We are all busy with what we perceive as relevant to our lives. Keeping up with everything is impossible; it would be fair to say that we prioritize immediately relevant facts and events, and that historical and future concerns don't have much influence over us. And yet there's something outside of our lives, on the scale of time and space, which we sense is beyond our grasp - something that's revealed as deeply mysterious, when one tries to place his life in the broader tapestry of life itself. At some point I realized that I could only survive for four weeks without food, for four days without water and for four minutes without oxygen. Although I had a good idea where my food was coming from, I would have only been concerned about water when it stopped flowing from the tap, and I had only a foggy idea where the oxygen I was breathing was coming from. I had thus stumbled across a major flaw in the way I'd prioritized the essentialities of my life. Following this realization, I discovered that the dilemma was not mine alone. The next step for me was to look at my body as a self-contained living system that had developed over millions of years and was functioning rather well within a narrow range of conditions. Any deviance from my constant body temperature indicates something; two degrees could be painful and four degrees could mean a total system failure. To understand how and why my body worked, I had to examine it as - for lack of a better term a vessel of aqueous solution, in which everything that is vital to me happens. With water comprising 60% of my body weight and 80% of my brain, all the cells in my body developed and can properly function in it, because water is the conduit for nutrient delivery, neuronal messaging, heat storage and energy distribution, as well as a means of waste disposal. My body is also involved in a symbiotic relationship with thousands of water-living species that help it digest food, extract nutrients and produce the countless molecular components that it needs to function properly. This relationship only works well when my body provides conditions that are stable enough to host these organisms. This interpretation of the human body as a living system led me to look for similarities between it and living systems of a larger scale. I effectively found myself looking for patterns of life that would allow me to place my own life within a much broader context. The environment of the Niagara Escarpment, where I reside, offered me viable cues, and it became the subject of my observation as it recovered from the obliteration of its vegetation—in favour of farmland — that occurred decades ago. The Canadian Shield is my Petri dish, permitting clear and transparent observation of the life that forms on its surface. This book is the compendium of evidence gathered there. It has become the basis for my own conclusions, and we may each derive different conclusions from the same evidence. Curiosity, a trait common to all human beings, reveals itself best at the water's edge. I invite you to walk there.
Canada may be more defined by water than any other country. With the Great Lakes containing one-fifth of the planet’s fresh surface water alone, and as many lakes as the rest of the world, this country offers the best opportunity to observe how water defines our planet. “Water is Life” may be the most frequently expressed axiom in the history of mankind, and it simply summarizes not only the origin of life, but also its prerequisite. The enduring civilizations in our history were built and maintained around the principle of equitable access to water. The industrial revolution started the process of water commoditization. The warming of our planet started affecting its distribution.
2
Everything in life, from the cellular level of my body to the continental scale of environmental processes, evolved from, and depends on, one specific physical property of water: its heat capacity. It has one of the highest of all materials, in all three of its states. This is what stabilizes living systems — as well as my body — in their range of inborn temperature requirements. This property also makes liquid and vaporized water the best mediums for energy transfer in the power generation industry, as well as in the formation of climate conditions of all possible scales. The same vapor that cools my body, the farmer’s soil, and stretches of rock surface, takes heat energy away in cloud formations, then disperses it in equal measure. These same clouds could trap more energy or bounce it back into outer space, all in patterns so complicated that it makes the heads of scientists spin and the most powerful computers crash. Watching the surface of water has been a captivating experience for so many of us. It’s like watching a human face that can reveal as much as it can hide. The gently rippled water might awoke the stable, comforting feeling of nursing, while masking a buried current that seeks to unload its energy. Surviving mariners were the ones who had mastered the anger management of all three phases of water. Water is not life, but the medium of life, and its face is as mysterious as life itself. I pay attention to the face of water; its signals return me safely from my solitary travels.
3
5
6
7
12
13
14
15
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Shorelines, the most common feature of the Canadian landscape, have fascinated me since I settled in this country. As the borderline between liquid, solid and transparent states, a shoreline is also the embodiment of the transition between the inanimate world and the world alive. As such, it’s a place that stimulates both reflection and imagination, and where cottagers escape to recharge themselves, to get way from urban environments and to “reconnect.” Shorelines have inspired generations of artists to contemplate our constantly changing relationship with nature.
