the experience of what is left

"I'm fascinated with the quality of light and the spatial immensity the ocean possesses. I have an enormous reverence for feeling so small in the presence of something so vast, where perspective, scale, time and distance momentarily become intangible. My photographs contemplate that condition, and through their reductive nature, suggest a formalized landscape we rarely see. The glory lies not in the act of this removal or reduction, but in the experience of what is left - sublime experience located in ordinary space: a slowly moving sky, the sun moving across a boulders surface or sea foam swirling around a pylon."


this guy's work is phenomenal in that it really seems to connect with & evoke freud's nirvana principal(different from thanatos & eros). freud didn't really follow up on his assertion of the individual's impulse to reduce all tensions &, actually, finally did fold it into thanatos(the death instinct). the idea of nirvana has always been misunderstood in the west, esp by the germans, & was never meant to signify non-existence. it is simply achieving a mental state that is desire-free. the Buddha taught:" ... if you perceive things truly, you will become free from attachment, separated from them, you will indeed be liberated. I have well crossed the watery waste of existence. I abide in bliss, having transcended suffering, therefore I am devoid of unending desire, I have eliminated attachment and gained Liberation [moksha]. There is no old age, sickness or death for me, my life is forever without end. I proceed burning bright like a flame. You must not think that I shall cease to exist. Consider the Tathagata [i.e. Buddha] to be like [Mount] Sumeru: though I shall pass into Nirvana here [i.e. physically die], that supreme bliss is my true nature [dharmata]." (Tibetan version, translated by Stephen Hodge, quoted in Buddha-Self, by Dr. Tony Page, Nirvana Publications, London, 2003, p. 27).

burdeny's shots seem to visually give us a another version of the Buddha's mahaparinirvana sutra. the tensions within each picture seem arrested, relaxed, or dispelled. i'm allowed to take away from the experience only what i'm left with: a capacious solitude w/o my intrusive presence.