drmstream[writing]

I shared a bus ride in Ire­land once with a French man who car­ried more photo equip­ment than cloth­ing. It was 1979 and the bus ran local stops up into Done­gal from Killy­begs. I was on my way to a lit­tle town called Glen­columkille, where I’d spent a time­less week in a cot­tage with six other itin­er­ants. I was on a quiet pil­grim­age of my own this time. There was a sheep herders’ hut on an iso­lated field that jut­ted out beyond the bogs above the ocean and I planned to camp out there for a while.

I fash­ioned myself an artist then. Not even that, really. I just wanted some­one to think that I was an artist, so that all the time I spent scrib­bling in my note­book and pick­ing out tunes on my sax­o­phone could amount to some­thing more than just things that I did. After all, how did you acquire an iden­tity if you couldn’t have exter­nal artifacts?

So, I was impressed when the French­man got on. He had blond hair, stained fin­gers, a vest filled with pouches, film can­is­ters and light meters. We made con­ver­sa­tion, a lit­tle French, a lit­tle Eng­lish. I asked him what he was trav­el­ling for.

The per­fect light, he said.

There was a light in Ire­land that came as the sun moved around the hori­zon, at dawn, or sun­set, a light that you couldn’t find any­where else in the world. He’d seen it once when he was young and had waited all his life to come back and pho­to­graph it.

The image cap­ti­vated me. I looked for the light and felt like I’d seen it some­times. I won­dered how you could grab it on film, because it was such a three-dimensional thing, that light, that enveloped you and soothed more than just your sense of sight.

I’m sur­prised some­times when I take a photo and find that light in it. These two pho­tos are from the Bahamas.