To a Man with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

I was reading Stephen Hawkins’ “A Brief History of Time” and my mind was to black holes, Saturn rings, and orbits around stars and planets.  

When I went to take a few pictures, I was still thinking about celestial movements and harmony. In fact I always think about harmony when I am looking through the viewfinder of my camera. I try to find a co-existence of shape, movement and a story I can tell.

I took a few pictures, but did not develop the roll. I did not think I had captured much that morning.

Then a couple of nights ago, high in the Arizona desert, the sky was perfectly black and a sliver of the moon (waxing crescent) bright as a morning thought. I do not take pictures of the moon as my equipment is not designed for such. But just for fun, I took my 1970’s 210mm Kiron lens out of its hermitage and snapped a couple of times.

…When I printed the pictures I realized that indeed, my mind was somehow “seeing” shapes influenced by Hawkins’ book. When I looked at the picture of the man carving a horse out of wood all I now saw was his hat. It was an orbit around his head!  And I wondered if the discussion of the Big Bang, the creation of the universe was not symbolically captured by this picture where he was “creating” a horse out of wood, perhaps like the creation of man out of clay… Hmm.

Then I looked at the picture of the moon. The sliver was bright yet there was nothing special about this picture. What my eye had seen was the ordinary encounter with the image of the moon. 

Yet, I enlarged it just for fun. Now I could see the entire moon, hidden to the naked eye. What I saw was a bright hole in the sky from which a mushroom cap or a champagne cork was popping through. Was there a celebration on the other side of the sky??

Again, there are as many pictures of the moon as there are stars in the sky. But this one was MY moon, on that quiet evening in the high desert. It was captured with a lens that is not supposed to capture such images; and it was taken because a book had shaped my thinking hence my search for stories with a certain theme.

For a short while, the stars and planets, their orbits and mysterious attraction to each other had become part of my daily optic of ordinary things.

June 21, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015