“Whatever is seen with the eyes is vividly unreal in emptiness yet there is still form”
-- Chögyam Trungpa, the Sadhana of Mahamudra

First of all, these photographs are of apparent phenomena. They are straight photographs - no digital manipulation went into their making. But because they are reflections, the forms they describe are inherently without substance. What is depicted are not actual clouds or trees or sky, but their reflections in water or ice. From a Buddhist point of view, this is the nature of all phenomena: the forms we take for real are merely the surface appearance of the luminosity and emptiness that is their actual essence.

In turning some of these reflections upside down, so they read as landscapes, I am pointing at the question of knowing and not-knowing. In “knowing”, we trust our senses, take our perceptions and fit them into what we understand conceptually about the nature of reality. In “not-knowing”, those conceptions are seen to be unnecessary, and a more intuitive understanding reveals itself. It is almost as if I am photographing not just what is visible at a particular time and place, but what is invisible as well.

As a student of Buddhism for 30 years, my practice, particularly sadhana and visualization practice, encourages the perception of energy rather than form, freeing the mind from habitual responses to the world. Recognizing these elemental energies at play - earth, water, fire, wind - bypasses discursive mind, providing an intuitive glimpse of the unconditioned radiance of phenomena. It is so fleeting, but real. This kind of vivid direct perception can penetrate one’s body and inform the mind below the surface of consciousness. It is almost as if, by going beyond conception, vastness enters our bodies and minds through the medium of perception. In my photographs, I try to point at this possibility of experience, while still aiming my camera at ordinary forms of land and water and air.

Two years ago, my work was in response to the vastness of Crater Lake National Park, a powerful place beyond imagination. This year my photographs are of phenomena on a completely human scale, taken from ferry boats, from docks, from the edge of a river or a puddle. Many were taken within a half-mile of my house, while walking my dog along the Charles River, a landscape that is completely familiar to me. Yet in photographing this ordinary landscape in Newton, known to me for years, I discovered the essence of not-knowing.

This has been a personally turbulent year for me, where I have felt caught in questions of knowing and not-knowing about my own life. In many ways I have turned my life upside down, and not surprisingly, this is reflected in my work. Not knowing whether you are looking up or down, turning an image upside down to reveal a more profound truth, opens one to other possibilities. In the midst of this year, walking the dog every morning was a great comfort to me. I often just relaxed and let my mind go. It is not so surprising that in that process I discovered the heart of my work.

--Mary Lang, May, 2003

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