 Hello. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming to today's program. I'm John Smalley. I'm a librarian with the main library and the general collections and humanities department. While we're waiting for a few more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded homeland of the Ramatushaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As indigenous stewards of the lands and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatushaloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Tomorrow, Monday, July 18th, online, the authors and artists Dan Wang, Kimberly Bain, Pato Hebert, and Cheryl Dericott discuss artistic practice, the pandemic, and their new book, Last Gaspism, Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic. Next Sunday, July 24th, authors with nomadic press celebrate nature in the main library's Latino room. That's just across the way. On Tuesday, July 26th, author and eco-activist Jennifer Atkinson explores the mental health toll of our warming world and offers strategies to channel dark emotions towards climate justice and solutions. On Wednesday, July 27th, Ursula Pike discusses her new book, An Indian Among Los Indígenas, A Native Travel Memoir, with novelist Michelle LaPena. And on Sunday, July 31st, in this very correct auditorium, the Indian-born American photographer, writer, and conservationist Subhankar Banerjee will speak about art social transformation and his exhibit, A Library, A Classroom in the World, which was featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale Art Exhibition. Lastly, San Francisco Public Library and its partners throughout this month are hosting a series of programs and events on the topic of nature, the environment, and climate. You can find flyers to all of the events I have mentioned on the back table, as well as you can find our library's newsletter, which lists these events. Or you can go to our website and check out the event calendar, and that is at sfpl.org. So this ends my announcements of upcoming programs. I'll now say a few words of introduction about this program's distinguished guest, Nathan Worth, and then we'll turn the mic or phone over to him. After Nathan's presentation, please stay for a short question and answer session. Nathan Worth was born and raised in San Francisco. A resident of Marin County for the past 11 years, Nathan Worth attempts to photograph silence. His recent book, A Slice of Silence, published by Chin Music Press in Seattle, is a collection of his photographs intermingled with poetry and essays. Using a variety of techniques, including long exposure, infrared, intentional camera movement, and the occasional dip into compositing, Nathan Worth is a photographer who seeks to express his unending wonder for the fundamental fact of existence. In his work, he attempts to focus on the silence that we can sometimes perceive between the incessant waves of sound that often dominate our perceptions of the world. Nathan earned his master of arts in English literature from San Francisco State University, and he brings a deep appreciation of poetry to his exploration of place, especially the sea. Poets such as George Oppen, Gary Snyder, Seamus Haney, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Lorraine Niedeker, and George Mackey Brown have played a fundamental role in shaping his attention to the things and places that he photographs. Often returning to the same locations many times, Nathan seeks to explore the silence and sublimity of these places. In addition to poetry, Nathan is profoundly influenced by paintings of Morris Graves, Casper David Friedrich, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Camille Pizarro, and the photography of Michael Kenna, Edward Weston, and Wright Morris. For the past few years, Nathan has been studying and integrating into his work Japanese traditions of Zen, rock gardens, maw, and calligraphy, as well as the transience, impermanence, and imperfections of Wabi Sabi. Nathan's studies of Zen calligraphy and Zen writings have led him to the practice of trying to achieve, while working on his photography, a mind of no mind, a mind not preoccupied with emotions and thought, one that can, as freely as possible, simply create. Please give a warm welcome to Nathan Worth. So thank you. I haven't done anything public since March of 2020. So I make my living as a English teacher, and I haven't been in a classroom since March of 2020 when I decided to go home. So my public speaking skills have probably diminished incredibly. So thank you for coming, first of all. It's fun to be here at the library since I spent much of my childhood, not in this building, but in the building that now houses the Asian Art Museum. I did lots of school projects. I went to Star of the Seagrammer School. It's just kind of fun to be here. All right, so a slice of silence. I want to begin by saying something that might sound very counterproductive to me speaking to you right now. Every time I've been asked to speak, which has been a handful of times now, I always ask, could I just come up here and say nothing and just show my photos and leave? And I've always been denied that opportunity and always told that I have to say something about my photography. And I'm going to say a lot of things, but I want to really state very emphatically that anything I say now, I say to you in hindsight that everything I do, everything I'm going to say has nothing really in the end with the process of creating photos for me. I've figured out a way to say some things about what I have done as opposed to the actual practice of doing. And a lot of people say, well, why a slice of silence? And I think this begins with this thought I had one day with, what is a photo? And I know digitally this doesn't work quite as well, but what is a photo? It's just a thin piece of paper when you print something. It's just a slice, and what is a photo? It's something that retains something of what the camera had looked at and then what I have processed. And in my mind, I'm always in some way, shape or form, thinking about silence. So every photograph I take, in some way, in some form, has something to do with a very thin slice of silence. So I've just decided over the years to call what I do a slice of silence. It's as simple as that. So I'm going to begin with a quote from Dogen, one of the founders of the Zen school of Soto. And he wrote, my late master, old Buddha, said, the original face has no birth and no death. Spring is in the plum blossoms and enters into a painting. When you paint spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots. It is not yet painting spring. It is not that spring cannot be painted. But aside from my late master, old Buddha, there is no one in India or China who has painted spring. He alone was the sharp pointed brush who painted spring. Start to, there. This spring is spring in the painting because it enters into a painting. And I'll leave you to read the rest of the quote. And I want to be cautious about saying anything about this because while I've spent a degree of time thinking about and studying Eastern thought, I am definitely well grounded in being taught in the world of Western thought. So thinking about this in some way, my Western ideas and training is going to infiltrate. And what I take from this in the end is that I could say I'm photographing silence, or I could say I'm photographing the ocean. I could say I'm photographing anything. But in the end, those things enter into the photograph. They enter into the painting. And the Western way that I think about this is that I could tell you, sure, I attempt to photograph silence. Or I could even be more bold as to say, I photograph silence and you should come enjoy my silence. But the truth of the matter in my mind is that whatever hope there is for the experience of silence and anything I do, you're going to bring that into it. Your perception is going to bring that into your experience of encountering whatever it is that I have done. If you could not care less about silence or for you, silence is just not speaking or silence is an anti-political act when you don't speak, when society calls for the necessity for you to speak. But if you in some way already see or understand or have some connection with this, then silence will enter into a photograph that I would take. And what I want to say in all these things because I'm going to throw in some quotes and show some photos, that none of this is me just, oh, I'm going out. It's time for me to activate the silence. I got to bring the silence into something or it's time for me to activate ma or it's time for me to get into my motion notion mode. These are just things that are kind of, they've shaped who I am. Just like poetry and reading it has shaped who I am. I don't ever create a photograph that is a poem, but I've read poems and poetry in some way, shape, or form enters into just my conception, my experience of the world. And that brings me to motion notion, which is motion, no mind, motion notion, mind of no mind. And this comes out in part because of my interest in meditation. This comes out in part because I no longer wish to spend a process of thinking about what I do when I create photos. I just want to create. I went through a period of time where I very closely and carefully tried to figure out how does a camera operate? How do you do processes? How do you dodge something? How do you burn something? How do you add contrast to something? I've been through all of that and I worried about it. Well, anybody like my photo and all those kinds of things and social media, am I going to get a like? Am I going to get a fave? What are people going to think of what I'm doing? And I'm just done with all of that now. And I just want to create. I want to create when I process. I want to create when I go out into the field. I want to just stare at whatever I'm staring at. I want to walk along. And when I just see something to photograph, I want to photograph it. I don't want to worry or think about these things anymore. Just like the person who does calligraphy, who does the Enzo, every single day they get the brush out. And they just do the effort to make that swish with the brushstrokes. And they're not thinking about it. Someone who, I started Ikebana flower arranging for many years. At first, I worried about it. But after time, I