Every meaningful journey begins long before we move
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." — Marcel Proust
Passage, Pebble Beach, CA, 2017
Some forests we can walk through with sturdy boots and a reliable map. Their paths are marked, their rivers named, their distances measurable.
Then some forests exist entirely within us.
No compass recognizes them. No satellite photographs them. Yet we spend astonishing portions of our lives wandering beneath their unseen branches.
I have begun to suspect that every meaningful photograph I make is really an attempt to describe one of those places.
When I created this image, I wasn't interested in documenting a bird or a landscape. What fascinated me was the quiet moment between two worlds. The egret enters from the left, already in motion, as though we have interrupted a journey that began long before we arrived. Is it escaping? Arriving? Maybe it simply continues.
That feels remarkably familiar.
Most of life happens exactly there.
We celebrate beginnings and endings because they fit neatly into calendars and conversations. Graduation. Marriage. Retirement. Loss. Success. These become the headlines of our lives.
But transformation rarely announces itself so politely.
It happens while driving familiar roads that suddenly feel unfamiliar.
It happens while rereading a favorite book and discovering an entirely different story than the one we remembered.
It happens when a piece of music we've known for years suddenly explains something words never managed to reach.
The largest changes often occur quietly enough that we don't recognize them until much later.
The bird in this image knows nothing about destinations. It only knows the necessity of continuing.
Artists understand this better than most.
People often imagine that inspiration arrives as lightning, brilliant and unmistakable. My experience has been almost the opposite. It usually resembles fog.
An image begins as an emotion without vocabulary.
A shape.
A rhythm.
A faint sensation that something unseen is asking to be noticed.
Months later, sometimes years later, I finally understand what the photograph was trying to tell me.
The artwork arrives before its explanation.
That delayed understanding has become one of the greatest gifts photography has given me. It reminds me that art is not always an answer. Sometimes it is simply evidence that the question exists.
The unfinished trees in this image seem to emerge from memory rather than soil. Their branches dissolve into atmosphere. Their leaves hover somewhere between presence and disappearance.
Doesn't memory behave exactly like that?
We rarely remember events as complete stories. We remember fragments.
The smell of rain before bad news.
The sound of someone's laughter whose face has faded.
A window.
A shoreline.
The color of late afternoon.
Memory edits relentlessly, preserving emotion while allowing facts to evaporate. What remains is rarely accurate, yet somehow becomes more truthful.
Perhaps that is why I have always been drawn to ambiguity.
When every detail is explained, imagination becomes unemployed.
But when an image leaves room for uncertainty, something remarkable happens. The viewer unconsciously steps forward to complete what has been left unfinished. Personal history begins filling the empty spaces. The photograph quietly becomes a collaboration.
Collectors occasionally ask what a particular image means.
The honest answer is that I know how it began.
I rarely know where it ends.
Once the work leaves my studio, it starts living other lives.
Someone may see hope.
Someone else sees farewell.
Another sees childhood.
None of them are wrong.
The egret continues flying through all of those interpretations, belonging to each one without belonging exclusively to any.
Perhaps that is what art should aspire to become.
Not a declaration.
A crossing.
A bridge between one person's inner landscape and another's.
We spend much of our lives believing that clarity is the destination. Yet some of our deepest growth occurs while moving through uncertainty with quiet confidence, trusting that understanding will eventually catch up to experience.
The bird never stops to ask whether the forest is real.
It simply flies.
Perhaps we should follow it.
Artist Statement
I create images that inhabit the space between memory and imagination. Rather than documenting the visible world, I seek the emotional landscapes beneath it, where ambiguity becomes an invitation rather than an obstacle. In Crossing the Invisible, the egret becomes a symbol of quiet transformation, reminding us that life's most profound journeys often occur while we are simply moving forward, unaware that we have already crossed into someone new.
Note on Proust's quote
This widely circulated version is a paraphrase rather than the exact wording from his original text. The quote originates from his seven-volume novel series, In Search of Lost Time (specifically the fifth volume, The Prisoner). In the original English translation by C. K. Moncrieff, the passage reads:
"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."
The popular, shortened version emphasizes perspective and internal change over physical travel, suggesting that true discovery comes from shifting one's mindset and perception rather than exploring new physical locations.