the place of a transparent knowledge of ourselves, but an obscure space haunted by the remains of memories, of which the worth, including creative worth, stems from the vague phantoms circulating there.

The passage also reminds me of my old statement about the Ghost Light project.

Size matters as it would appear that you have a bigger specific than I. I’m referring to the detail within the silhouette that goes missing in the dark. A good place to see this is L.A., and particularly in Hollywood Forever cemetery. I was there one night to see a play and was struck by the slender bulk of palm trees etched in cutout mode against a smoggy nighttime haze.

I’m also attracted to nighttime views, and your reasoning makes sense to me. Except that rather than preclude focus on specifics, I would say we are given a few prominent specifics (whatever is in light) and are left to peer and guess at what’s in the dark.

That’s a great title, and could do as well for a book as for a painting. In a sense, it truly applies to figurative painting (or drawing, etc.) in that one is looking away from the subject when actually rendering it. I think that must feel quite different from photography. There I continuously observe the scene before me until activating the shutter (though I may have some other image in mind at the same time). Later, developing the image, I no longer have access to the subject.

Your concept of peripheral seeing is somewhat like David’s seeing through an interfering veil. Part of the way this works, I think, is by inducing the viewer to fill in gaps, to speculate.

You have a point. If I remember, one of the techniques taught by Don Juan Mateus, in reaching a state of heightened awareness, was to see the world out of focus and without specific visual attachments. Nighttime for me is so beguiling in part because the darkness tends to preclude focus upon specifics and sources of light seem to emerge from a kind of primal state.

But a direct gaze deserves a good word. Lock onto something with your eyes and keep it up past the boredom. At some point the obviously familiar undergoes a transformation. It’s akin to a long and repetitive recitation of a single word as the accustomed associations fall away.

As far as taking my profundity, I like to see it out of the corner of my eye. Everything in the peripheral has more possibility than what’s in front of you. Things (idea for work, truths,even feelings about people) tend to whither under a direct gaze. Better to half perceive something and believe it could be something profound than to look head on and convince yourself its not.

That’s the fun of this photograph–the speculation.

I know that picture. It has a haunting quality.