Messieur Silhouette

Light often falls on its beginnings; sometime we have to go in search of that place - and know it when we arrive.

I love the way Light reveals other world, draws distinction, renders a clarity otherwise eluded.

I saw a reverse forest silhouette while hiking, a few years before I discovered the camera, I have never forgotten that image and have been searching for its essence for more than three decades. From time to time, I walk again in the woods, or in a market, or in this case a Paris shoe shop, and whispers of that long ago image tickle my thoughts, my eyes search, it's their hiding in plain sight.

To be in Paris and struck by a silhouette made me smile. Drawn from the name of Messieur Étienne de Silhouette, the notoriously cheap Controller-General of French king Louis XV, the word refers to a cheap form of portraiture, mocking the parsimonious Étienne de Silhouette. But ironically the most perfectly executed silhouettes are capture a beauty rarely otherwise seen.

I've recently returned from Washington DC and the late autumn countryside west up the Potomac River, into West Virginia. Changing environments for the eyes is like being a kid and opening a new box of crayolas - the eyes dance, I feel their excitement, they flit about every new scene, they are almost exhaustingly alive.

Peak fall color was two to three weeks ago. The countryside is now quiet, windshield travelers all back to the city. I can walk sections of the Appalachian trail without a single human interruption, save my own thoughts. Light is also quiet - Light without direction, from every direction. A walk in the forest is a muted journey from the rust and sable and Dijon end of the crayola pack - silhouettes cast against seamless sky.

My walk feels like that of a small child with his first bike and training wheels; it is a new approaching winter for me, for my eyes, I usually flee the cold, the damp, the lifeless, in winter, this time I'm staying, I'm wobbling and learning to pedal in a new Light.