just started to arrange things. And I started to create. So that's integral in my mind to letting go, which, again, brings me back to my first statement. Couldn't I just show you these pictures and not say anything? All right, so where does it kind of begin? Well, this, to me, is kind of where photography began for me. And it's just simply an egret going for a fish if you know the little pond in the striving botanical garden, where the little bridge goes over. It's just going in there. And I isolated this little egret all by him or herself. Themself, I guess. I'll go for it. And it set something up. And again, this is in total complete hindsight. Just look at the single-loan figure. And then think about the Japanese spatial concept of ma. And the closest we have in English to ma is negative space. But negative space is more about the stuff that's not around stuff, which is good. But ma is it's equally important, the egret and the space around the egret. If you think about calligraphy again, how when you put a kanji, a character, onto a page, when you see that character, what's equally important is the white space and the character. The space is equally up to the task of the thing that's there. All right, so singular egret. This one day eventually leads to this experience. So when I first started seriously thinking about photography back in 2008, 2009, and I'd learned you can do long exposure. That you could put a filter over a lens. And you could take a photo that's 30 seconds to many minutes, two hours long if you wanted to. I taught myself how to take photography, how to take photos, how to do long exposure at the ruins or the sutra baths. And I was just down there one day, and there's this guy just sitting there. So you know that little part where you're kind of behind this little pool and that little bit of stone juts out. I'm standing there. He's sitting there. And lucky for me, he just, for some reason, did not move. He was still a stone to borrow from the Elizabeth Bishop home. So I got this nice little shot. And you might, again, notice that idea of Ma works in there also. And then to add on top of influence, on top of influence, I love Casper David Friedrich's painting. And this, of course, is his most famous. And if I was to say maybe I did kind of borrow a little bit from someone intentionally, maybe this photo does. And this is just me up above Mount Tammel Pius. But it becomes this singular experience of nature, just staring out into what is before you. And as I was talking to John a little while ago, one of the things I love about Friedrich is it's in the age of thinking about the sublime, that 19th century understanding of the sublime. So you're connecting with nature, but it's not just nature is pure beauty. It's pure serenity. You have an awe for nature. You have a deep appreciation for nature. You have a little bit of fear for nature because nature can be very dangerous. Bad things can happen to you. Nature can cause great, incredible calamity. So this sense of pondering out and having this experience comes with that sense of awe. So this, again, led to me being at Ocean Beach now. And I'm standing there one day. And I'm not standing where you see me now. I'm behind the camera, and there's just that little rock. And I got to thinking, will anyone care about a picture of just a little tiny rock? And I was not as advanced in my experiences yet. And I thought, no. So I got this weird thought, maybe I could go stand out there. And this is a long exposure. This is about 90 seconds. So this also kind of perfected my ability to stand still without moving for long periods of time, as I just gazed out into whatever was in front of me. And that began this sort of self-portrait series that I began to work on. And again, if you go back to the single egret, now you kind of see, OK, single person standing there. Then I stood a little bit further out, Drake's Beach. One of the most, because we are always thinking about climate change and the horrors and the terrors that come with the inevitable rising of the sea levels and all of the terrible stuff that's going to be happening. One of the really nice great stories about this beach is I can't probably take that shot again ever, because the elephant seals have come back to Drake's Beach every winter, and they own this beach now. So my days of wandering around and working on these kinds of photos with these rocks that jut out, those days are gone. All right, so again, more stuff that's had an influence on me. George Oppen, I don't want to say who my favorite poet is, but if I was cornered and had to say something the first name that would probably come to my mind would be George Oppen. And the part of the quote that I'm most interested here is the self is no mystery. The mystery is that there is something for us to stand on, followed by some other words that remind us that we wish to exist. But the first part of it that is so important to me is that the great question of ontology, the great question of why do we exist? Why are we here? What is our purpose? All those kinds of questions. Oppen turns that around and says, no, that's not the mystery. The real mystery is that there is anything that there is something for us to stand on. The fact of existence is the great mystery. Why does anything exist? And I would say that in many ways that's always kind of in the back of my mind in everything that I do. And again, these self-portraits kind of reflect that. And then you've got to bring in Emerson. I teach English at City College of San Francisco. That's how I make my living. And I teach this section from Emerson's long essay, Nature, part one. And my students always think I'm inviting them to do mushrooms when they read this. Like this is some kind of grand call to the world of the psychedelic. Because when you read it, you have standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean ecotism vanishes. And here's the part that students always tell me, this is drugs. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all the currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God. In other words, Emerson has such a deep, deep connection with nature. As he says earlier in this essay, the inner and the outer are working together. The emotion and the eyes are working together. And this is certainly part in the back of my mind about how I experience nature. I don't know if my photographs reflect this or not. But my experience taking these photos, this is my very deep, deep, deep connection. I was raised Catholic. I am not Catholic at all anymore. But I may not relate completely to God being there. But if nature is a life force, I really relate to how that works. All right, so again, maybe the more Emersonian version of the self-portraits. And then up in Second Beach up on Olympic Coast, it was 18 degrees outside. I had the whole beach to myself all alone. And at that moment, I understood why the Kuihut people saw this as a place that was sacred. I felt like I could commune with the gods in that particular moment and banden up on the Oregon coast. And then a little tiny fisherman. All right, so continuing this idea of the egret going to me standing in the photos, eventually this Buddha statue, which was a gift from my dad. My brothers and I and my parents had not talked for 15, 16 years. I won't go into the whole story, but there was a reconciliation. And my dad, who was very Catholic when he was alive, this was sort of his apology for the weirdness that was my childhood. He gave me this Buddha statue. So I'm out there again one day thinking, well, what can I photograph? I've got the moon up in the sky. I've got point rays jutting out at Dragg's Beach. And I thought, what would happen if I put that little Buddha statue? But again, think about it. You go to the egret. You go to the self standing there, a fisherman, someone standing at the sutra baths. And now I put this little Buddha statue there. And that, of course, goes into another photo. I always bring this photo when I talk because it seems so peaceful and serene. But what was actually happening is the water is rushing in, rushing out, rushing in, rushing out, rushing in, rushing out. It was actually almost violent, the waves coming in. And you see the little inlet or outlet there at the end. About two seconds after this photo finished, the ocean took my Buddha and sucked it out into the sea. Just went flying through that little outlet there. And I was standing there. And this was my early days of thinking about Zen. I thought, well, this is clearly the universe telling me I have no business to practice Zen. If we're going to take your little Buddha statue and your reconciliation, suck it into the sea. And I walked down the beach feeling very forlorn. And I realized what could be more actual than this experience. And this sudden moment of peace came over me. And I came walking back and about maybe a half city block up from the beach, there was my Buddha statue. The sea had just returned it. It was completely popped up because it had been bashing rocks into the water and all the turmoil. But then it got returned. And then I just continued to take some photos of it from time to time. All right, so from the Egret to me standing there or some other individual to the Buddha statue, now single rocks. And these next few photos are all from the Sonoma Coast. So my fascination, I have a fascination with places. I just return to places over and over and over and over again. So I spent several years just going to Drake's Beach. I spent several years learning to do photographs at the Sutra Bars. I spent several years at Drake's Beach. And I spent several years and still returned back to this beach. You might also notice there's two quamerons up on top. And that's a three minute exposure. And one thing I've learned taking photos of the sea, the creatures that can stand more still than me or quamerons and seagulls. And you don't necessarily notice them when you take photos, but when you go back, there's always these seabirds. And they're just sitting in these photos, just still as the stone that they're sitting on. Also up on the Sonoma Coast. Also up on the Sonoma Coast. Right, and there's no plan. I just show up at these places. I guess the plan is to go there. But I don't go with an intent or a specific, I'm going to go there, I'm going to do this. I just go and see what's