S. Heiner fine art photography
                   "enLightenment". 2016.
                  Inkjet print, approx. 7"x10".
                          [Edition of 300]
HOME
BACK

     After grad school, I took a break from the next step along the career path and went to teach ESL for a semester at a university in South Korea. I bought my first manual camera there, and a month later took this photograph of a monk gliding towards the light while engaged in simple work --chop wood; carry water-- which leads to the kind of emptiness (as suggested by the boxes) at the heart of Buddhism. It was my 'first photograph' and the experience of taking it and seeing it in print for the first time was exhilarating.
     I since have spent most of my days mostly just looking, looking at reflections, shapes, textures, colors, shadows, patterns, harmonies, and suggestive meanings; looking at the world's weirdness, warmth, decay and distress, all to be found in the smallest corners of parks, gardens, cemeteries, and downtown streets; looking at spaces where things moving nearby might coalesce into one momentary unity; and looking at what appears in an instant, at what surprises that the world, a wondrous magician, conjures up. Add the excitement of trying to catch any of it in a photograph, and there you have in large measure what life with a camera in hand has been like for the past twenty years.