2020 · Kodak Ektar 100 · 35mm
Light unfolds across the plain without urgency. It does not announce itself, only reveals the contours of rock and dust, a slow unveiling of forms that were always there. The wind moves in long arcs, shaping nothing, carrying nothing, brushing past the silence like it has somewhere else to be.
2022 · Svema 200 · 35mm
There is no origin here, only repetition. The same ridge casting the same shadow into the same gully, deepening as the sun climbs. Something like memory clings to the stone—a residue of warmth, a hollow where water once gathered. It is not remembered. It is implied.
2022 · Kodak Ektar 100 · 120
Cracks spread through the soil like forgotten roads. They do not lead anywhere. They do not end. A line splits, and within it a darker silence hums, not louder than the air, but denser. As if meaning once passed this way and left a scar.
2022 · Svema 200 · 35mm
Above, the sky is a pale restraint. Cloudless, endless, precise. Beneath it, the earth curves inward—not a valley, not a bowl, but a gesture toward containment. There is no center. Only the suggestion that once, something turned here, slowly, in place.
2022 · Kodak Ektar 100 · 35mm
There is the shape of water in absence. The bed of a river long vanished, still following its path through the folds of the land. Stones remember the weight that passed over them. Each one smoothed into silence, resigned to being touched no longer.
2022 · Ilford FP4 · 35mm
The air thickens with light. Heat rises without motion. Distance flickers. Nothing approaches, and yet the horizon bends, as if holding something back. The land does not change, but it becomes something else when looked at too long.
2022 · Kodak Tri-X 400 · 120
Sound comes without source: a hum, a scraping, wind through grassless roots. The noise of the world uninhabited. Not empty—just unwilling. The space resists presence, not with violence, but with indifference. Desire collapses against it, soft and useless.
2020 · Fuji Provia 100 · 35mm
Stillness grows teeth. It does not bite. It waits. What is longed for has no name, no shape, no location. Only the certainty that it existed—once—and the echo of its shape clings to the corners of rock and sky. The wanting sharpens the contours of what is not there.
2022 · Svema 200 · 35mm
Nothing answers. The land continues. The light changes. The wind does not stop. What remains is not understanding, not peace, not resignation—but a rhythm, slow and precise, like breath drawn in by a body that never was.
Text from GPT-4-turbo, April 2024 Series of Prompts…
Can you generate a 9 paragraph short story that builds tension between landscape and desire?
That’s the wrong desire, it’s the desire for a presence in place and time you can’t actually have.
That’s pretty good, but I shouldn’t have any sense of the person, so more abstract, without any clue about what the person who is experiencing it.