The shorelines of the Canadian Shield are testimonials to the forces attributed to the physical world and its interaction with the world of the living. Metres away from the scars of the water’s edge, one can find the conditions of a sun-baked desert. It’s where windblown clumps of organic matter find a foothold by facilitating symbiotic relationships between different living organisms. The sole purpose for each nucleus of life, and its composition, is to secure its living conditions—an outcome of very long evolutionary processes. The only way for some organisms to survive is to grow and stabilize these conditions by interacting with the physical world. Their main threat comes from violent discharges of locally accumulated energy in the physical world; mechanisms have evolved that effectively bring the physical world back to its optimal level of entropy. Yes, we all learned about chlorophyll, cloud formation, evaporation, condensation and radiation in school. Bringing this knowledge to our lives in more practical terms is a different story.
“Nature” has a different meaning for each of us. The original interpretation encompasses both the physical world and the living one. Our world — the Blue Planet— formed as a strictly physical world and gradually became a living one, through the development of complex symbiotic relationships between physical matter and living substances. Water is a part of the physical world, so I must be as well.
Shorelines, once a stepping stone in evolutionary history, became the stepping stone of our civilization, as we developed expanding urban centers on the water's edge. In this process, we adopted the same principles as the natural world and created many others. As an organized society, we built bigger heated and air-conditioned walls to screen ourselves from the peril, influence and inner workings of our own planet.
I am a part of the living world as long as I retain that medium of life.
My fear is that we’ve started dreaming about colonizing other ones.
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
36
37
38
Beauty, however, is in the eye of beholder, and is therefore a concept that’s formed by a brain. For some people, wetlands are just muddy, stinky waters. Both points of view are the outcome of reasoning on many levels: cultural, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, to name few. It is, in a way, the outcome of assigning different values to different things.
The Hudson Bay Company was formed in 1670, in England, for the sole purpose of supplying Europe with beaver pelts. The Company employed native Canadians to trap beavers, in exchange for guns, blankets, whisky and trinkets. While pursuing the valuable pelts, the Company mapped out a large chunk of our continent, which, two hundred years later, was sold to the Crown when beaver hats fell out of fashion. The investors left behind an impoverished trading post, an unemployed native population, a decimated beaver population, and the legacy of a colonial economy. Left alone, the beaver population recovered, then rebuilt and engineered wetlands the way nature equipped them to. Canadian wetlands again became the most effective and out-of-the-way trappers of carbon dioxide generated by the Industrial Revolution, which produced, among other things, the blankets, trinkets and guns that were killing beavers.
I see wetlands as scaled-up nucleuses of life, the same that I observed forming on the rock surface. They are the nurseries of plants, fish, birds and animals on the one hand, but they are also places that sequester an enormous volume of carbon from our atmosphere. Wetlands are also effective buffers that help to retain water in a much larger area, and therefore help to stabilize the local climatic conditions. Each of these processes has an intrinsic value, but human perception of it changes with the passage of time.
The story of the Canadian beaver hasn’t ended just yet. The recent political administration engaged significant public resources to promote the virtues of the Athabasca oil sands abroad — a resource that by now is mostly in the hands of foreign investors. It is credited with containing as much petroleum as all other known reserves of conventional oil on the planet combined. The exploration of it releases massive amounts of pollutants that contaminate the Athabasca watershed — the same area that produced the most beaver pelts for the Hudson Bay Company.
The history of Canada, and related to it, the fortune of the beaver, illustrates this well.
Wetlands are an untold Cinderella story.
I find wetlands beautiful.
40
41
43
44
45
46
47
Over the years I have become more selective when choosing the places where I stop to recollect and contemplate during my working trips. I see in them an immediacy and a unity that is informed by my current understanding of natural processes, environmental debates and challenges. As a collection of images, “In Full View� takes into account all of the above as well as my personal relationship with each photographed location. It is a culmination of what started three decades ago when I settled in this country, when I was longing to belong somewhere again, when I needed to find common ground, learn the stories, and walk the land. To speak and understand it, one must know of how it was.
48
In my travels I pass hundreds of abandoned lodges, campgrounds and nowquiet summer camps. Many cottages armed with satellite dishes are silent during summer long weekends. The big skies above are crisscrossed by jet vapours that point to all-inclusive destinations, shopping experiences in Dubai, or weekends in Paris. For many of us who live mostly on a sliver of land along the US border, the millions of square kilometers of living land is slowly becoming an abstract construct. We’ve isolated ourselves from the realties and responsibilities of our world. There is no Hollywood escape to a new planet awaiting me or my grandchildren. It will never come to pass. Another quiet evening out there, water sloshing gently at my feet, my mind again adrift in the fluid affiliation between man and nature.
