Photography got its beginnings as a way of casting onto a chemically treated glass plate an image of the shadows between rays of light. That was magic for the Age of Art, in which representations of objects were usually made by laying down colours of paint on blank canvas. Suddenly, they were made by the pattern of darkness and light, and mostly by darkness. Light was inferred. Well, it’s not the Age of Art anymore. We can begin again. Just look at how light and darkness make images in the world.

Darkness and Light in the Sagebrush

See how the plants have developed over time, out of the action of rays of light on the matter (chemical and biologically-active molecules) on the surface of the earth? Isn’t that photography? If it is, then so is the way that the light cast onto the human retina creates the colours you see below:

Sagebrush and Last Year’s Tumbleweed

The world develops in the human mind into what we see. It might be that what we see in the image below…

… is the human mind, or it might be that it is an entirely different mind. No device can record these effects or develop them from physicality to spirit, but you can.

Photographs aren’t light images any more. We could call them biographs instead: the amount of developmental energy in a scene transferred to us by the shadows, just as it was with early photographs. This time, though, the shadows are colour

and light. As they develop on earth, they provide clear images for us.

We have the ability to develop that energy further, to take it through a process of enlightenment, and free photography from the image.

The above image is not a photograph. The sagebrush in it is. This is organic photography. An old word for it is ‘life’, but that term separates life from the sun and earth of which they are a part. Better, perhaps, to talk of being and becoming, or in the terms of a biograph, presence and development.

Yellow Clover in the Process of Becoming a Moth …

in the process of becoming spirit, or, if you will, social energy.