going to happen. And sometimes nothing happens. But the reward is I got to hang out in nature, to hang out at the beach. So we go from Egret to Bee or someone else, to Buddha, to rocks, to single tree. And this comes out of me now experimenting with infrared. I got a camera converted to read infrared. And I always laugh at this photo because it looks like some kind of primordial tree. It looks like the tree of life or something if you let your imagination go. The truth is if you facing the tree turn around right behind where you're standing is the most god-awful Stepford Wives suburban neighborhood you've ever had the misfortune of being in. It's just the most dull looking area. Yet this tree stands on top of this hill. It's a joy of being able to frame something. So you create something out of, you slice again that silence out of whatever was there. So single tree. Now, I told you before that I was standing there one day and would that little rock be enough? But then I grew up and started thinking more about the things that I was doing. I'm starting to realize, well, gosh, water and light isn't that enough to create something. And I began this sort of series where I did things as minimalistically as I possibly could. So just the curvature of a shoreline. If you've been there, that's the bulinous lagoon as the water comes in from the ocean. And then, if you've studied photography or looked at photographs, you know that one of the famous terms people use is look for the leading line, a line that leads you into an image. And what could be a more compelling leading line than winter rain falling at a beach and that water returning to the sea? And this is a topic I've become a possible image that I'm fascinated with as I go up and down the West Coast. And again, this time you don't just have a couple of quorum ronches. You just have a whole bunch of seagulls at the end. Same place, both Drakes Beach, different years. And then the leading line of the Eel River going through the Humboldt Redwoods. Why shouldn't I stand in the leading line? So you start to see the merging of things. And then the leading line is leading to a single rock. It's Whales Head Beach up in Southern Oregon. Face Rock Beach up in Bandung. Which then leads to place again. I'm fascinated by specific places and here's your little tip for a good vacation. If you want to go see strange, beautiful, wonderful, unusual rocks, go to Face Rock Beach in Bandung by the sea in Southern Oregon. Many people refer to this as the witch's hat. And I didn't load the photograph into this particular PowerPoint, but if you walk down the beach about four city blocks and look back, that looks like a Buddha. Just the strangest, weirdest thing. Which reminds me of something that you all know. You might sometimes get a photograph of yourself and say, I like this side of my face more. I like this angle more. The same thing looks remarkably and dramatically different as you move around the thing. This is sometimes referred to as the witch's hat. Like the sorting hat and Harry Potter for anyone who saw those movies. And then just a gathering of rocks. You might notice the witch's hat at the center. And then thinking about place again, Drake's Beach, which I can't go back to anymore, but I spent years going there over and over again, realizing that the same, you know, the old drawing of blank on the name, famous philosopher, says you can't ever step into the same river twice, right? You, thank you. So this place never, ever looked the same. Even if I go the next day or later on in the day, the light's always different throughout the year. The way the sands would move and rocks being exposed. So I became fascinated by the different things at Drake's Beach. A little bit less tumultuous where the Buddha got sucked into the sea. Another place I'm fascinated by, Trinidad State Beach up in Humboldt County. Offer referred to as the grandmother rock. It's other things that kind of influenced Japanese rock gardens. How might that work into my thinking of things? Well, here's a famous one in Kyoto. Note how the rocks were formed in various kinds of ways. So in some way, this is a reflection of what's already kind of happening in nature, a symbolic reinterpretation of what's happening in nature. So I start to think about, well, how do rocks form along a shoreline? Rodeo Beach over in Sauselito. Tourist central haystack rock up in Oregon. Seal rocks. And then another thing that kind of works its way into my mind, I'm a big letter Cohen fan. And the song Anthem, there's this great line that repeats often. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. How might that work its way into photos? So the way that light just kind of comes out of the darkness sometimes. This is Bowling Ball Beach, even though I don't think those look like bowling balls, I would probably call it Truffle Beach. And then Serendipity, which works in well with Ocean Notion, because if you just let things happen, sometimes when you least expect it, great things happen. And this particular photo at Drake's Beach, you may notice that very rarely do any of my photos have good weather, what people consider good weather, blue skies. I always like to go out and photograph when it's foggy or rainy, when the weather is the kind of weather that keeps people away. A, because it keeps people away, because I like to be alone when I do this if possible, and B, because this is where the drama really comes out. And on this particular day, I arrived at Drake's Beach and it was sunny as could be. And I felt a little sad, like I'd driven out there and I really wanted to take some photos and I was trying to embrace my motion notion and have this whole sense of it's gonna be okay, I'll just enjoy the walk. So I decided to go for the walk. At one point I turned around and the fog had poured over the cliffs and the sun said, I'm not going away, it just insisted on its presence, it just radiated through thick, thick fog. And I remember I turned my camera around and I just stared at it for moments before I even took a photo. I was so awe inspired by how beautiful it looked. Another one, again as John said, I was born and raised in San Francisco so I was here for 44 years. It wasn't until I moved to Marin County and came back here one day that I was at China Beach and it was really low tide and I walked around these rocks and I saw that. So for 44 years I had no idea you could see this in San Francisco, but lo and behold, there it was. And then there was also that where I got to put the little bridge as if it's joining those two little rocks. Right, the most iconic bridge on the planet, the most over-photographed bridge on the planet. Lots of beautiful photos, but it's mostly everybody up on Hawk Hill taking a picture of the fog rolling over. So I felt good, I found something unique and it was serendipitous, it just happened. There's no way I planned, I had no idea it was even there. I just happened to go, huh, I wonder what's behind this rock. A bonsai, how might that work into all of this? Well, what are bonsais? But a reflection of how trees already form in nature. And in particular, this is an example of, if you were doing a bonsai, this would be an ishizuki, which is the kind of tree where the roots grow over the rocks, but this is just a pine tree. And really what, pardon my language, but just a really shitty town, Crescent City, up in Northern California. A place where truckers go to die as far as I can tell, or you go to prison. Those are your two real options. Or it's a perfect place for a tsunami to come in and wipe out the docks. But I found this beautiful tree. Once again, serendipitous, because I just took a left-hand turn to go down and I saw that. My apologies for insulting truckers. I didn't mean to do that. Again, you just sort of see just how these trees have a certain kind of form to them. And then me, now contemplating a tree, which leads to trees on hills. And this is done easily by getting into a car and randomly driving all the back roads of Sonoma County and Marin County. Because every road ends up on one of two roads. So you might seem like you're in the middle of nowhere and you can get lost, but if you keep driving, it'll eventually hit one of those two main arteries. Sometimes two trees. Sometimes it's like in a little valley, like might even get a tire swing. Foggy morning. And then looking inside. So all the other tree shots are the outside, now standing inside. Not to ruin the potential silent zen-like moment of this photo, but I laugh whenever I see it. Because I know kind of what I went through. So because of the lens I was using, I needed to run pretty far to get there. And I've lost a lot of weight, but I used to weigh a lot more than I do now. Running was very hard, and I set the thing up. I didn't have much of a timer back in those days. I just had whatever the camera would allow, so I set it for the 10 seconds so I can get my camera to do. And I bolted like a bat a hell and ran and stopped. So I'm standing, I look all peaceful, but I'm going, huh, huh, huh, huh. But again, photography gives you this sense of peace sometimes, even if that peace is, now you can slice off the silence, even if the reality is you're gonna pass out. So this brings you into the interior of things. This is up in the Queen Oat Rainforest. Also the Queen Oat Rainforest. Sutro Baths, the Sutro Park above the Sutro Baths. Always foggy there. Helen Putnam Regional Park, put that on your list of places if you wanna go see an old growth oak forest. Same place. Redwoods, probably my favorite trees. Hardest thing in the world to photograph. You can't photograph a redwood tree. Can't draw a redwood tree. You can't even really look at one, right? You have to, you have to stay here and you're just gonna go up and down like that. But in some way, maybe you could find lines. And then water, and waterfalls. I always remember when I took this photo, this guy was standing next to me and he was saying, oh, you're here at the wrong time. And he kept, you know, one thing if anybody here does photography, you know this. The minute you go out into the world with a camera, you always meet someone who has their iPhone and they stand next to you and they explain to you why they are a better human being than you by the pictures they took on their phone. And this person was chastising me for being here in