The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky exhorted us to:
Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.
I believe completely in this, and find the fundemental truth it contains echoed in many different places (for example poetry), and in other religious traditions as well as Christianity. It is of course, like all truth, easier to say and admire than to live by, but something of it's essence is, at least in my perception, present in the greatest art, including photographs.
Photographs can be gloriously illustrative, breathtakingly detailed, humourous or wonderfully executed, but without this sense of oneness, of love, they can seem incomplete. In photography as in life, authenticity is a most difficult and elusive thing to achieve, at least for me.
Moorhen on the river Dee, Chester.
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