Hi Marthinus:
Whew! There is a lot to respond to here, and while the wait was long, it was worth it. In no particular order, I want to see if I can unpack some of what is here and maybe add to it. Before you begin, be warned: This has gone to a place I didn’t imagine it would….
You know, for me, photography really is a process of self-discovery and discovery of my understanding of something Greater. I guess, if I think back, that my core interest has been in the question of the Absolute.
You won’t know this, but my degree is in foreign languages. In the course of my formal education, I studied French, Latin, Spanish, German and Russian (no, I am really only partially fluent in French and German now, nothing I feel that couldn’t be sorted with time spent in those cultures. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed Afrikaans so much, why I found the experience of using it so moerse lekker. It really is a beautiful language. Past a certain level at university, there really isn’t much use of the language. It is more of a study of literature. Certainly my experience was of reading ‘important’ texts; Schiller, Descartes, Pushkin, and Lorca, to name but a few. By the end of it, I felt that I must have studied every significant European writer from the Middle Ages to the present! Of course I only scratched the surface….
As an aside, when I left, I absolutely could not read another ‘good’ book, I felt so saturated. For years I read crap, Clive Cussler and the like. I avoided art film like the plague. Now, however, as I realise that all this has influenced and continues to influence who I am and therefore, how and why I photograph, I am finding myself increasingly watching more and more European film and films of substance. If a film keeps giving me flashbacks for days afterwards, I feel that the time spent watching has informed me.
Case in point: I recently saw a German film called Other People’s Lives. It left residues in my mind for days and has made me think much of the Human Condition. The gradual humanisation of the Stasi agent is a glorious thing to watch and to my mind is an uplifting thing. With all the inhumanity evident in the world today (Darfur, Iraq, the Congo, to name but a few), it is a reminder that people are essentially good. You may disagree. A friend who is deeply spiritual maintains that we are not human beings looking for a spiritual journey: rather, we are spiritual beings on a human journey. I totally concur with this. To adopt this way of thinking totally changes one’s perception of Life and the reason for our being on the planet, in this life. All our life-experience therefore is part of a process. Even the Bad has a reason, unpleasant though it may be. I realise that this is open to argument. As it should be. And from this awareness comes the Germ of the Absolute.
Only lately, some 30 years after I finished with university have I come to realise that my studies there have had a profound effect on how I see the world. Only now am I able to draw on what I learned. Only now is the impact of my studies making itself felt. Studying Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Sartre, theoretically paradigms apart, taught me that the human experience is essentially a Relative one. Each held that his view was absolute truth, but others followed who stated otherwise, based on their own understandings. By the time I had completed my degree, I longed for something that I could nail down as Absolute. Perhaps that is why my life, both personally and artistically, is a search for God, or rather, for an understanding of Him that is concrete, absolute and defensible. In my heart of hearts I know that is not possible. The Nature of Faith is such that we are required to entertain the relative as absolute.
I include here part of the introduction from my documentary section. It still resonates for me…
Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
I am continually fascinated by my own culture, by the way it is changing, and the challenge of fixing the fading footprints of the culture in which I find myself in an image made in the present.
The art of photography lies in framing, in organisation and the Moment. Wonderful things can happen while the shutter is closed. I never cease to be fascinated by the possibilities.
Why do I photograph?
Perhaps I hope to see God looking back at me from one of my images.
For me the question then becomes when that (God looking back) will occur. A quixotic quest I know, but one that defines who I am, and one I am quite comfortable with.
People fascinate me and the interaction between them, along with the nature of Moment, are much on my mind at the present. There is a reason for this.
The wind has turned (yet again). Work commitments have brought me back into a space I haven’t inhabited for some time.
The photograph as life-document.
While I get a real sense of the Divine in the landscape, while I get a sense of the All, in variety of different ways, my documentary photography has languished. The photography of life and the human experience is a core calling for me, but one I haven’t done for a while.