Bellingham at the wrong time of the year because he had these photos of the river or of the waterfall just rushing over, like the intensity. But I wouldn't have wanted that because it would have just been one straight thing. I was looking at one, two, three little tree. And then kind of to show how I think about things in some way, shape or form when I'm there, if I am thinking at all. And this is the tourist shot of Multnomah Falls up in the Columbia Gorge just outside of Portland, right? If you've been there and you've taken this photo, everybody who goes there takes this photo. It's nice. I like it. But that's more about what I'm interested in. You form a plus. You get this radiant line of light just shooting down the little bridge that's crossing over. Same thing here. This is Cataract Falls over at Mount Tam. That's interesting, right? You get the trees, you get the rocks, and you get the water. But again, taking us back to that singular egret that started this whole little talk, that's more to my liking because you kind of isolate in and just see the water flow. And then I put this up for one very simple reason. I love this photo. And no one seems to care about it, except me, only I love this photo. But again, it takes us back to the egret. But now it's not a single egret, it's just fish. And it's just the koi at the Japanese Tea Garden. I just photographed one day and I was looking at it for a long time and all of a sudden I just thought about what would happen if I isolated those fish in the world of maw, right? And you don't ever incorporate maw into a photo by saying, this photo needs more maw. You don't say, oh yeah, that's a good use of maw, right? You don't think about standards of maw. It's just, it's a principle and an idea that somehow kind of can become part of you and form how you might approach something. All right, so this comes to the poetry section. So the original plan for this was to have my dear friend Peter Weltner come and read some poems because him and I have worked together on poetry before, on poetry and images before. But he's an older man and he was nervous about COVID and he didn't wanna stand up here with two masks on. It just was too much for him, so he was not able to make it. And I wish you had had the chance to hear him read, his poetry is amazing. So he asked and I agreed and I wanted to read some of his poems, so I'm gonna read about five or six or seven of his poems if that's okay with you all. And I will say something, as John said, I got both my bachelors and my masters at San Francisco State and poetry was really central to my study, Shakespeare and Chaucer also, and the Southern novel, but primarily I was interested in poetry. And I am a photographer in part because the two things that I really wish I could do, I can't do, I can't write a good poem to save my life. I keep doing it, I won't share it with you, I won't prove to you how bad I am at it, just take my word for it. And I wish I could paint, I can't paint. I just don't have that natural talent. So I partly meandered to photography as a failed poet and someone who didn't even bother to try painting because he learned early on that it could not. And one of the things that fascinates me about poetry is how people tend, and this is probably because of our grammar school and high school teachers, they tend to think that poetry is some secret, there's some hidden agenda when you read a poem and you need to understand the poem, you need to be able to put it up in the moon as if it's a rune and read it like on Tuesdays at a full moon from 330 to 430 to be able to understand the poem. When in the end a poem is about what a poem is about, if you can't figure out what the poem is about, it's not a very well written poem. And all the other things about meaning and going beyond, they're really interesting and they're fun and they're games that are enjoyable, but what makes a poem a poem is a poem, a poem about a tree is a poem about a tree and a photograph of a tree is a photograph of a tree. I might say I'm thinking about silence, but in the end the photograph is a photograph of a tree, a photograph of a rock, a photograph of some person standing there. And as I read these poems, instead of trying to figure out what was Peter after in some secret kind of way, enjoy the power of just the music and the words and the language. Okay, John, do you want to? I'm going to at first try to, because a few of them he wrote as a reaction to some of the photos I took and a couple of them I went ahead and created a photo based off of his poem. So, hello. So the first batch of poems are from this book, Old Growth, which features seven poems and seven photos. So the photos are tipped in. Stone altars. The black rocks are for where the images fail. For where the living lie buried with the drowned among uncarved stones. Flags are unfurled on ships once they sail far from harbor or appear over the horizon. Piratical like those you saw as boys when they came for you, dark as these rocks. The sun luminescent fills the sky with promise of return. The ground of the sea bright as a mountain slope. The west sunset lit like planes. Beyond them, everything is silence. No sound left in the world. Two gnarled rocks, a beachside cairn, two fragments of one boulder fallen into the sea. A common phenomenon, though these mark old lovers who took care of poor strangers, of whose devotion to the Wayfarer no more remains than two stones, like relic holders in closing bones that rise like the jagged back of a deep sea creature. Unsatisfied by the villagers in the valley below, the cliffside cottage, hungry disguised as beggars, two gods knock on their door. The couple, slow to answer because of their age, the fear that marrs all late in years, invite them in despite the rags they wear. The odor of their filthy skin and hair is old like theirs. There's something not right about them. They can't say what, like the pinprick sensation they feel when, in winter, a cold wind seeps through chinks in their walls. They feed them boiled cabbage and bacon chunks, a stew already cooking on their stove, and a wine that indeed is most poor, but much better when filled anew each time they finish a glass. A miracle they know at last, who the beggars are, and if it's so, have they dined with gods? The two nod and give them one wish. They reply to die together, never either to have to mourn for the other or to grieve. Waves crash against the headlands. Light, water, ocean are holy to them. Sunset, the cry of seabirds as they fly overhead. They're unafraid of dying, they agree, as the gods disappear like a sigh heard late at night that maybe one lover has made and then rolled over to sleep more soundly. As quickly they become two rocks, apart but together. Islands in a becalmed Pacific craggy rough hewn, the sea lit by luminous clouds, by a light that stands outside the world, as gods do, who've turned them into stone, black as magma, gradually over centuries, to a road to wash away. Yet two altars, two rocks, two lovers arising out of misty water, souls not shades or shadows. Ask the sand they will become, how it is like the sea or a shell like a wave, how the dead recall the life they had. The bell tolls of their days and they will answer. We are the stillness within rivers, tides, winds, a sea-carved cave, a storm, breezes on a sunny day, rustling leaves, a wolf, a fox club, fox cub, thankful for the meat it gnaws, a bird soaring in air, a meteor, a cat's claws teasing twine, a child on a swing, lovers lying side by side, a father with his child on his back, a bride awaiting her groom, a mother, her baby, the crucified one, burning with desire. Ulysses, resailing the ocean, all will reply the same. Love moves without motion like stones in deep sea currents, altars to compassion. I should mention before I go on that the main person that I learned poetry from was Peter Wiltner, who wrote these poems. He was a person who I took multiple classes from when I was at SF State and I audited classes after I was already kind of done with the coursework I needed for my degrees. I just kept showing up to his classes. Okay, old growth. You remember our tree, Ronnie? The one reaching toward heaven. It's bushy, spiked limbs, jagged, gnarly, thigh-thick roots, leaves beseeching, Jesus, we said, old as it must have been, haggard, it's twigs like bony fingers, a kind of fury to it whenever storms shook it. Someday I'll see it again. Each hike we took, we had to press our palms against the bark, maybe to confess our sins. I don't know. A right two small boys made up. A liturgy, a laying on of hands, hickory, spruce, beech, dense vines, pine stands, and an adjacent oak, not even lost, destroys but rejoices in. The smell of leaves, loamy earth, streams after rain, trees, slimmity, the woods of our youth. A photo of an old growth forest, a ghost-like haze, mist from a distant sea, mingling with fog, dampened sunlight, chill breezes seeping through needles, leaves, thickets of brush, entangled vines where massive redwoods root, their trunks grand, defiant as mottleths, bark mottled black and gray, like shadows cast by twilight, precise forms dying away. How much they must know have seen these venerable trees, dim, shaded, unreadable like black ink spilled on cardboard or scratch paper. Their hearts, their sap, the hard flat rings inside them, visible only after they topple from old age or are cut down and sawed for timber. Look at them, Ronnie, trees so strict and rigid they might be steel beams slightly leaning or set on edge, polished granite columns of a temple rising out of woods, soaring from floor to heaven or post-shaping frames through which flows and scatters like rain through screens, a smoky light, a promise of more dark to follow, each mammoth tree as thickly drawn bar, a broad crease, a wide gap, a fold in space, a phantasmic forest snapped by a lens. Redwoods elevated, aspiring skyward, not opposed to the wilderness in which they dwell, but invisibly lifted into the clouds like a consecrated host, a priest holds higher than he can reach. Oh, wonderment, holy trees, icons of belief, fables of nature repeated to be as long lived as stones as ancient creeds surviving past man's wantonness, desperate acts of folly, his skill at destroying. Look, long departed boyhood friend, how in a photograph of an old growth forest we too druid boys might