brið

Tattooed inside my upper left arm, easy to see as needed, is a single word tucked into waves, brið. Partly because I’m a bit of a language geek and partly because of a silly travel superstition, it is the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling of a personal mantra, or at least my personal mnemonic…

breathe.

When chaos has descended, when the stress level has achieved critical mass, when the pain hits a 5, when I’m angry to the point of slamming the door and then opening and slamming it again for emphasis…

breathe.

A breath, a deep down to your gut breath, a small bit of wind exchanged for a moment of things put in perspective, a beat before panic gets a foothold or I say something I regret; an end run around the automatic and primitive systems of my brain. But if breath invites calm, wind encourages adventure.

“Let me tell you about winds…”

How can one not see romance in the wind? It is the bringer of change. Wind is action and movement. Wind is an instigator. There is a reason why they give names to winds, like the November Witch, the Freemantle Doctor, the Snow Eater, Diablo…

As I talked about in my last post, the latest project draws on the five classical elements. But I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with how to depict air, literally and figuratively for me an intangible thing. Breath and the wind have weight and meaning for me, and as such, are easier ideas to create images from. Still, whether we’re talking about air or wind or breath, how do you photograph something that is, well, invisible and only seen by its effect? I haven’t exactly gotten the hang of it, so more experimentation is in order.

Starting by using smoke, I’m beginning to test out making images of the insubstantial…