiment I tried to cultivate in my travels: 

“As a writer, I don’t like to know too much about what I’m doing. I want to sit down at my desk with hope rather than certainty and be surprised.”

Paradise

Is not all the summer akin to a paradise?

                                             – Thoreau

The Truth

 

“The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.”


                                                                                                    — Stanley Kubrick

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