wander yet, incessantly seeking the giant oak we abandoned, having grown too old for it. Come back, Ronnie, to ceremony with me. There are more sacred trees to believe in than youth knew, gods to hold true. Let us touch them, hands open, and see. So this poem is titled, poem set to a line and words by Wordsworth, and words by Wordsworth. And the first line is from a poem by Wordsworth called, nutting for all of you, poetry fans out there. Touch for there is a spirit in the woods. Surprisingly, as if unexpected, the end came. I'd climbed Mount Tamm, now at his old age, that shocks, the vast view witnessed for an hour or two from the summit. Then the holiday over, the trek back down, the marined woods gone, more like a lifetime. The reason I came across the bay to Phoenix Lake overpowered by a desire to be lost in a forest I never forgot. A little boy, no more than four or five, I'd been allowed to roam in woods freely. Maybe they said, why fear getting lost if you live as trees live? I don't know. I became a city man and thought an occasional trek up Mount Tamm was enough to intrude far back where trees uprooted, crash, and die. Now I'd return to the ancient stands, not far from hope, not according to necessity. Anaximander's thought, but to smell the acrid pine resin bleeding to be young again, fearlessly lost in woods, not his. The boys, not anyone's. The sun's seeping through a green dark as moss or lichen, the rot in humus depth enough for him as he rested and searched above the canopy beyond the sun to find the spot where his breath, the light came from, the source of desire in trees, in him, his old man's small boys, godward gaze. This next poem's called Redwood, which for me has also become a tribute to another teacher who was very, very important to me. I don't know if anybody went to San Francisco State, but the department chair for many years, Stephen Arkin, was a really wonderful, wonderful dear old man and he passed away a few years ago and he had a particular interest in this photo, which I gave to him as a gift. So the poem and the gift for me always represent Stephen Arkin, who I just wanna mention because he was a wonderful, wonderful human being. Redwood, trees like poles to climb, foliage gleaming in a shaded light as snow shadows day while you try to see far away, though only what's near is clear, vision intensified by exactitude, this leaf, that needle, bark scrap, limbless trunk, whatever's more precise than memory in the back of an eye. Think of Barnett Newman's zips or Pollock's blue poles, how you dance to the rhythm of what they envision. Consciousness must betray itself to be free, must trust the ghosts concealed in things outside it. These Redwoods have seen, though no less certain, in shades of gray. How quiet the wilderness is today, wet from dew, the mist that perpetually falls in woods, the murmur of a distant rain that is part of what you know is you, the light muted by the moisture dribbling off Redwoods, bushes and vines, the music of a rainy morning's hushed musings, it's silence broken. Or perhaps this is noon, this burnished gray, blackened brightness, not the sun's, but a gift of the primeval world you enter with your camera, illusionless, stark, half-awake dreaming trees once depict on ancient paper scroll, washed in watery ink, nature painterly, the cold fading light, you'll sleep better by deep back in the forest. So those four poems, if I'm counting correctly, I had sent to Peter, I sent the photos to Peter and Peter created these poems. And this idea comes from Echfruxus, Echfruxus, my Greek is not good. But the idea is, Auden's famous for his poem about the Musee of Debo Arts, where Icarus falls from the sky and then my old brain, Bruegel, who may or may not have actually done the painting, I guess it's been discovered, did that painting where you see the plowman and the ship and all this stuff going on and you just see this little splish of water in the distance, so that's an idea of a poet kind of writing a poem that comes, and I think prepositions can be really important. It's not about the poem. These photos are not meant to be, or these poems are not meant to be about the photos. I like the prepositions of and from, they are of the photo, they are from the photo, but they're not necessarily a reaction to them or an interpretation of them at all, they just take this idea of creating something that comes from and of the experience, of seeing something, and these next two poems, I read the poems and I came up with the photos. So this is called A Last Heron on Hamilton Lake in late November. It is not the end of autumn that prevents me in my old age from sleeping, but the smell of smoke from burning leaves in my father's backyard. Night after night, the sound of rain. Night after night, cold winds blowing. It is not reality that keeps me from dreaming, the truths that make life hard. How lonely is the evening as it settles on the bridge over the creek near the lake. The days rush as swiftly by, and my prayers stay unanswered. Heresy is the pond where a blue heron fishes by a pine stand. I write for the sake of my dead father to tell him I remain a believer, a heron alone and winter ready. This is the white light of morning, and because you're not here looking at the word like I am, it's not M-O-R-N-I-N-G, it's not the beginning of a day, it's grief M-O-U-R-I-N-G, so the white light of morning. The world is a wonder of ordinariness. Every day he is surprised by its survival. There are no miracles, just light and sea and sky. The gentle spray of waves in his face, the morning sun on the sails of a boat, glowing a pink-orange translucent as the roses growing in his backyard. After death, what beneficence endures? At home, he arranges lavender asters into crystal bowls. What reticence, greater than silence, partakes of the grief he feels as the last spring flowers drift onto his lawn, scattering petals that after rain blaze as if with life renewed, dew-wet, sparkling long past dawn. They look as if they were burning with a minute bright flame that is consuming their colors into one song of praise, dazzling his eyes with the white light, the fierce blank light of morning, like the flare, the stunning incandescence of the sky after a storm when the sun is newborn to its sorrows. All right, and Peter specifically asked if I would be so kind as to just read a couple of poems from his two latest books. That's my photo. I found this pinhole thing. So you just, there's not a lens, I didn't take this picture with a lens, it's just this pinhole thing that I stuck on my digital camera. And it just does weird pinhole things. Don't you love books? We have two million of them here. Make sure you have the library card. Someone gave me a Kindle once and I just put it in a box and gave it away. Said thank you so much, I can't wait to this new adventure in reading. Exile. A man, a poet in exile, stands on a deserted shore of Augustus' Mediterranean Empire, no more temple, no more alter beasts being slaughtered for the feasts to follow, roast bores on slaves' shoulders brought to table, no more courtesans perfumed with scented waters, garlanded with hibiscus in grape leaves, as Caesar savors his poems about the metamorphoses of all things, even as his soldiers fight his foreign wars for power's sake and die and dies he might do for poetry or the pleasures of Bacchus dancing to timbrels, flutes, drums, crotales, the muses, music and joys and lusts in all their sensual inconsequence. Nonsense is the stuff of poetry is made of if it never dares to defy its caesars. Along this craggy shoreline his days will end, seated to Augustus. Let him then freely pour the wine, the libation that might induce to rise out of the waves at the cries of seabirds, the sight of the ship that would carry him homeward at last done with his punishment. A small boat to fishermen ties dockside rocks like a cradle. He is a teller of tales of the ancient tragedies about how everything is metamorphic, changeable, save this, that all men come to harm, their lives suspended, ended forever, whether on the Parthian plains or the Dacian borders or by the Black Sea in the lands of unlattened barbarians. City of decrepit old age of ghosts, visitations, lusts, fears and premonitions, lies and misprisons, abiding every violence, resentment, rage. Tell me, he longs to say, how safe do you feel today, Rome hidden, even as you pray behind the walls of your Olympian silence, that death not come for you like playthings of the gods of cabals and plots, assassins from circus to form, to end like me, an exile shuffling among lemuries a thousand miles from home. In an open field by a desolate olive grove, he found a shard he's pocketed for luck. No one can live forever, but might his poetry be read down through the centuries. He eats melons, figs, dates and little more. When he dies, who will pour wine on his grave as an oblation, offer lemon cakes and honeyed almonds? Wave after wave, lapsed at his feet, the ancient Greeks believe that every language begins in mourning, undulations, nothing lends you, all you borrowed taking from you. Say poetry is a bandage applied to conceal the separation, the oozing of your wounds, then grieve for the dead. None living can understand the battle that goes on and on in the heart even after death. The dread, there is no end to it, the carnage. This is where reading ancient poems brings us to an island where poetry began. An ancient woman, black hair, sun, gritty, a cracked face, craggy fishermen bound to the seas, cruel life, both of whom know they must weep as they laboriously climb steep zigzagging paths up a hill to the cemetery. The place where tragedy originated, to reach the meaning the exiled poet sees as his own and yours at mine too. The old woman dressed head to toe in night black, the fisherman limping, staring out beyond sight, both blessed by a final vision that shines far past the horizon, the dying half light from the soul of devotion, the common pain, the daily primordial suffering you write of, Ovid, a bitter wind chilling your eyes and the dead you see unchanging. Sibilance, I don't know if you can just, I always love just how much assonance and consonance and sibilance there is in Peter's work. And once asked him about it and he said, it just comes. Right, you often think all these artists are sitting around with these like long-term plans of