“I love all things that move,” said oceanographer David O. Brown. “My lifelong obsession with water coupled with time flowing on by has drawn me to… the various gorges, streams, lakes and oceans.”
As a filmmaker and animator, I was thrilled by the relation of motion and rest in this photograph. The camera has arrested the dynamic flow of the current. Yet the image, printed on textured aluminum, brings out the tremendous motion in the water, and dazzling light. So we feel rest and motion at once.
As we look down upon a stream, the bright sun from the upper right lights up the tumultuous, clear water rushing down over the tiers of brown rocks. In the midst is a radiant, golden leaf, vibrant, yet at rest—at least for now. That one leaf, so energetic in its brightness, stabilizes the whole composition.
“The opposites,” Mr. Siegel wrote in the journal Ante, “that as living beings we are most interested in, perhaps, are tranquility and excitement, or repose and stir….Tranquility and excitement are a one in all art. When they exist together in a person, that person is happy.”
—Ken Kimmelman