A Multiplicity of Views...

   This flower, which I photographed on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, seemed the perfect image to illustrate the idea of multiple views.  Each little stalk radiates from a center point and seems to look at the landscape it is in from a different angle, a unique point of view.

   Now, this line of thinking lead me to Pablo Picasso and the style of art he pioneered, along with Georges Braque, called Cubism.  Through cubism, he tried to render an object from all different angles at the same time creating a multiplicity of viewpoints.

   Contemplative photographers know, on a heart level, that there is more to a landscape than the first impression...more than even the second or third impression.  There are a vast array of views from which we can regard the world we walk through and each view gives us a different message of what "is".  Imagine a tiny insect resting in the center of each of the florets of this flower.  Each looking out on the world around them.  Their "reality" would be different from the others...all would be "right" but incomplete.

  Remember this flower when you venture out to photograph the landscape...remember to look, look harder, look deeply, look completely and then look again.  There is so very much to see.  Remember too that Carl Jung suggested, and I'm paraphrasing here, that "we make the photographs our soul wants to see."  What image does your soul cry out to see?