the overwhelming fullness of being
lately, as temperatures in san francisco have been so perfect as to cause one to forget temperature exists at all, i’ve been suffering from an inability to totally comprehend the beauty around me. i work on the twelfth floor in a high-rise that stands on the peak of parnassus heights; the floor-to-ceiling windows of our howard hughes-funded research facility look out over golden gate park, ocean beach, and mt. tamalpais. standing behind that tempered glass i can’t even absorb the splendor, but rather stand unfulfilled, analyzing and not experiencing the profundity of what i’m seeing. i want to merge myself with the view; and i wonder if a life not spent learning to do this is a bit wasted.
sometimes i want to capture it with a photograph, but the photograph presents exactly the problem: with it i can capture the image, not necessarily the experience. a photo of a person can capture the experience of the subject, but how do you capture the experience of the photographer, as the strokes of the brush capture that of the painter? here i tried to use angles and exposure to represent the experience of being overwhelmed and unable to capture the fullness of the scene:
