Be Our Guest - Patricia Turner

In this our month of gratitude here at Focusing on Life, I'm pleased to introduce our guest for this month, Patricia Turner. Carol Albers recently met Patricia at a photography workshop and suggested her for a guest blogger. I think you'll be glad she did when you've read Patricia's lovely post and viewed her wonderful photography. Since Patricia is new to our pages, I think a short introduction would be helpful.

Patricia majored in photography and filmmaking in the mid-1970’s.  After receiving her master’s in Fine Arts Education from Harvard University in 1979, she spent the next 30 years teaching in a suburban Boston school system.  In 2005, she received a grant from The Philanthropic Initiative to return to her photographic work with a trip to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.  This has led to 9 years of world travel.   Since her retirement in 2010, Turner has devoted her time to contemplative photography and travel with her home-base in Porter, Maine.  Her latest project, The Poetry of Place, Reflections from the Edge of the Pond, finds her much nearer to home, at Little Clemons Pond in Hiram, Maine.  Her passion for the writings of Henry David Thoreau has led her to make the pond her personal Walden.   This photograph represents the inaugural print of the series she hopes to create over the next year at the pond.  Turner writes a blog, A Photographic Sage, that approaches contemplative photography from a Taoist perspective.  You can see folios of her work on the site.

Finding Walden

I am grateful for so many things. Retirement has offered me the gift of time to pursue my passion for contemplative photography. My love of the writings of Concord contemplative and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau has given me the desire to find and photograph my own Walden close to home. I'm thankful that I found it within a mile of my home in Maine and I've made it my goal since June 29, 2014, to visit and photograph the pond for one year.

What has evolved since June is The Poetry of Place: reflections from the edge of the pond. Not merely documentary, I have tried to wade into the soul of this unique little pond. Unspoiled by development along its shore, Little Clemons Pond has touched me in ways no other landscape has. It has opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing and for that I am truly thankful.

It's not what you look at that matters,

it's what you see.

                                                                 - Henry David Thoreau

What I've seen has surprised even me.

I've begun to see the pond in terms of gentle and sometimes subtle abstractions. Tentative at first because I was a bit afraid of letting go of imagery.

Early on I made photographs that attempted to reflect the lyrical nature I found at the pond. I called these images Intimacies. I began to experiment with processing the photographs in a more painterly way. Something I'd never tried before.

But as I became more and more immersed in the poetic elements of this place, I took a giant leap.

Once I began to see the reflections in the mirror-like surface of the water I had to acknowledge the masterful hand of Nature that creates these amazing abstract expressionist renderings. I simply chose a particular part of Her composition to translate into my photography detaching it from any reference to what caused the reflections.

The world is but a canvas to our imagination.

                                                                                                            - Henry David Thoreau

Every visit to the pond has brought me to a new and different place with my camera work. I felt completely liberated to explore new ways to depict what I found there. A friend took me out in his canoe so I could look at the pond from the inside out rather than my usual outside in. That too changed my relationship with the pond.

That is yet another thing I am thankful for ... this new co-conspiracy with the landscape. I rarely see myself as a silent witness but as an active participant with the pond. We are a team. Some days I just go and sit by the pond and work on a haiku, another new adventure for me, but the pond has inspired so many. She, and I do see the feminime quality of this place, invites me to watch the seasons slowly change along her shores; watching the ever revolving wheel of the year turn. The dazzling fall season is slowly but inextricably fading as the trees rust on the hillsides. 

This has been a warm and lengthy interval between the heat of summer and the frosts of late autumn.

It seems to me the landscape is having a final and furious fling before it gives itself up to the starkness of a Maine winter. The calendar page drops away and I know the time has come to embrace a new reality. I've watched summer melt into fall and now fall fades into that in-between place that some call November. The leaves and the pine needles engage the pond in an intimate embrace smothering the shore as they let go of the trees that held them tightly in their grasp all summer.

A chill may pervade the air but I find the slowly disappearing color a relief. I am looking forward to cold and snow and ice in a way I never have before when I only saw it as a nuisance to be dealt with. Now it will transform my pond in new and magical ways and I know that it will transform my camera work as well.

November is that time of transition and I feel my photographs becoming more and more experimental as I struggle to transcribe the pond's metamorphosis in visual terms. I find the need to visit more frequently now and often only with pen and paper and not camera, in hand. Then, when I do return with the camera, I find my response to the pond more intuitive and authentic.

November Night

Silent in the black woods wait

'round a sleeping,

moonlit pond

Owls keep watch with me.

Haiku #10

The pond is turning inwards and I seem to be also. I find myself returning, from time to time, to the monochrome image. As the color leaves the landscape, so it is with my photographs of it. Again, I find my camera work responding to the whispers of the pond.

I have nearly seven more months left in this project but already it feels as if I have been visiting and recording the pond's spiritual essence for a lifetime. I doubt that the strong bond that I've forged with this place will end just because the calendar says the year is over. One simply doesn't turn one's back on a cherished friend and I am forever thankful for Her friendship and the photographs She has gifted me.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

                                                                                                     - Henry David Thoreau

Please visit Patricia's blog by following this link:

http://aphotographicsage.blogspot.com/

You can also access the Poetry of Place posts so far by following this link:

http://aphotographicsage.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Poetry%20of%20Place