In July 2016, I was on my way to Alaska by way of Portland, Oregon when I received a phone call informing me my father had taken his own life. I put my trip on hold and returned to New York. Two days after his funeral, I was back on my trip to Alaska and soon my feet were planted, although tenuously, upon a glacier.
These massive rivers of ice usually inspire awe of their sheer magnitude: the profound influence on the earth around them and their unfathomable volume of water. In my fragile mental state, something else inspired me: time. These behemoths flowed essentially as rivers do, but on a timescale beyond our simple human comprehension. Over the next several days, across and above many more glaciers, I stepped out of the present and let my mind succumb to geologic time, finding comfort in its virtually endless cycle. My place in the modern world held only pain, but in the geologic world, there were only slow rhythmic patterns.
In John McPhee’s Basin and Range, Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes says, “If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then, in a way, you do not live at all, but in another way, you live forever.” I wasn’t looking to live forever, but in a sense, to live again. In a way, my descent into geologic time was the beginning of my resurrection. I looked to the ancient world to figure out how to rebuild my present.
I spent the next year looking for places to observe and photograph visually unique geology: cycles of sedimentation and erosion, glaciation and volcanism. Ancient Medicine is the result of these travels. In this series of photographs, the horizon is purposefully disregarded in order to give the feeling of immersion in geology. Objects and landscapes of monumental size take on an ambiguous scale. I like to think of the creation process as painting with time. Ancient Medicine asks the viewer to consider these glimpses, to step out of our human timeline and into a geologic one, to imagine the slow tick of eons that have made these compositions possible, and to be soothed, as I was, by the notion that this has all been before and will be again, whether or not anyone is here to witness it.
Images by Brian Merriam.
This article was originally published in RANGE Magazine Issue Eight.
