the impossible challenge.

T H E   I M P O S S I B L E   C H A L L E N G E .

I had sent a photograph to K. Posted it in the mail to her earlier in the summer. It was random black and white of the Picket range in the North Cascades to share with her a moment captured of mountains she needs but cannot envision. The shadows and light. Her response to me later was simple. Profound. In a half-question she wrote back -

'Maybe what you photograph best is silence.'

And that stopped me in my tracks.

For that in a sentence so concise - so clear - defined in an instant what I must now do with this old wooden view camera and the whole vastness and solitude of the North Cascades. But in an instant later begged the question for me: how does one go about photographing silence?

After a moment of thought the only possible answer I could come up with frightening was a single word … unintentionally.

And I realized it seemed as if this project - limitless in its scale and just as frightening as my answer in its scope - is like the ultimate lesson David Helfgott received from his piano professor when attempting the similarly musically-limitless interpretation of the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninov in D minor -

'You must learn the notes David … so that you can forget all about them.'

Learn so that we can forget.

But it made perfect and absolute sense. Discover our purpose. All that we intend to do. Then - and this I know will be the hard part … forget it all. Let the future - everything that it may be … just be. Knowing without knowing. Just doing.

I have no idea if I can photograph silence. I may very well fail. But I know for certain I will never know without trying ... an old wooden view camera and some beautiful lenses and a rickety tripod stuffed in my pack up over mountains and passes high across glaciers and down through valleys all there unfolding before me.