JIM HONTZ PHOTOGRAPHY

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

---Jean-Jacques Rousseau

On the exterior of a small utility shed at the edge of the forest outside Williams, Arizona, is engraved a gallery of otherworldly landscapes masquerading as knotty pinewood siding.

On those weathered walls, multiple orbs spin across violent alien skies, through leaden atmospheres, toward both destruction and creation at once.

Barren seas wash up against desolations of congealed stardust. Dark, vague matter insinuates elemental life. Black fissures, vast plains, flowing textures – all evoke a primordial familiarity in our collective imagination.

I would be the rock

about which the water is

flowing; and I would be the water flowing

about the rock.

And am both and neither-

being flesh.

-Charles Reznikoff

In the Swampy Lakes Snow Park in the Cascades west of Bend, Oregon, are forelorn creatures that emerge only during heavy snowfall, overwhelmed by the weight of circumstances beyond their control.

Fog in the desert seems a paradox.  It usually follows a a heavy winter rain and a cold night.  Desert fog is contradictory to one's paradigm of a blistering, arid land inhabited by exotic, specialized life forms designed to conserve every drop of moisture for their very survival.  

To wander in this rare Sonoran murk in southern Arizona is to submit to sensory deprivation.  The mist subdues footsteps; voices seem muffled in cotton.  Distance is foreshortened by a gray curtain through which ghostly saguaros advance and retreat as if from a fantastic, silent dream.  The mist is tenuous as it teases those forces which seek to disperse it or enter it.  

These blended images are a collective impression of the beautiful mystery of this otherworldly landscape.

Autumn in the Colorado high country has three seasons within one.

First, leaves begin to change from the dark green of late summer to a tentative, scattered gold that mixes with the fading green to welcome The Fall Colors. 

In a few weeks the full fall palette saturates the high country with its signature shimmering gold, fading green,  occasional salmon hues, and hordes of admirers.

The third season is a time for my minimalist sensibilities.  As winter approaches, the slopes are mostly barren but for a handful of hangers-on, reluctant to shed their final leaves.  Many protest with others next to them, possibly sharing a common root system.  The resulting strips of old gold and orange barely insinuate themselves into the yellowish white-to-gray canvas of bare forest. 

Other stands are more conventional in their loss, leaving hints of flaxen shades before November strips them silent and still once again. 

The reward for one who walks inside this quiet, subtle beauty is not purely visual.  The damp remains on the cold forest floor will send up an intoxicating scent of sweet fermentation, as if to acknowledge their own obituaries by offering a final cocktail before their winter burial. 

Statuary

A dead vine tendril is a monument to itself.  The cursive beauty of its lines writes its own epitaph. Sinuous remains are encased in the air where it lived and toiled, its final act suspended in time and space.

Many appear to writhe, snakelike; some seem tensely coiled as springs. Others strike anthropomorphic poses, preserved in their final throes like the Vesuvian dead.  Some adopt a gripping pretense of ballet or whimsy or even defiant resignation. 

These quixotic wooden sculptures remain in their final poses as if a capricious wood sprite had cast a spell before they could tell their secrets.

Water:  From Rapid Descent to its Destination