All Things Being Equal
Personal transformation is one of the most difficult things to accomplish. It tends to occur during big moments of transition: moving from one relationship to the next; at birth; near death; in heartache. If we’re lucky, we awaken to what is truly around us. And maybe, for a few brief, crystalline moments, we might even see through the veil of our Expectations and truly glimpse the Present.
It is also a hard thing to depict.
Jessica Tampas created these photographs at a time in her life when she was experiencing profound loss. It was the summer of the Covid epidemic; her life was particularly precarious because of personal and relationship issues. And while this was going around in her heart and mind, she was moving about, spending time around two different Lakes -- Lake Michigan, in Michigan and Lake Champlain, in Vermont.
If you encountered these landscapes with no context (and with a healthy desire to seek your own personal growth) you’d say they were elemental, almost mythic. In a very basic way they are about Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Nature, and all the Human striving that happens in between as we, the earthbound, seek to somehow connect with the cosmos.
Looking back through art history, Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series – a seemingly out-of-character study he made in the 1920s and ‘30s of clouds – comes to mind. In them, we get a seemingly simple viewpoint – the camera pointed straight up at the sky, unfettered by references to horizon. The Equivalents are out of keeping with his earlier works, but it is that anomalous, unbound feeling that makes them compelling. Mystically speaking, they seem to say: Why bother with man? The answers are all there, above us, around us.
Tampas’ (utterly contemporary) images are colorful and energetic. They are energizing. They seem to possess a sublime pleasure that is very akin to the pleasure that one might have in the moment of actually making them – of seeing a Great Lake, a haystack; of walking or running through a field of wild grasses. Give in to the moment they capture, and you may swear that the air, itself, is making the scene; the light of day, making the depth of field; and color and light together sculpting some specific setting out of the chaos of time. And yet, these photos aren’t quite what they depict, are they?
If time of day could make pictures, they would look like this.