The Place Behind the Pictures
When author JRR Tolkien spent most of his life building Middle-earth, his rich and compelling fantasy world, he created it chiefly for himself and his children to explore. Only secondarily and much later did he open it up for the rest of us to visit.
In similar fashion, I’ve been taking pictures over five decades for my own imagination to dwell in. Image by image, from French cathedrals to New Zealand waterfalls, from surfers and sea life to ancient ruins and modern festivals, I continue to build the world I long to inhabit. It’s a place where serenity and awe, the majesty of creation both natural and manmade, is quickened with moments of whimsy and drama and mystery. Only recently have I been convinced to open up this world to others.
I believe that the most effective art, whether representational or abstract, creates a yearning in the beholder — a half-glimpse of something ineffable that speaks to the discontents of our earthly lives, offering us solace if we could only reach out and grasp it. It’s the same impulse that led Peter S. Beagle, in his introduction to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, to write wistfully that “lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.”
The world I capture and curate with my photos (and my fiction writing) is the place I have built to try to meet that longing in myself. If I could wish anything else for that world, it’s that it would make you desire to live some of your own life here, too.
Welcome inside.
Ronald Crittenden 