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
60
61
62
63
64
66
Over the years I have developed an annual ritual — a long, solitary evening swim. At dusk, I shove off from the outer islands on Georgian Bay, the north shores of Lake Superior, or from the edge of a northern lake. As I make long and slow strokes, stretching my body, I tune in to the cool flow over my skin and the warm flow in my veins. Nature is silent. The first stars flicker. I am water and I have come from the stars. I emerged from water once, and I am coming back to feel it, as it all began. The same molecules have flowed in the veins of many. I do not feel alone here: I am connected, part of something bigger
Sweet Water
Janusz Wrobel 2014
What is relevant about me in the context of this photo book project, is that I spent the first three decades of my life seeking education in seemingly unrelated fields: dye making, chemical engineering, theoretical physics, chemistry, and the science of photographic materials. During these formative years, I was also exposed to the humanized environments of continental Europe, which had been nearly completely altered by the gradual interventions of previous generations. It infused me with the concept of a natural world that was compliant and contained - a view that was well entrenched in the societal mindset of that time and place. I've spent the other half of my life contemplating natural processes, within a range of environments, on scales that were unimaginable to me in my earlier years. The confrontation between these two different ways of viewing the natural world made clear their striking differences, and led to the formation of a new frame of reference. I began to see the natural world as symbiotic relationships of many different scales, where the physical and biological worlds interact amid processes that have been established and maintained over time frames that are inherently relevant to them.
My professional association with the medium of photography started when I was still a teenager. What attracted me to photography was its ability to force me to pay attention to what I was seeing. I tapped into this attraction and deployed this medium throughout my life, in applications ranging from medical, scientific and industrial, to documenting international arts festivals and tackling socio-political issues in the form of conceptual installations, in order to avoid scrutiny and political censorship. My use of classic techniques and materials - inevitably consuming more time and resources - forced me from the start to be more contemplative of what I was attempting to interpret through photography. The act of seeing happens in the brain, where light impulses that enter through our eyes are being interpreted. What is stored in each of us becomes the basis for the brain's interpretation, and that opens up the possibility of different impressions of the same reality. Each of us sees the world differently, and might photograph it differently as well.
68
In this book project, I use photography in its inherent capacity to provide unaltered and verifiable images of places that many Canadians have seen at some point in their lives. The selected images are the outcome of a much longer process that illustrates my reconciliation with my New World.
Image List Page 03 Page 04 Page 05 Page 06 Page 07 Page 08 Page 09 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16,17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34,35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58,59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66
Sweet Water Sea Fossil Beach Deep From Here & Beyond From Here & Now #2 Polished Jade Topaz Blue Morning Gold Evening Amber Pebble Beach #2 & #3 Pebble Beach #2 Water Grass Study #3 Superior Beach Study Ebb & Flow Wind Study 07/09 Western Wind Grassy Shallows #3 Flow Study 05/07 Grassy Reef Fray State of Entropy #3 Boil Driftwood Beach Western Shore Eastern Shore Northern Shore Spring Reef Shield Study #1 Nucleus #4 Nucleus #7 Frosty Shoreline #3 Shoreline Study #4 In an Aqueous State Creed Creed #2 Bog 22/10. Spring Wetlands Ontario' Everglades Morning Pearls Misty Bog Grassy Reef #3 Winter Lace First Frost #3 Misty Beaver Pond Cold Front Indian Pond Luminous Shoreline Canterbury Falls #4 Trail in the Valley Winter Cottage Country View from Salomon Island Shores of Bruce Peninsula Temagami Evening Evening Boreal Forest Boreal Nocturne Boreal Shoreline Bloodvein River Fire #2 Elemental Suppertime Continuum
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* edition size
Preface Water Shoreline Wetlands In Full View About Myself Image List Large format text for electronic reading
All content copyright Janusz Wrobel januszwrobel.com
Page #1 Page #2 -25 Page #26-39 Page #40-47 Page #48-66 Page #68 Page #69 Page #71-76
preface
(Page #1)
