An ongoing photo series exploring the language of landscape in my home region of central Virginia.
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
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And now the lustral waters of night absolve me
from the many colors and the many forms ◇
I feel / in the crack of night / the verses that are to come ◇
Darkness is sealing
the mirrors which copy the fiction of things ◇
“The language of landscape is our native language. Landscapes were the first human texts, read before the invention of other signs and symbols.”
- Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape
I never knew I could miss a word like ‘damp’
like ‘dark’
It’s late August, and prophets are calling their bears in.
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Under the tongue is the utterance.
Under the utterance is the fire, and then the only end of fire.
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Orange Crush sunset over the Blue Ridge
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Over the Blue Ridge, the whisperer starts to whisper in tongues.
Watching the nouns circle, and watching the verbs circle
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Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
what touches me
As though I didn't exist?
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A note
This project began as a way to capture and catalog the “language of landscape” in my home region so that I could take it with me when I was elsewhere. I was inspired by Leila Chatti’s poem “Echo (All She Lost She Lost)” and the way it uses the abecedary format to explore loss, desire, and sensory aspects of language.
The landscape of central Virginia is a language I didn’t know I spoke until I left it, and the process of leaving and returning continues to haunt me in ways that go beyond any single format or medium. The images in this collection were made over a period of nearly ten years, across half a dozen different cameras, and tell the story of how my home shaped my sight and how I’ve turned that sight back towards my home. It is my forever subject.
Poetry Key
◇ Jorge Luis Borges
✿ Charles Wright