Seeing The Light

This book, Traveling Light, Chasing an Illuminated Life by Deborah DeWit Marchant was given to me by a blogging buddy. It is a tiny book, 6 x 8 inches, 83 pages, about 45 photographs. It has been on my Amazon wish list for quite a while and I don't know why I haven't included it with another order.

In a way it reminds me of Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt because it is written by the artist about her struggles to find and make art. Marchant's writing is so intimate and beautiful about how the light of the natural world affected her so deeply that she struggled to capture these feelings on film but the camera couldn't capture her quivering heart or the damp warm wind. But she did learn how to see the most delicate light and capture that for us to enjoy.

What was ending up on my film? Misty dawns and vacant windows, lone boats and dapples of light on a wall, a reflection in the water, an abandoned building, empty roads. These weren't universal symbols, nor images of expansiveness. They were pictures of a solitary view of the universe........Was it me that I had captured?

The images are not the Grand Landscape. And certainly many other photographers photograph the same types of things that Marchant is photographing but she sees the light in a very special way. These images are beautiful in their simplicity with a palette subdued with mist or dawn and in many of the images with a horizon line that almost disappears.

Some might call the book sentimental but I call it beautiful and inspiring. This is a book that will stay by my bed to be read and looked at many times.