No doubt your photographs reveal the subjects you are bearing witness to, as you intend. But don’t you find, when you start photographing a subject, that you notice new things in it? That if you look at one of your photographs very closely, or for the first time in a while, that they also reveal aspects of things that you weren’t aware of at the time you made the photograph? Don’t other people sometimes “see” something in a photo that never occurred to you? These are what I would call discoveries, some in the course of the making and some that come later. (Though maybe, in the sense of installation art, we should consider the photo as merely the catalyst in an ongoing series of experiences with it, which together constitute the real art.)

For me, I take photographs to reveal. I want to reveal other worlds and other truths that are usually overlooked. This is similar to discover I suppose, except that I know these things already exist and I want to bear witness to them.

I studied the ideas of pastoral, sublime and transcendent in American art but it wasn’t until my first trip to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee that I felt what these terms mean and truly understood them. When I got back home, my way of processing all of it was to write a short story; but some things aren’t meant to be captured in words.

Did you mention a parachute? There are people who jump from high places like Yosemite with video cameras on their helmets. Head to Bridal Veil with a 4″ x 5″ mounted instead of the video camera and you might get some interesting results. Not so much goofing as wondering if being the trout that you so eloquently portrayed recently wouldn’t get you closer to your goal.

Aha! The sublime is then an internal matter and not inherent in anything external. I could have been watching The Price Is Right for all the difference, with my fear and elation, love and kinship directed at Bob Barker, or whoever.

Actually, most any distant point of light on a dark night will serve to some reduced extent. Billions of them overhead on a dark night – now that’s sublimity. Cloud cover, however, will make it subliminal.

Only you know. The more difficult question is whether you can find a visual way to convey that sensation to others.

One of my usual stories. March of last year I was on a night flight to Austin, Tx. The sky out of the window was dark and we flew above gently glowing clouds. Many miles away was a small blinking light – another plane on a parallel course. It was just the two of us and I lost myself in the vastness. I felt a little fear and a sense of elation; and a strange kind of love and kinship for that distant point in space. I wonder if I had a sublime experience.