Two trees, and between them nothing but the space where they nearly touch — everything else has surrendered to light and shadows. The pillars of light aren’t really pillars anymore by the time the lens finishes with them; they’re columns of soft collision, one bright shape falling into the next like the morning couldn’t decide where one tree ended and the light began.

The PC-Nikkor doesn’t just blur — it dissolves, the way memory dissolves a place you’ve walked past a hundred times, until what’s left isn’t the fairway or the trees at all, but the feeling of standing there while the sun came up through them.

There’s something almost architectural in the composition — two vertical masses holding the frame together like columns in a ruin — except the ruin is made of light, not stone, and it won’t hold still long enough to be measured. That tension between structure and dissolution is where the image lives: solid enough to read as trees, loose enough to read as feeling.

It’s less a photograph of a fairway at Lake Arbors than a photograph of a particular kind of attention — the attention a dog on a leash force on you, stopping you right there, right then, whether you were ready to look or not.

Looking at this image now, I see snowmen & snowwomen slowly melting on an early July morning before things heat up — a strange, out-of-season thaw that only makes sense in black and white.

You don’t set out to make a morning look like this. You just happen to be standing still enough, dog on leash, me in tow, long enough for the light to finally get around to noticing you back.

back to B&W –