We are all busy with what we perceive as relevant to our lives. Keeping up with everything is impossible; it would be fair to say that we prioritize immediately relevant facts and events, and that historical and future concerns don't have much influence over us. And yet there's something outside of our lives, on the scale of time and space, which we sense is beyond our grasp—something that's revealed as deeply mysterious, when one tries to place his life in the broader tapestry of life itself. At some point I realized that I could only survive for four weeks without food, for four days without water and for four minutes without oxygen. Although I had a good idea where my food was coming from, I would have only been concerned about water when it stopped flowing from the tap, and I had only a foggy idea where the oxygen I was breathing was coming from. I had thus stumbled across a major flaw in the way I'd prioritized the essentialities of my life. Following this realization, I discovered that the dilemma was not mine alone. The next step for me was to look at my body as a self-contained living system that had developed over millions of years and was functioning rather well within a narrow range of conditions. Any deviance from my constant body temperature indicates something; two degrees could be painful and four degrees could mean a total system failure. To understand how and why my body worked, I had to examine it as - for lack of a better term—a vessel of aqueous solution, in which everything that is vital to me happens. With water comprising 60% of my body weight and 80% of my brain, all the cells in my body developed and can properly function in it, because water is the conduit for nutrient delivery, neuronal messaging, heat storage and energy distribution, as well as a means of waste disposal. My body is also involved in a symbiotic relationship with thousands of water—living species that help it digest food, extract nutrients and produce the countless molecular components that it needs to function properly. This relationship only works well when my body provides conditions that are stable enough to host these organisms. This interpretation of the human body as a living system led me to look for similarities between it and living systems of a larger scale. I effectively found myself looking for patterns of life that would allow me to place my own life within a much broader context. The environment of the Niagara Escarpment, where I reside, offered me viable cues, and it became the subject of my observation as it recovered from the obliteration of its vegetation—in favour of farmland—that occurred decades ago. The Canadian Shield is my Petri dish, permitting clear and transparent observation of the life that forms on its surface. This book is the compendium of evidence gathered there. It has become the basis for my own conclusions, and we may each derive different conclusions from the same evidence. Curiosity, a trait common to all human beings, reveals itself best at the water's edge. I invite you to walk there. 71
water (Page #2)
Canada may be more defined by water than any other country. With the Great Lakes containing one—fifth of the planet's fresh surface water alone, and as many lakes as the rest of the world, this country offers the best opportunity to observe how water defines our planet. “Water is Life” may be the most frequently expressed axiom in the history of mankind, and it simply summarizes not only the origin of life, but also its prerequisite. The enduring civilizations in our history were built and maintained around the principle of equitable access to water. The industrial revolution started the process of water commoditization. The warming of our planet started affecting its distribution. Everything in life, from the cellular level of my body to the continental scale of environmental processes, evolved from, and depends on, one specific physical property of water: its heat capacity. It has one of the highest of all materials, in all three of its states. This is what stabilizes living systems—as well as my body—in their range of inborn temperature requirements. This property also makes liquid and vaporized water the best mediums for energy transfer in the power generation industry, as well as in the formation of climate conditions of all possible scales. The same vapor that cools my body, the farmer's soil, and stretches of rock surface, takes heat energy away in cloud formations, then disperses it in equal measure. These same clouds could trap more energy or bounce it back into outer space, all in patterns so complicated that it makes the heads of scientists spin and the most powerful computers crash. Watching the surface of water has been a captivating experience for so many of us. It's like watching a human face that can reveal as much as it can hide. The gently rippled water might foster the stable, comforting feeling of nursing, while masking a buried current that seeks to unload its energy. Surviving mariners were the ones who had mastered the anger management of all three phases of water. Water is not life, but the medium of life, and its face is as mysterious as life itself. I pay attention to the face of water; its signals return me safely from my solitary travels.