careful calculation, but I think a lot of great stuff just, it just comes. And you have no idea where it comes from. And personally, the hope that maybe it'll just continue to come with the possibility that it'll just someday stop. All right, just a couple more. Early morning, December 21st, by the way, Peter lives like 47th and Lawton, like two or three blocks away from Ocean Beach and every day he walks. And when you read his collections of poetry, you start to see that a lot of his poems had to have come in some way shape or form from just him walking his dog along the great highway and the beach and going into the park, which I used to do when I could afford to live in this city, which is why I now live in Nevada. Early morning, December 21st, behind a veil of thin torn clouds, a white wafer moon is surrounded by an aurora like a rainbow, a monstrous in the sky at night before the winter solstice. Dawn is hours away, a few stars low on the horizon, look like chalk marks scrawled on a blackboard. A big jet flies due east, it's beacon lights flashing red, yellow red. The air is cold as coastal Maine, chilled by the surf, a somber, dark-hued Prussian blue, the waves wild as if driven by storms that wait to lay beyond the visible world. Sometimes I wonder if it is because I am old that I feel saddened by such beauty. The earth too full of it, too much left for me to see, to let my soul willingly depart from my body. The night to come is the year's darkest. Squall winds will rage, I'll lie in bed, awake too long and listen to the sea. And I think I'll end with, I do a lot of poetry readings in my life and I always find it interesting that many poets who read from their longer poems, they just choose sections. I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do section two and three from a poem titled New Year's Eve. Last night I dreamed of myself dreaming of the new life I'd imagined as I slept in a bedroom not far from cold, thorough like new England woods in 1968. And I dreamed of friends and friends of friends as their voices seeped through floorboards, talking of lives, there was still plenty of time left to live no matter how wrongly dreamed of, dreamed of as freedom, joy as a happiness, I like them imagined when young before age change what we all might hope for into reality. The regrets that it never will be ensue. These days I listen to Mahler a lot, songs, symphonies alike because his music lets despair sound almost beautiful and beauty even closer to despair. This morning right before dawn, I removed from its dusty place in a tall bookshelf Steiner's language and silence to reread my full name and the year I bought it, scrawled on the fly leaf unsurprisingly faded. I wonder what I will make of now five decades later, it's lofty eloquent at odds with its topic sustainable of language despite how clear or factual it might strive to be, to be dismissing what poetry might try to retain of the hopes of the past and asked it to meet. And I agree with Steiner I suppose, language fails us. Poetry lies mortally wounded among wars rubble tainted by disasters ruined by centuries of unspeakable cruelties. And yet I wanna say here in this poem, if it is a poem, something so simple, so plain and ordinary, there's no poetry to it, just bare truth, I miss my friends. These are the woods where I hide from time when a boy, these the days I read in the news of friends and obituaries, the stories I'm unable to hear this far from home, sparse clues to the lies they've lived. In my fantasies where I've stayed, where I've too long strayed, what's needful? Let me read that line again. In my fantasies where I've too long strayed, what's needful? In the dark of a forest, vines tangled with brush, the air is wet, drizzling pine oak and hickory bark black as duff, the thick canopy diffusing sunlight to a dusky bronze glow, or the shine off some gold thing no one can afford. Perhaps my mind's not right, or maybe it is merely the nostalgia of an old man demanding, go home, boy. The last light fades, so would speak, or stay where you are, go deeper in, make your daily futile raids on the inarticulate or indefinable deeds, know me as I am, dear friends. I pray you have lived in one clear place, never a stranger, never far from kindness, nothing at your end deprived of its beginnings, and I, always the dreamer, doomed to disappointment. I see, call it visionary, you and me wandering together, unguided by sight, miles remote from our homes, romantically incited to recall all we've lost, yet led by love past twilight. Wish Peter could have been here, so, because I won't say anything about his poetry. I'll leave that up to the poet. So thank you very much for staring at my photos, listening to me ramble, and then giving me a chance to read a dear friend's excellent poetry. So I guess if there's questions. So what I propose, I have a few questions for you, Nathan, just a few, and then we'll open it up to the audience, and I'll come down and bring a microphone for audience members. And, you know, I always, remember when I'm in the audience, if you have nothing to ask, don't worry about it. I'd be happy just to go back home to Marin. So don't feel any, like, overwhelming pressure. And if you want to ask me some really weird question, like, what color are my socks? I'm always glad to answer those. When I teach a class, I can't get students to do anything sometimes. I just say, ask me anything. Just don't make it embarrassingly personal, and I'll answer the weirdest of questions. So just to... Okay, we'll let it rip. Thank you for, thanks for sharing your images, and also the story of your journey into photography. I've known you for quite a few years, but I did not know any of that backstory. I've known John, what, since I was like... Five. Elementary school. We both went to Star of the Sea. His brother was in my class. We both went to SI. And thanks also for sharing Peter Weltman's poetry, which we do have some of his books here. I guess, you know, one question I have for you. I noticed that the photographs you shared with us were all black and white. What led you to specialize in black and white photography? So, this is... I have like 5,000 answers to this question. The truth is because... And I feel like I could stop there. Like, I would just want to show my photos and leave. I could just say, well, you know, they're black and white. And I have color photos. But, you know, I think if I look back to childhood and things that have influenced me over the years, you know, I did grow up in San Francisco. And I grew up in a family that had no money. And we had a black and white TV when there were clearly color TVs everywhere. So, everything that I watched as a kid, I saw in black and white. And then in the eighth grade, I was chosen to pick, for whatever reason, I was chosen to look through all of the black and white reels of World War II. You know, the World War II footage. And I saw all the movies of World War II. And to this day, for some reason, when I imagine World War II, I think World War II happened in black and white. It was not in a color world. I just have this black and white kind of idea in my head. And that leads to, you know, before I ever became interested in taking my own photos, I mean, Edward Weston, Win Bullock, Paul Strand, just to name classic, Henri Carter Bresson, to name, you know, famous black and white photographers, Ansel Adams. I love Ansel Adams. He's not my go-to guy. Everyone's like, Ansel Adams is a God. And he certainly is in the sense that he created the idea of just taking a photo and then just messing with it until it looks the way that you want it to look. But I think, I almost kind of think of my childhood in black and white. So I have this sort of black and white understanding of the world is visually. And then when I think about, when I want to take a photo or whatever it is I'm doing, the one thing I have no interest in ever is recreating what's there. So it looks the same way. I don't want to say I want to interpret things because that takes me away from everything I said about motion, notion, and that I'm just doing whatever. But I certainly have no interest whatsoever in capturing a sunset and saying, look, that's the sunset. I'm not gonna be the person that when you go to the beach that I have my phone up in the air trying to take the majesty of the sun and squish it into a little rectangle. And the other thing is, I had an opportunity to go to Canada and these two wonderful jazz musicians invited me to show my photos on the wall and they turned their chairs towards the screens and they just played jazz, clarinet and piano. They just improvised. I just kept showing like 125 photos and like a 45 minutes later, they played a 45 minute piece that they made up in that moment. And I was asked later on in the question and answer, why black and white? And I said, because black and white is more truthful. And I'm not gonna explain that. I'm just gonna say that and let you do whatever you want with such a statement. If one can photograph silence and I don't know if you can, wherever it is, it's in the light as far as I'm concerned and I'll stop with that. Thanks for that contrast. You talked a little bit about your working with Peter and I know you've done at least two books with him. In your latest book, A Slice of Silence, there must be like a dozen poets and also SES. Can you say a little bit about what was your process working with those different writers? The book is not published yet. It's done, it's there. It's in the world of supply chain issues. Donald Trump, it's his fault, I'll blame him. He's made it so my book can't come out soon enough. And Biden's contributing. But it'll be hopefully out in the fall. And the idea started with my brother, Jason, who John knows very well, of my best friend in life. And I said, would you wanna write an essay about my photos? Cause I'm just looking for some little side project. And he got the idea, let's do a book. And we managed to persuade Bruce up in Seattle with Chin Music Press. He's agreed to publish it. And then because of all the work I'd done with Peter on the poems, we thought, let's find some poets. I'd also done collaborations with musicians, jazz musicians, Amanda Lin player. We did this thing with music, being inspiring the photos or photos being inspired by the music. And we started to sort of, well, what