OIL

I’m fascinated by the oil platforms that occasionally take harbor just off the Curacao coast. They are breathtakingly large, complex, man-made structures and often they are moored within Canonshot of a fisherman’s simple craft. Both sustain us in their own way, one fueling our petrochemical society, the other topping up our hungry selves.

Much as I love clean water, and uncontaminated environments generally, I’m not so naive that I can ignore my own impacts: how I got here, the tools I rely upon, the creatures I consume. Self-flagellating climate protesters going anywhere on private jets are laughable. Better to admit we are in the thick of it, and work to mitigate our impact, not necessarily by depriving ourselves of the life & times into which we were born by accident. Perhaps we may find ways to balance our demands. Eat fish, but plant mangroves. Drive to trailheads, but pack out trash. That sort of thing. A thousand normal folks quietly being decent are far better for our own local environments than a few noisy morons demanding restrictions on our lives while flaunting all their own suggestions when they’re off camera.

The bulk (all?) of these images were taken with a Lensbaby Velvet 28, and it’s pretty obvious which were shot wide open or close to wide open, and which, for the sanity of my wife, were taken at smaller apertures. I love the vintage surreality of the Velvet 28 at f/2.5 or thereabouts, that enhanced atmospheric perspective found with particular art lenses such as this one, which pushes the object of attraction back and recedes it into the midsts (and mists) of time and space. Pictures as old as yesterday’s or yesteryear’s re-seed the gardens of memory upon which we depend. The velveteen & ethereal images are less a stark and documentary ‘what I saw’ than a reminder of ‘what might have been seen, if…’ If you had been there, too, back when. If my mind weren’t clouded, just a touch, by all the rest of life swirling around outside the frame refusing capture for captions. If instants – never hard, clear, removable, and able to be set permanently to the side – could be captured anyhow rather than melting away as they are wont: here then gone forever except as the fainest traces impacting the world to come.