We’ve spent the week thus far exploring the limits of lines and the expanses of the spaces between them. Today, in keeping with that theme, we’re going to enter one of the images from our Monday Photo Meditation and and traverse its lines and spaces, tangible and metaphorical alike.
Over the course of his life, Wings has taken countless photos of the village: panoramic shots that capture the entire landscape; iconic stills of North and South House and the church; distance shots that contrast the skyline of the human architecture with the natural one formed by the peaks; close-ups of individual constituent parts, from walls and windows to the means of ingress and egress; even single-element shots that focus in on something as mundane as a mud puddle in the earth of the plaza.
In every shot, he captures what is obviously visible to the naked eye of any viewer, but he also always captures something more . . . something inherent, something immanent. Something that, frankly, would never attract the notice of, nor have meaning for, an outsider absent explicatory narrative by one of the people themselves.
And in every shot, whether explicit in the imagery or only implicit in the context, is a phenomenon, a dynamic that is equally immanent in our cultures today: the motif of lines and the spaces between, or borders and barrier and interstices and the ways that everything about us is now conceptualized and compartmentalized and yet still exists in ways far transcending all externally-imposed artifice.
Today’s featured image is one of my favorites, for so many reasons: artistically, aesthetically, simply in terms of color and light and shadow, but also subtextually, even subversively.
In Pueblo architecture, lines are everywhere; it’s a style built on the solid lines and blocky substance of geometry itself. The exterior walls form broad straight lines rising high above the plaza; unlike tipis or hogans or many other forms of indigenous housing, the shadows they cast form lines equally bold and straight. Doors and windows are similarly geometric; the old method of entry, by hand-built pine ladder, is entirely a collection of straight lines in three dimensions, lashed together at multiple right angles and propped up to form a line of another sort, one that permits scaling the buildings’ heights; the open-aire arbors are likewise a collection of lines bound at right angles, casting shadows full of interstices. And for certain occasions, such as the Feast of San Geronimo, a single towering line, a pole several stories high, is erected in the plaza for the festivities. The line its shadow casts upon the earth at certain times of day is as intimidating and impressive as the pole itself.
But this also image speaks of other ones, of less tangible lines and more symbolic spaces: those of shifts in time and space and season, of shadows woven through the blanket of the light, the line of a road leading to spaces of deeper spirit.
Taos Pueblo’s light is famed for its otherworldly quality, and at no time is that a truer descriptor than at the season when this photo was taken, in autumn. It’s a light that is somehow tangible, gently warming, yet sharp as crystal needles; you feel as though you can reach out and touch it with a fingertip, hold it in your hand. It turns our entire world here golden and shimmering, effortlessly intensifying color and sharpening depth. And in between the shadows it casts by way of anything in its path, it creates whole new spaces that once were ordinary only moments before.
This photo captures all of these phenomena, and more. It simultaneously straddles lines and interstices alike: shifts of time, as day teeters at the brink of night; shifts of season, as autumn ushers the extremes of summer out and those of winter in; shadow lines of that wrought by humankind against that of the Earth herself; shadows demarking the path from the daily life of ancestral place to the center of mystery and sacred space.
And it does so in yesterday’s colors: midnight shadow and indigo sky; amber light and ivory peaks.
It’s more than a landscape, more than a villagescape: a panorama of place and time, of shift and shadow, captured in one image.
It’s not quite a hawk’s-eye view. But it’s close.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
