“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
Lightscape n.1, Pebble Beach, CA, 2009
Merit Award, B&W Magazine Special Issue 72, February 2010
I wasn't looking for light that morning.
I was looking for silence.
The kind of silence that lives between two notes of a piano piece, where something fragile lingers before deciding whether to exist. The forest along Scenic Drive was still half-asleep, wrapped in its gray shawl, reluctant to declare itself either dream or day. I remember thinking that the trees were not standing upright so much as remembering how to stand, like old dancers rehearsing a forgotten choreography.
And then the light arrived. As illumination? No, it was more like an interruption.
It broke through the branches like a confession.
Not gentle, not polite. It came in long, deliberate strokes, as if the sky had decided to paint over the world and forgot to ask permission. The beams stretched, collided, dissolved, and reformed, turning the forest into a cathedral with no doctrine. I stood there, not as an observer, but as someone being quietly rearranged.
Two figures appeared in the distance.
Cyclists, yes, but that feels like a small, almost bureaucratic description. They moved like punctuation marks in a sentence I hadn’t finished writing. Commas, perhaps. Or ellipses. They did not disturb the scene; they completed it. Their presence suggested something I could not name at the time: that movement itself could be a form of reverence.
I did not photograph them.
I remember this clearly because I almost did not photograph anything at all.
There is a peculiar hesitation that comes when a moment feels too complete. To touch it feels like a kind of betrayal. But I have learned, over time, that creation is not theft. It is translation. And so I allowed myself to translate.
What you see now is not the forest as it was.
It is the forest as it insisted on being remembered.
Light does not behave in straight lines in memory. It bends, lingers, repeats itself. It exaggerates certain truths and quietly erases others. That morning, the light did not simply reveal the trees. It rewrote them. Branches became veins, shadows became thoughts, and the air itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting for something unnamed to arrive.
Perhaps it already had.
Years later, when I opened that issue of Black & White Magazine and saw Lightscape No. 1 staring back at me, I felt a peculiar dislocation. As if I were looking at a memory that belonged to someone else, a version of myself who believed, perhaps more fiercely than I do now, that the world could be understood through moments like this.
But the truth is, I still believe it.
I just trust the mystery more.
The forest that day did not offer answers. It offered a question, disguised as light:
What do you do when something fleeting asks to be remembered forever?
I am still answering it.
Every time I return to that image, I realize that the cyclists are still riding, the light is still breaking, and the trees are still learning how to stand. Nothing has ended. The moment continues, quietly, beyond the frame, like a melody that refuses to resolve.
And perhaps that is what I captured after all.
Not the light.
But it's refusal to leave.
Artist Statement
I create images as acts of remembrance rather than documentation. In this work, light becomes both subject and storyteller, reshaping the visible world into something interior, something felt. The figures, the trees, the air itself exist not as objects, but as fragments of a larger emotional landscape where time lingers, and meaning remains open.