About “Being There” by Melville McLean There is simply no substitute for standing in front of and seeing “live” my original large-scale 40 x 50-inch color compositions of natural environments. The detail, clarity, light and color complement the absolutely convincing experience of three-dimensional space. It is qualitatively in the nature and degree of verisimilitude – the individual viewer’s direct experience of standing in front of the imaginary space that achieves the sense of “being there.” Familiarity with looking at other people’s photographs does not necessarily prepare the solitary viewer for this experience, its intimate, intensely powerful essence. I combine the benefits of photography’s oldest and very newest technologies: the large format view camera, sheet film and digital output on conventional dye coupler paper to deliver a level of realism that is constantly being refined through experimentation and innovation. I want to pull the viewer completely into the space and reveal the nature I read about in contemporary natural science. It is the demonstration informed by a new paradigm and understanding of the interconnectedness of nature that reflects this cultural moment. Everywhere, I emphasize the preciousness of life. All over and all at once I celebrate aesthetics informed by my love of Western painting which incorporates Cézanne to Rothko, representation and color field From within the vast genre of "landscape," I pursue various personal, sensational and distinctly intimate emotional experiences in the natural landscape that are in response to its highly specific, and uniquely compelling appearance. My site selection is determined informally and it originates in my personal life from conversations, friends’ referrals, travel and books. Of course where it is and how it looks are both artistic means but they are not in themselves, the ends. Every potential site exhibits an example of nature’s beauty but that alone is insufficient to engage my interest. Nature gives us beautiful places freely, extravagantly, and examples can be found in never-ending variety. However, from within the almost infinite set of opportunities to photograph nature’s beauty in all its manifestations, I choose that one elusive moment that specifically represents my experience of what it was like to be there. I use the photograph to extend that supreme solitary moment of a heightened sense of what it is to be alive. It feels ecstatic as a solitary witness being overwhelmed by all that surrounds me, and by all with which, I am inextricably linked in each natural environment. Each time is different from all of the rest and it can happen in any kind of natural landscape. For me, these intense, deeply intimate moments represent the experience of being alive that are unmatched by any other personal experience. I believe that I can share what could be considered the essence of this experience with one viewer at a time. For each composition, I try to attract and ultimately pull the viewer into the imaginary space – to put you there -- inside. Each viewer is then free to determine the specifics of his or her own private emotive, contemplative, aesthetic, psychological, and/or meditative response. Each of us may have different notions of what life looks like when virtually all daily distractions have been removed and we are left with the intensity of what it is like to focus squarely upon what it feels to be alive. My central premise concerns the preciousness of life. I consider my photographs to be living landscapes in the sense that nature’s organic and inorganic components both demonstrate powerful generative forces that create successive cycles of growth, decay and transformation. The Earth’s protean surface consists of a thin crust of rock covered by an even thinner membrane of life. This statistically unlikely and fluid phenomenon prevails despite its inherent impermanence amidst persistent peril. Furthermore, virtually everything in nature is constantly in the process of changing into something else. Essentially, we are all interconnected and interdependent with everything else in nature’s unified system of balanced exchanges. Even soil is merely unconsolidated rock, which, without death and decay, cannot sustain life – and for billions of years it did not. Of course everything changes together. For eons, climate, topography, flora and fauna have been in a state of constant flux that extends or contracts the genealogical nexus and creates an endless variety of natural environments in amazing combinations. Without a plan or purpose, living cells, weather, rock and water tentatively, often unpredictably, are continually passing from one temporary state into another and simultaneously interacting while doing so. We are inextricably linked with all of nature within each self-maintaining and self-sustaining biological environment. I compose large-scale color photographs of natural environments that try to preserve the fragile, transient, evanescent life flourishing on top of the enduring rock just as it has done for hundreds of millions of years in countless manifestations. Hopefully, they also preserve the human capacity to be astonished by the complex web of life’s precarious existence upon the rock. By stopping time my photographs also arrest change at all rates and at all magnitudes of scale. I impose a human sensibility of order and harmony upon a free flowing, complex system. Without the capability for explication, my photographs must rely upon one elusive and extraordinary moment’s detail, clarity and the interaction of color to fulfill their potential for the intense optical excitement that stands for nature. There are three themes at the heart of my work that I consider to be deep, profoundly resonant, and enduring truths. The first is the fundamental fact that all life is fragile, brief, and contingent. Secondly, nothing survives alone. Lastly, I believe that the best of my photographs can demonstrate and celebrate life surviving and thriving against all odds. © Melville McLean 2003 All rights reserved back