I spent the weekend just gone photographing for a client. The images I photographed weren’t as clear as I wanted, philosophically speaking. I felt my vision was muddied and that I was going over old ground. I didn’t feel connected in the way I have become with landscape photography. That forced me to take a breather, to evaluate and re-evaluate.
Part of that comes from adjusting to being back in Canterbury, to being in the city. In all the years I lived here (40+), I never really wanted to. Christchurch and I were an arranged marriage that didn’t really work out that well. Now that has changed. After a year away, I am now glad to be back. I walk the streets and look with joy at the city that has so much been a part of my life, geographically speaking. I find myself waning to lift a corner of the blanket, to peek under the surface and find the core rhythm that makes it what it is.
And the answer, when/if it comes will lie in a Moment. Cartier- Bresson, in his book talks about the decisive moment. I often hear people use the term, but I wonder how many actually understand it as he did. Not many, I would venture to suggest. He talks about the coming together of different elements. Light, time and the movement of people are givens. There are, I suspect other things as well, some of which I am only beginning to grasp.
Imagine if you will, several people moving in a space. It could be festival or a gathering or just people on the street. Each of them has a purpose. Or not. But each occupies a part of that space, displaces a portion of it. As they move relative to each other and the space, they generate and displace energy, they interact with the universe. There is a seminal moment at which those Lines of Intention interact, a point at which they make a statement that is somehow Other, and alludes to something more profound. Quantum physics has much to answer for… In that moment it is, I believe, possible to see something of more absolute significance.
The Moment exists in all forms of photography. Landscape photography has its own Moment. There is a point at which Light and Space and Time and weather and… all come together. The point may well come from some small detail, such as the bending of a tree in the wind or the subtle angle of grasses or a particular arrangement of cloud. But it is there all the same.
Portraiture likewise. A great portrait is a Moment of collaboration between photographer and subject, when each exposes him/ herself to the other, when both reveal themselves. Marc Hauser shows himself through the portraits he does, as did Karsh and Newman. There is a duality here, a multiplicity of layers all present in a moment.
Documentary photography, is the most recent of the photographic genres, is that combination of the disciplines of portraiture and landscape photography and talks about both people and place. The moment here is about both place and people, about where and when and who and what.
To my mind the Moment is something that we slice increasingly thinly as our mastery grows, as we come to recognise the moments within the Moment. My Moments are somewhat wide at this point…
But we hang all this perception on the coat hook of our experience, of our Self. And to know the Moment, we have to look to our Selves. It seems to me that looking in the library of our lives will give us much to contemplate, much to draw upon. For therein lies the key to our understanding of Moment.
Marthinus, I realise that this has deviated far from what you might have expected. If you feel frustration, I hope you will forgive me. In my own way I have tried to address what you have written. I have tried to both answer you and to leave threads open for further discussion.
I must also confess that this has been a catharsis for me and a reawakening, an attempt at both self-redefinition and rediscovery. I really appreciate your intense scrutiny, because it gives me the opportunity to delve into myself, and further cement fragments of my understanding together.

By way of an image for you, I enclose these ones from a commission done a few weeks ago, of a performance at a festival in the nearby town of Akaroa. The techniques are really simple; mastery is about simplification after all. For those who wish to know: Canon5D, mode= program, exposure-adequate (to plagiarise Edward Weston). And no, I didn’t PhotoShop it. I am still a traditionalist/purist at heart.
I am continually fascinated by the Moment, and performances are full of them. That is why I love photographing them. There is also the issue of the surreal; performances often offer us an understanding that may be beyond the quotidian.
And therein a glimpse of the Absolute.
Arohanui e
Tony
Dear Tony
I had a good laugh the other day when my wife described her perception of what our conversation would be like if we talk face to face.  She said that you will probably say something; I will then wait about five minutes and reply.  You will then think about it and state your mind some minutes later.  And so on.  That is probably why you need a good red wine for this type of dialogue!  Please accept my apologies for the long delay in answering.  This is not at all a reflection of my interest in our subject or my passion for our conversation.  In my heart I wish I could share this conversation a lot more often.  Your reply, being fairly different, but very welcome and challenging, has lead to this one, also strolling and arriving into different waters than what was envisaged.  Hope it speaks and that I understood you correctly.