poets do we know? And we gathered together a nice list of willing people, including Gary Snyder, Jane Hirschfield. Those are the two most prominent names that come to mind. And the way I did it was one of three ways. Either the poet or the essayist saw a photo and they created something of it or from it. Or I got a poem and I created something of it or from it. Or some people just took one of my photos and matched it with a poem that they'd already written. So it was this sort of this different people doing different kinds of things. So the way the book is set up, it begins with this wonderful introduction by the wonderful writer Charles Johnson. And it leads into an essay that my brother wrote, that essay that we first had agreed on. And then it goes into the section where it's photo, poem, photo, poem, photo, poem, photo, poem. And then in some cases, photo, essay. And then after that section of that collaboration kind of thing going on, there's a whole section of the sea, then there's a whole section of land. And I'm happy to say it. It's only gonna cost 30 bucks. So please buy one. Book is really beautiful. And what's interesting is underneath each poem, unlike a footnote, you mentioned which one of those three processes was used in the pairing of the text with the image. And also Charles Johnson's forward is quite remarkable. There's some contributors, a phenomenologist from Sweden. Jason's introductory essay is quite impressive. It's a very beautiful book. Lots and lots of pages. What you saw was just a very small slice of the different genres that you work in. Very interesting. Thank you. I had another question for you. Which perhaps has to do with what I would call a mood, both in your images and in some of the poems you read by Pierre Weltener. And this, I noticed also in your earlier book with him old growth, there are portraits of trees that have what I would describe as an elegiac or melancholy mood. In your current book, the poem, The Elders by Galen Garwood. Also has some of this melancholy. Is this something that I'm just projecting because these are black and white photos and I associate black and white with, you know, time that's been lost or is there? Well, I'll go back. I hesitate to say something intentional about that. I'll go back to the Dogen quote and I'll say that melancholy enters the image because you have a melancholy like understanding of things that you see and you will bring to the images. I share your melancholy like, melancholy is actually one of my favorite emotions if I can even call it an emotion because melancholy to me is many different ways you could define and cast melancholy but to me it's thoughtful sadness. It's a kind of acceptance of the way of things. It's an acceptance of that there is grief, there is tragedy, there is difficulty, there is processing the grief and the tragedy of life. There is things that come and go. There's transience, just the speed of things. There's the impermanence of things that nothing lasts. There's just this constant state of flux and the overwhelming reality that most of us stuff down to get through daily life that we too shall someday no longer be. So yeah, I think there's some of that in my thinking of things, but you would bring it into the photo. Another story I always tell, the self-portrait shots, the self where I'm standing and stuff. To me it's like, ooh, look person, tiny, the immensity of nature and life and light and the glory, the contemplation, the silence. I can't tell you how many times people have sent me notes or set aside and they say, you're so sad and lonely. So they see these photos and they think of, this is someone who doesn't have a partner in life and they're sitting out there all alone and wanting, that's the furthest thing from my mind. Because I'm very happily married for 27 years so that's just never an issue for me, but I'm out there by myself because Jesus, I wanna be out there by myself. I want that quiet, I want that escape. So I think really in the end, all art, people are gonna, you teach poetry for a while and you ask some students, what are you things going on in the poem and the things they say, it's so far removed but you have to step back and you have to think, but that's you, that's your experience, you're going to bring yourself to something and art would have no pleasure if it was dictated by the creator. Absolutely, the listener or the viewer contributes something. I was gonna say, on the other hand, in both the books that I've read by you, the photos, a lot of them are very centered, the trees, the rocks and for me, it really reminds me of portrait photography and these rocks or trees seem to have a personality, a life, do you have anything to say about that? Are you a choice of formatting? Well, I could speak just technically as I already kind of hinted at earlier, things have sides and things look different from different sides. So if I thought I could keep you guys captivated for six hours, I could show you studies of particular rocks and trees and how I've gone around in different times of the year, buried under sand during certain times of the year, the light hitting it at certain times of the year, just the one tree will look like a corkscrew on one side, it'll look expansive and wide on another side, just how you approach that individual lone thing that in some way, shape, or form, what you do with portrait photography is applicable to taking pictures of these various things. I've just never had an interest in taking pictures of people. I love portrait work that other people do, but it's just not something that's ever struck me as something I wanna do. So I have one final question for you and then we'll open it up to the audience. So as you alluded to earlier, we humans are in the midst of a planet-wide human created climate crisis that we seem unable to face up to and I noticed the headline of today's New York Times Riley observes, the headline reads, as the planet cooks, climate stalls as a political issue. So climate change is clearly reshaping our environment. Does an awareness of this fact inform in any way your art and do you think artists can do anything to raise humanity's awareness of their impact? It's a tough, it's a tough, especially the killing artist raise awareness. I guess I've always kept my art and by art I don't mean the things I create, but my appreciation of all the artists over time that I really loved, I've kept a lot of it separate from politics for some reason and I'm always wary of art that tries to instruct, tries to tell, tries to guide. I worry about it on some level because imagery created to persuade always to get a little over the top is several steps away from fascist propaganda. It just, it worries me in that kind of way. But you know, there's all these crises that are going on in the world and there's certainly all these crises going on in America with all of the recent stuff going on socially, all the political people and all of that and I'm concerned and worried about all those things but climate change does really seem to be the one that is the most important thing to be worried about. But at the same time, what Gary Snyder said about it always echoes in the back of my mind the earth's gonna be fine. We're not gonna be fine after all this is said and done. And it is a great concern of mine but this might seem like a strange, weird thing to say but when I encounter the beauty of nature even in climate change, concerns dancing around it's still beautiful, it's still silent, it still has that reflection and I did something very interesting last week. I got back from, took a trip to Southern Oregon for a couple weeks with my family and when we were coming back we got stuck in a little bit of traffic because there was a fire in Nevada and it burned the grasslands and there's two oak trees that I often take pictures of and I went back a week later and I took a picture of the burnt oak trees and it was just so strange and eerie and I now have this compare and contrast between the oak tree that's vibrant and the summer with its, as you may have noticed with infrared images the green comes out as white and black and white it just picks up this really stark white and it doesn't do that after they burnt and I don't know if these trees are dead or if it just kind of, you know the leaves have been fried and they've kind of died back because the trunk looks strong still like it could make a comeback next spring but there's this sort of awareness that California's on fire the waves are always rising and all these places that I photographed along the shoreline people may not be able to photograph them in the same way I did so in a certain way a photograph will preserve that which once was and no longer will be I mean if I thought my photographs could persuade Joe Manchin to do something different I would print every photo I owned and mail it to him in order to begin this kind of process but I don't know if my work changes the minds of that crisis to an answer, it's a tough question. Yes, well we've appreciated all of your answers thus far in your talk if there are any questions from the audience raise your hand I'll come down and bring a microphone to you. Hello, I have two questions well first I really like your work that's not a question but I was wondering if you take any inspiration from Hiroshi Sugimoto some of your work reminds me of his work. In what was it? I'm not gonna get the year right but I'm gonna guess 2005 or 2006 they had a retrospective or an exhibition of Sugimoto at the De Young and I was there. Yeah, I have the poster in the living room. I have the book that came from that. Yeah, his, the no-line on the horizon photos those were. Long exposure see photos. They were, because it reminds you when you look at all those photos they're just pictures of the ocean just the horizon line and it doesn't matter where they are it's like, it's almost, it shows you that you can see the ocean anywhere in the world and it picks up the qualities of what that looks like and it's completely relatable. So yeah, Sugimoto is someone who's work definitely dances in my mind and when I first started taking photos I got really serious about it. I went to the Academy of Sciences and I took a picture of the dioramas because I was fascinated by his diorama photographs because he took pictures of animals and from the New York