As I briefly mentioned in my previous post in September 2023 this low key littoral zone project, with its grounding in Japanese aesthetics, went into a hiatus in 2023. The basic understanding that I had been working with up to that point was that a central tenet of Japanese aesthetics is the transience or impermanence of life with its sorrow for the loss of transient things. The relevant concept is mono no aware.
The close-up or macro picture of seaweed is from the 2022 archives. It was made before we got Maya, our standard poodle pup, who arrived in February, 2023.
After Maya came the hiatus in the littoral zone project took the form of the project grounding to a halt. I only walked along the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach infrequently for most of 2023. What I lost in this period was the ritual of daily walking the path across the rocks with its mediative processes that focuses on the presence of things, the moment of now.
There were multiple reasons for staying away from the rocks along the coast. It was probably a mixture of reasons --- such as Maya when she was a puppy, the rugged weather conditions (the frequent rain and strong coastal winds), and my concentrating on seascapes. I realized that I wasn't open to what was around me when I was walking -- I wasn't aware of of the light of the sun and the forms and patterns of the shadows that soften everything --- as I was too busy keeping an eye on Maya I missed the nuances of perception in the shadows which are not permanent.
When I did start to walk along the coast around October of 2023 I made a few close-ups of the impermanent objects in the littoral zone, including this humble branch, which had been washed up onto the rocks in a little cove during one of the storms. It didn't stay in the cove for long, just a couple of days, before the high tides took it out to sea again.
When I started walking again with a young poodle I realized that I had to relearn being open to what was around me when I was walking being being in the present moment so that we can see what lies beneath the surface. This is slowly changing as I've started just sitting on a rocket relearn to be in the moment and Maya will now wait for me whilst I photograph ephemeral objects.
However, the core problem remains: how to deepen the connection to the associated concepts in Japanese aesthetics around the idea of the ephemerality in nature. These concepts include those of wabi, sabi, iki, fūryū, Yūgen. An example is “Yūgen”, which originally meant dark or mysterious in relation to the the depth of the world we live in (rather than referring to some other world beyond this one as in Platonism). It's meaning expanded to subtle, hidden depths, or what lies beneath the surface.
The idea is to give only a suggestion or a trace of objects (trees, mountains, or waters) which appear to negate themselves as objects with the space within the frame being left un-touched and so referring to the invisible and absent as distinct from what is represented (as in Japanese landscape paintings) and visible. A famous example is Sesshū Tōyō's evocative and celebrated Splashed Ink Landscape.
“Yūgen” is a complex aesthetic category if it is related to photography. It refers to something that is present but cannot be seen -- eg., an entitie's presence is only expressed by the effects of the entity -- could that be wind? Or the mysterious interplay of light and shade? Or time passing? My working understanding is that Yūgen alludes to that which underlies the pictorial description.