It is interesting what you mention about films.  Living in an area of town where you cannot receive any television signal unless you have a satellite dish, we haven’t had television for about 4 years now.  The effect?  It led me to being more sensitive to the content of any film or movie that we watch.  Sometimes after watching a good film (or bad) it leaves such a residue that I cannot sleep that night.  A recent film, “Babel”, had exactly that effect.  It talks about communication and the lack thereof.  Us not wanting to hear (and listen), and the utter confusion due to that.  “Other people’s lives” I have heard about but haven’t seen yet.
Some time ago I was asked what type of photographic subject is my favourite.  This seems like a very easy and straight forward question for any photographer.  I suddenly did not know how to answer.  I’ve always liked nature, landscapes and architecture.  Macro as well.  The last couple of years people and human condition speaks a great deal to me, hence the start of our conversation.  Then it struck me.  My favourite has always been the Moment.  I have tried to look for it and discover it in all my photographs that I feel speaks to me.  I am amazed by Henri Cartier-Bresson work about the Decisive Moment.  And as you said I think this subject can be present in all types of photography.  I think this is why I have so many movement images, images with slow shutters and colour.  I mages where you do not really know the subject but it intrigue.  It is a moment that the camera can see and us not.  It almost speaks a language that we don’t know, a mind of its own opening our mind to images that is there but we don’t know it.  Movement in a face, movement in a landscape, a human condition, a dance.  I think me and you are on the same page with this and it is very exiting to me!  To lift the blanket and take a dive!  The Moment may be what we are on about.
With people photography I think it is at that fleeting, unguarded or decisive moment that the shutters are rolled away and one’s soul is exposed to reveal the raw unworked inside, all through the sash window of the eyes.  Steve McCurry (among many other) also talks about the Moment, specifically the Moment in people photography.  In portraiture there will always be the collaboration between the subject and the photographer, which will shape the moment, but in human condition images involving people not always.  I believe we are made in God’s image and we are the crown of his creation, I then sometimes wonder whether photography of people is the place were we would see God looking back at us.  I believe this is not a resemblance of image, in other words visual, but in the images of God stating that we must rule under Him over His creation and be just and loving as He is.  Then he made us this way and maybe this is where he shines through us all and straight into our lenses.  Nature and the rest of creation were made for us, for us to work it and take care of it.  Sometimes when I see some of the portraiture of Steve McCurry (and there are many more) I want to run and not stop till I can grasp the feeling in the eyes.  The joy, the pain, the deadness.  And I agree this is when all comes together, light, technique, visual design, colour and more importantly emotion (especially from the photographer’s side).  And the viewer.  And this is what we should strive to master.
Nature, I believe, was made for man.  It is also where God shows his power and majesty in a creative manner that we can only dream of.  Actually he stares back from all those amazing images of the landscape you have taken, waiting for us to recognize His glory.  Rich Mullins, a singer with native Indian ancestry, wrote a song entitled “Everywhere I go I see You” and with this he recognize God in nature, nature being so important to native Indian survival.
I was visiting London quite some time ago and while searching for the old Smithfield square, where the Scot William Wallace was executed, I came across a very old small church building that was under restoration.  A solid wooden fence blocked a view of the architecture, but on one of the panels was written the following:
“Earth is filled with Heaven and every common bush afire with God, but only those who sees, take of their shoes”.
If you think about this it is amazing.  Freeman Patterson talks about the Art of Seeing, but this takes it so much further, beyond skill, even maybe beyond interpretation in the realm of understanding.  This section has reference to Moses and the burning bush in Genesis.
Not contradicting this, but rather emphasizing and applying fixer to this light sensitive sheet, is the words of C. S. Lewis:
“Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her.  When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive.  Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use.  We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.  And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.” C. S. Lewis.
