“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
— Carl Sagan
The Edge of the Known World, Carmel Valley, CA, 2008
Some days, the world becomes too large for me.
Not literally. I am still approximately the same height I was the day before, give or take a few existential centimeters. But something happens when I stand beneath a wide sky, look across an open landscape, or imagine the universe stretching beyond anything my mind can comfortably contain. My usual worries suddenly seem rather unimportant.
I took this photograph in Carmel Valley in 2008.
At the time, I was simply looking at two trees.
Now, I think they were looking back at me.
They stood apart from one another on the crest of the hill, each with its own peculiar shape, its own history, its own way of leaning into the world. They did not seem particularly concerned with one another. They certainly did not seem concerned with me.
I found that oddly reassuring.
The landscape had the quality of a stage after the actors have gone home. The hill was quiet. The trees were quiet. Above them was an enormous sky, filled with tiny points of light that seemed to belong to another place entirely.
Or perhaps another time.
I have always been drawn to those moments when the familiar begins to feel slightly unfamiliar. A landscape can suddenly become a memory. A tree can become a witness. A patch of sky can become a doorway.
Photography, for me, has always lived somewhere in that uncertain territory between what I see and what I imagine. I am less interested in simply recording the world than in discovering what else might be hiding inside it. My photographs often begin with something real, but I want them to carry the atmosphere of something remembered, dreamed, or only half understood.
That is what happened here.
The trees became more than trees.
They became two old sentinels standing at the edge of the known world.
And I felt very small.
Something is humbling about realizing how little of the universe belongs to us. We spend much of our lives constructing elaborate explanations for ourselves. Who we are. Where we are going. What matters. What does not. We make schedules, plans, lists, ambitions, grievances. We become surprisingly passionate about emails.
Then we look up.
The sky does not care about any of that.
There is simply immensity.
When I feel small beneath a vast landscape, I do not necessarily feel diminished. I feel released from the exhausting obligation to make everything important. Some things can simply exist. The hill can be a hill. The tree can be a tree. I can be a person standing somewhere in Carmel Valley, temporarily aware that I am part of something.
Perhaps that is why the image has stayed with me.
The two trees seem almost like parentheses around an absence. Between them is a space that refuses to explain itself. I like that. I write posts on Substack about exactly that topic. I have always preferred fragments to complete answers. An unfinished story gives the viewer room to enter it. My images are invitations rather than instructions. I want the person looking at them to bring their own memories and emotions and discover a story that may not be entirely mine.
The sky in this image feels especially important to me.
I did not want it to behave like an ordinary sky. I wanted it to feel ancient, almost touched by memory. The surface seems to carry traces of something that happened long before I arrived and will continue long after I leave. The little lights scattered through it could be stars, dust, distant worlds, or simply fragments of an old dream.
I don't need to decide.
In fact, I rather enjoy not deciding.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons classical music continues to influence the way I think about images. Music can create an enormous emotional space without telling us exactly what to think. A pause can sometimes say more than a sentence. A single piano note can suddenly make an entire room feel larger.
This landscape has that kind of silence.
The trees are the notes.
The hill is the low register.
And the sky keeps playing long after the music has apparently stopped.
Looking at the photograph now, I wonder whether the real subject was ever the landscape at all.
Perhaps it was scale.
Perhaps it was solitude.
Perhaps it was the peculiar relief of discovering that I am not the center of the story.
There is freedom in that realization.
The universe is vast. The landscape is vast. Time is vast. My own life is only a brief mark somewhere within it.
And yet I am here.
For a moment, I get to look up.
For a moment, the universe gets to look back.
That may be enough.
Artist Statement
I have always been drawn to the space between what we see and what we imagine. In this photograph, two trees become quiet witnesses beneath a vast and mysterious sky, transforming an ordinary landscape into a meditation on scale, solitude, and the unknown.
The landscape reminds me that feeling small is not necessarily a form of weakness. Sometimes it is a form of release. We briefly step outside ourselves and recognize that our lives exist within something immeasurably larger.
As with much of my work, I want the image to remain unfinished. It is not meant to explain the landscape, but to open a door into it. The trees may be sentinels, witnesses, or simply trees. The sky may be a night sky, a memory, or another world entirely.
The meaning belongs partly to me and partly to whoever chooses to enter.
Note on Sagan's quote: The Library of Congress attributes this quotation to Sagan and uses it in its collection exploring his work and humanity's place in the cosmos.