Museum of Natural History and he took a picture of all these dioramas and when you look at the picture of these recreations they look eerily real. Like it's actually a picture of a zebra or a tiger or some prehistoric man and I became fascinated as an experiment. I did a whole, I still have them on my computer but I took pictures of the zebra exhibit and the gazelle, all of those different things. So yeah, he definitely is dancing around in my mind somewhere. Deep appreciation of his work. And my other question is, well, lots of times, you know, great photo. I mean, it's just being there with the camera and getting that instant. So I think, you know, that probably comes into your work to some degree, you know, outside of the technical know-how and so on. But what would you say to, and I was interested to learn that you're an English teacher. So, you know, lots of times if you're pressed for time, you know, it's the day before the art class, you know, the drawing class, or the day of or the night before the papers do on, you know, your essay about a reading and you're like, oh my God, I gotta get this done right now and you just crank out something. You didn't make any corrections. It just like comes out great. You bring it in. The teachers love it. But then you feel after that, you know, then, you know, like the next assignment, eh, you know, it comes out kind of not so great. And then, so how do you, like, how would you, you know, talk to an artist or a writer to be able to kind of work with that reality that, you know, everything you punch out is, may not be as great as that one thing. And to keep, you know, keep faving yourself that you actually do have more than just a flash in the pan kind of talent and that you want to pursue it to be able to keep it, you know, to keep going and keep producing? I'm gonna give you a very weird answer. Sorry, I apologize in advance. So there's a, there's a, I think it's Josue, Josue, the famous Zen Cohen, where the monk asks the master, how do I find enlightenment? And Josue says, if it is Josue, says, have you finished eating your rice? And the monk says, yes. And then Josue asks, have you washed a rice bowl? And it, you know, Zen Cohen's are always like, you know, especially to a Western mind, but the idea is of practice and not practice in the sense of you practice the piano by playing, you know, the set of side scales and chords, practice in the sense of how you live a life, practice in the sense of if you do engage in meditation, you know, there are some schools of thought that say if you meditate long enough, you shall someday achieve some kind of mystical enlightenment. But in the Soto school that I've been kind of following, the enlightenment isn't the goal, the goal is the practice, you sit down and meditate when you're in a shitty mood, you meditate, when you're in a good mood, you meditate, when you're in a mediocre mood, you meditate, you just meditate every day. If you apply that to photography, you just take pictures, you just do it, you do the practice, the practice is what matters, not the practicing, but the practice of, you just, every single day. And then you don't worry about whether your work is flashing the pan or dancing outside of the pan, you just do the work, you just do it and you do it and you do it and you do it. And then personally, I don't think about it, I just, what happens, happens and discovery happens when discovery happens and there are days when I come back and I look at what I did and I, that's not very good and I process something and I have, those of you who work on photos and you save different versions, you have, say that photo's called, you've titled it oak, you have oak one, you have oak one, alt, oak one, alt, alt, oak one, alt, alt, alt, oak one, alt, alt, alt, oak one, alt finished, oak one, alt finished, not yet finished, alt, alt, alt, alt, alt, and you have like 75 million, my hard drive is just filled with all of these weirdo things that I've done and I just keep working on something until something settles with whatever my mood is and sometimes that doesn't happen or sometimes I walk away from a photo and 10 years later I go look at it again and I start doing something and I go, oh, oh. And it just kind of happens. Social media is wonderful in the sense that, because I started out sharing my photos on Flickr, you know, back when Flickr was the only game and it was fun because you got to share and people got to say stuff because anyone who tells you they only take photos for themselves is slightly lying because why do you show them to people then? You want people to see your work and I want to share my work but it's weird to start to rely on whether someone reacts to something. It's weird to worry about whether or not it means something to you or doesn't mean something to you. I'm sure you've taken a photo, you've thought this is the greatest thing I've ever done and then seven weeks later you look at it and you go, oh, that's the worst horrible thing I've ever done, right? Because your mood changes and you see things and you grow and you learn and you evolve and you see things differently over time. I'm sure when you drive around and you're in the car you just see a glimpse of something and you frame it. You just start to notice things whether you were thinking about it or not. So I'd say as much as you can free yourself from all of those worries, do that. As far as writing an essay the night before it's due, not a good idea. Well, I've been a student for many years and I've been a teacher for many years and if I learned anything it's that learning is entirely up to you and the teacher is actually a very insignificant part of your learning process. The best teachers are the ones that are able to guide you towards something so you can learn on your own. Are there any other questions? One moment. Yeah, you've spoken a lot about silence so I'm asking just to complete the dialectic could you talk to us about sound? So sound in terms of experiencing silence? Well, you're using silence as a kind of a trope and you haven't really defined it, which is fine. That was intentional. I'm just wondering if you could just give us some thoughts on sound, you know. So in reality in the taking of the photo if there is silence there it's noisy to sound paradoxical for a moment. Whatever I'm referring to in silence has a lot to do with inner experience. Has to do with how you are somewhere and despite the fact that there may be a very auditory experience of the ocean waves crashing around you, birds making noises, people running by that whatever the silence is it's an experience that is in between all of those sounds to just sound maybe a little bit too poetic and a little bit too philosophical and to carefully dodge your question slightly so as to not give a finite answer because individually I think each person's going to have their own experience and conception of how they encounter nature and how they encounter art and how they just experience things. And you know, Thoreau once talked about solitude which I very definitely associate with silence in a lot of kinds of ways and that one can feel a certain kind of solitude that's a bit of a loneliness actually in a hall with lots of people around that one can feel alone, that one can feel that sense of disconnect and that's not really the kind of silence I'm thinking about. I'm thinking more of you're driving along great highway and there are some sunsets that are just so spectacular and so magnificent that even if you hate sunsets you go ah and you have to stop and you pull over and you go and you stand and you look and you stare and there are nowadays there are people with their phones there's people shouting people who aren't paying attention to the sunset but in that moment, in the midst of all that sound all those sounds that dominate our everyday life even the sounds that are in your head by that I mean all of that useless garbage and trivia and muddiness that just flows through your mind, right? You might be seeing a sunset and even for a moment you might think about what's John doing? What's Bill up to? What's Marcy up to? This constant sense of flow but there are those moments where despite all of that interruption you have that kind of moment where it's a deep connection maybe back to that Emersonian kind of thing a contemplative sense of what we mean by silence and where you start bringing out weird synesthesia like things like do you feel the silence? Do you see the silence? And it's politic in the sense that it's meant to be contradictory, paradoxical because it's for you to look at two things that don't go together and figure out some kind of truth that comes out of it I guess is kind of what I'm getting at. Does that help at all? Yeah, I mean silence in the sense of just how you engage things. So I think we have time for just one more question if it's quick. I hope you can understand, oh you can I hope you can understand me through the mask. Thank you so much. Oh thank you. That was so beautiful, so well inspiring to me and wow, I suppose, I don't know if you've had well I'm sure you all have had the experience where you see one art form or you have some experience and then you see something else and you see it mirrored and I just saw Tarkovsky's The Mirror. So when I'm looking at your work I think, wow, and the kind of the poetic the poetic silence, the poetic beauty I just wanna say how much I have enjoyed this afternoon in the discussion and all that you've said and the essay would have been better if you did it earlier. It's interesting that you bring up Tarkovsky because John and I were sitting in the back room just chatting and I was saying how I've been I got the criteria in channel and I've just been watching all these films that I've missed out over the years and I went into my little Tarkovsky phase and John asked what was your favorite Tarkovsky film and to make the longer conversation short it was a tie between mirror and sacrifice for me. So yes, if you want to discuss the photography or Tarkovsky's films I recommend, because we have to end this program I recommend that we go across the street to Euro King, across the street from the entrance of the library and we can continue talking. And I just wanna say thank you Nathan for your presentation and for your time sharing everything, thank you so much. Thank you very much.