Digital Collage and Photographic Metaphor...

   On my brief visit to Cape Ann, I saw and experienced quite a bit considering the fact that I was only there 27 hours and 8 of those hours I spent sleeping!  (If you didn't see the album of images on Google+, you can see it here.)

Stay Away from the Windows

   The image that pleases me the most, however, is a digital collage I made.  It is my icon of the experience.

   The people I was staying with had a beautiful contemporary home with huge expanses of glass that made the outside landscape fuse with the interior space.  Quite lovely.  But all that glass was having an unpleasant side effect.  The windows reflected the trees and sky and the birds were crashing into it.  Some were merely stunned; others succumbed to the collision.  Everyone was desperately trying to think of ways to prevent it.

   The bottom line was, for me, a metaphor for Man's relationship with Nature.  How do we live in peaceful co-existence?  How do we warn the birds to stay away from the windows?  What they are seeing is merely an illusion, a very dangerous one at that.  Human beings sometimes fall into this same trap, flying blindly into our illusions .  I felt compelled to make this digital collage of the metaphor and the experience.

   I make finding the metaphor in the landscape a major part of my work as a contemplative photographer but with the medium of digital collage, I can create them as well.  Finding new ways to think about the world around me through the lens of my camera, is always a good thing.