caroline beasley-baker
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If they be two, they are two so/ As stiff twin compasses are two,/ Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if the other do. John Donne (1572-1631), A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, st. 7.

As a child I discovered I could see things—all things—from a great height, so all was flat and mapped out before me. It was my steepest and widest avenue into the world, into beingness. My sense of self, then, seemed to be geographically determined and seeing was literally a 'territory' from which all else could be described. And so over time, I became many sorts of places.

In the past few years, I have been keeping a photographic night diary of those moments where I awaken and the world has rearranged itself in ambient New York City nightglow and moonlight. The 3 photos shown here were taken within a couple of minutes of one another, in available light only (the TV & the full moon) and then the photos were digitally retrieved from the near dark. For me, these kinds of moments signal the union of time/place/meaning, demonstrating what I have always known—the questions so many of us ask in our search for ourselves—'Who am I?' 'Why am I here?'—are indivisible from the question 'Where am I?'. Where more than who or why has a bold utilitarian disguise ('should I go left or right?'), yet it is a piece of the same experiential, ontological (geographical) puzzle that is the here and now.
copyright © 2010 caroline beasley-baker, all rights reserved