ON CONTEMPLATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY

George Simonson wanders Maine aimlessly by day and night, “listening for photographs.”

He shoots unarranged scenes in natural light, largely outdoors. And he says he is always astonished to find that despite our anxious era and attitudes, the world when seen aright, in a contemplative frame of mind, is ever-fresh and beautiful—in a raw, profound and yet ordinary way that points beyond the conventional opposition of ugliness and beauty.

Being instead of doing

George’s work often draws attention first to the visual patterns, color arrangements, compositional energy and other abstract features of scenes instead of to the things in the scenes themselves. This has the effect, he says, of giving the viewer a moment in which the things appear to hover unidentifiably, split off from our usual conceptual knowledge of them.

“The result,” he adds, “is that we can glimpse them in their sweet, light-filled nakedness—in other words, as being-in-itself rather than things-with-names.”

The photos shown here are available, framed or unframed, as museum-quality prints up to 19” x 13” at 300 dpi.

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