Doug Plummer, Photo Motion

From 1999

I’m on the tip of Valencia Island, on the western edge of Europe. Sheer cliffs drop below me, waves crash. Out at sea the two Skellig Islands rise from the Atlantic like Giza pyramids. The islands are lit in their own private pool of sun, as skeins of rain fall in front. The sun is obscured by the coming squall, and above it a sun ring appears for a few moments, then disappears.

With the panoramic I’m composing a shot of this. A sliver of sea at the floor of the frame with the islands dead center, and directly about them, about two palm widths, is the partially obscured sun. It’s an austere image, and it’s fluid. The sky is changing by the moment, so I keep banging away. Among these two or three rolls is going to be the shot, I know.

Intently observing with a camera creates, for me, a heightened acuity to my surroundings. I deepen my exposure to the moment by this craft. For a long time I struggled to reconcile the contradiction between being an observer and a participant. I think I entered photography the way a lot of shy people do, as a means of mediation with the world that I couldn’t carry on unencumbered. My way of resolving the dilemma is to use the process as the means to generate meaningful exchanges, with people and landscapes, that would never otherwise occur.

But I also live in that moment through the anticipation of the imagined photograph. There is the inevitable disappointment upon opening up the boxes of slides, or scanning the contacts. Robin is acutely familiar with this. I seem to go into the deepest depression for a day and a half. Nothing is as it was remembered. I have to be reminded, yet again, that this act of photography is about making a parallel reality to the one that I experienced. And then the gems start appearing. Robin is bemused, yet again. I run upstairs, “Look at this! Can you believe this image?” The alternate photographic reality asserts itself.

So it may or may not be the Skellig Islands and the sun that is going to be the memorable photographic image of the trip. But, in latent form, it remains within me.

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