72
Shoreline (Page #26)
Shorelines, the most common feature of the Canadian landscape, have fascinated me since I settled in this country. As the borderline between liquid, solid and transparent states, a shoreline is also the embodiment of the transition between the inanimate world and the world alive. As such, it's a place that stimulates both reflection and imagination, and where cottagers escape to recharge themselves, to get way from urban environments and to “reconnect.” Shorelines have inspired generations of artists to contemplate our constantly changing relationship with nature. “Nature” has a different meaning for each of us. The original interpretation encompasses both the physical world and the living one. Our world—the Blue Planet—formed as a strictly physical world and gradually became a living one, through the development of complex symbiotic relationships between physical matter and living substances. Water is a part of the physical world, so I must be as well. I am a part of the living world as long as I retain that medium of life. The shorelines of the Canadian Shield are testimonials to the forces attributed to the physical world and its interaction with the world of the living. Metres away from the scars of the water's edge, one can find the conditions of a sun-baked desert. It's where windblown clumps of organic matter find a foothold by facilitating symbiotic relationships between different living organisms. The sole purpose for each nucleus of life, and its composition, is to secure its living conditions — - an outcome of very long evolutionary processes. The only way for some organisms to survive is to grow and stabilize these conditions by interacting with the physical world. Their main threat comes from violent discharges of locally accumulated energy in the physical world; mechanisms have evolved that effectively bring the physical world back to its optimal level of entropy. Yes, we all learned about chlorophyll, cloud formation, evaporation, condensation and radiation in school. Bringing this knowledge to our lives in more practical terms is a different story. Shorelines, once a stepping stone in evolutionary history, became the stepping stone of our civilization, as we developed expanding urban centers on the water's edge. In this process, we adopted the same principles as the natural world and created many others. As an organized society, we built bigger heated and air-conditioned walls to screen ourselves from the peril, influence and inner workings of our own planet. My fear is that we've started dreaming about colonizing other ones. 73
Wetlands (Page #40) I find wetlands beautiful. Beauty, however, is in the eye of beholder, and is therefore a concept that's formed by a brain. For some people, wetlands are just muddy, stinky waters. Both points of view are the outcome of reasoning on many levels: cultural, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, to name few. It is, in a way, the outcome of assigning different values to different things. I see wetlands as scaled-up nucleuses of life, the same that I observed forming on the rock surface. They are the nurseries of plants, fish, birds and animals on the one hand, but they are also places that sequester an enormous volume of carbon from our atmosphere. Wetlands are also effective buffers that help to retain water in a much larger area, and therefore help to stabilize the local climatic conditions. Each of these processes has an intrinsic value, but human perception of it changes with the passage of time. The history of Canada, and related to it, the fortune of the beaver, illustrates thatthis well. The Hudson Bay Company was formed in 1670, in England, for the sole purpose of supplying Europe with beaver pelts. The Company employed native Canadians to trap beavers, in exchange for guns, blankets, whisky and trinkets. While pursuing the valuable pelts, the Company mapped out a large chunk of our continent, which, two hundred years later, was sold to the Crown when beaver hats fell out of fashion. The investors left behind an impoverished trading post, an unemployed native population, a decimated beaver population, and the legacy of a colonial economy. Left alone, the beaver population recovered, then rebuilt and engineered wetlands the way nature equipped them to. Canadian wetlands again became the most effective and out-of-the-way trappers of carbon dioxide generated by the Industrial Revolution, which produced, among other things, the blankets, trinkets and guns that were killing beavers. The story of the Canadian beaver hasn't ended just yet. The recent political administration engaged significant public resources to promote the virtues of the Athabasca oil sands abroad — a resource that by now is mostly in the hands of foreign investors. It is credited with containing as much petroleum as all other known reserves of conventional oil on the planet combined. Our The exploration of it releases massive amounts of pollutants that contaminate the Athabasca watershed — the same area that produced the most beaver pelts for the Hudson Bay Company. 74
in full view (Page #48)
Over the years I have become more selective when choosing the places where I stop to recollect and contemplate during my working trips. I see in them an immediacy and a unity that is informed by my current understanding of natural processes, environmental debates and challenges. As a collection of images, “In Full View� takes into account all of the above as well as my personal relationship with each photographed location. It is a culmination of what started three decades ago when I settled in this country, when I was longing to belong somewhere again, when I needed to find common ground, learn the stories, and walk the land. To speak and understand it, one must know of how it was. In my travels I pass hundreds of abandoned lodges, campgrounds and now-quiet summer camps. Many cottages armed with satellite dishes are silent during summer long weekends. The big skies above are crisscrossed by jet vapours that point to all-inclusive destinations, shopping experiences in Dubai, or weekends in Paris. For many of us who live mostly on a sliver of land along the US border, the millions of square kilometers of living land is slowly becoming an abstract construct. We've isolated ourselves from the realties and responsibilities of our world. There is no Hollywood escape to a new planet awaiting me or my grandchildren. It will never come to pass. Another quiet evening out there, water sloshing gently at my feet, my mind again adrift in the fluid affiliation between man and nature.
75