(Un)Seen Lands: The Texture of Intimacy

Project Statement

This is a love story. Through the heat of summer into the rains of fall, I observed my homeland of coastal Northern California transform into landscapes of lived experience – places of intimacy. I led with a question: why was my life-long relationship to place so important? More broadly, what is gained, or lost, when people interact with their natural environments?

The canon of landscape photography often portrays the Earth as passive, to be seen and conquered. To photograph the landscape meant to make oneself separate from it. I believed there was another way of relating. This began with challenging the way I look at my subject, considering what it meant to more closely see what I was photographing. The act of seeing is a highly subjective conversation of perception and relationship. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, asserted “our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.” Could the act of making a photograph invite me more intimately to relate to my subjective lived experience? Could this experience be communicated through the image to the viewer?

Bringing this perspective into the landscape, I began to witness a complex sensory relationship unfold within me, braided with memories, full of longing, grief and awe. This place was where I learned to love and have courage in life. As I saw how much I received from my homeland, I was saddened by how little I had given back. Like the character in my favorite children’s book, The Giving Tree , I was humbled by the land’s relentless giving. I see this one-sided taking as one of the major perpetuating forces of the evolving climate crisis at hand. I saw myself as part of the problem.

Martin Prechtel describes the idea that all humans are born into “spiritual debt” to that which “has sung us into existence.” To “try and repay that debt [one can give] gifts of beauty and praise to…the invisible world that gives us life.” This is my gift. I do not see this as an answer to the seemingly insurmountable challenge of climate change. Yet, there is something to simply sitting with the questions, finding a new way to relate with our modern moment and discover our direction. How do we cultivate a felt-sense of our environments, inviting us to ask, what does it mean to be human, now?

Shannon O’Neill Creighton
April 2018