I find it amazing that, if I understand you correctly, you are defined by the quest to find God looking back at you from your images.  Is this rhetorical?  I also think that it is one of the best reasons ever to photograph.  So many “absolutes truths” around.  So many people claiming they have it, only to fall on ears of someone else who believe they have it.  To find it in our images I do not think is such a quixotic quest.  Maybe the above sheds light on my statement.  It is an amazing quest, a quest for serious good photography.  Maybe to really reflect on it and try to represent it as He “said” it.  To know Him in such a manner that you understands His heart for His creation, for us.  And to reflect this to others.
This may be a challenge (for us both), so sensitively asking, what will we do when we see Him looking back at us?
I understand what you mean with this.  Maybe something to really answer.  Also the question whether our quest is rhetorical or not.  I maintain that it is not so difficult to see Him.  Not face to face, but to see what he has revealed, has shown.  Seek we must.  And if we see Him in our images, will other people see Him in it as well?  Will we want to show them?  Maybe this becomes the new quest which is in itself very exiting and talks straight about the communicative power of the image.  Will we keep photographing when we see Him first?
Then something else, on that day that we first see God in one of those glorious images, will we want to keep shooting, keep seeking?  I think we will.
Spiritual beings on a human journey.  I believe God made us to seek him, to look for Him in all his creation.  And like you said, we hang these searches on the coat hook of our experience.  And this should over time explain each man to himself and man to man.  To look at oneself, one’s history is essential to understand one’s frame of reference and ultimately one’s longing and search.  This should define our search, and I think in your case it already did.
An interesting question is whether we look for God staring back to us from other peoples images as well?
Your image of what I think is the “flying dancers”, but could also be flowers blowing in the breeze, caught an incredible moment of colour and gracefulness.  Before your correspondence included this image, I had a good look at it on your website and showed to my wife as well with the words “Look at this amazing image from Tony!”.  This moment you caught creates an intense anticipation for the next one.  It seems as if the figure on the right is a further progression of the image on the left, which opens the door for a third figure, and what will it look like?  Where will it be?  I still wanted include some of my photographs related to our discussion, maybe with next correspondence.  As you feel as well, I experience my Moment also to be too wide and slicing this thinner and thinner sharpens one’s perspective and clarity of photographic speech.  I agree mastery is about simplification and maybe less is more after all, always thought so.
I believe seeing God looking back at us in the Moment is the Absolute truth we must find.
Groete
Marthinus

Kia ora Marthinus:
I can imagine your wife laughing at us, and indeed it is an increasingly important wish for me that we may have some time together in the near future. Lately I have heard Africa calling me. I think that when you go there and leave, a part of you remains and from time to time, calls you back. When I was there, I visited the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg, and the reverberations in my soul from that experience echo to this day. But I digress…or do I?
It is my turn to apologise for the delay in responding. I read your reply and realised that there was much in it that I needed to consider and to use as a basis for my own reflection. It also pushed me into the corner of my own artistic awareness and indeed my Awareness . As summer has rolled its eyes in resignation and given way to winter through the transition season of autumn, so I have finally begun a process of transition myself. From Boxing Day to Easter I worked without a day off and without a chance to take stock, to even reflect upon what I was shooting or teaching. But that is changing for a time. My life seems to have its own natural rhythm and for the moment (hah!) I am having time to regroup, to think and to teach. (Actually teaching is very good for me for it forces me to reconsider what I am doing and indeed about). So last week, for the first time in months, I had the opportunity to sit down and reflect on what you have written.
How timely that you should talk about the Moment and its significance. Of late my (photographic) work has trended in this direction, but I guess a perusal of the featured image section on my website, which tends to headline what I am doing both professionally and personally/artistically would make that plain. I will confess that it is a new part of my journey but an old idea for me, one I have revisited over the years, and yes, it ties to the Moment.
I t is obvious to me that the Moment is a key part of all photography. David Hurn, the Magnum photographer maintains that there are only two decisions in photography; where to stand and when to press the button. While this is perhaps an oversimplification, I hold it to be true, and indeed true for all genres.
In landscape photography the Moment may appear to be lengthy but it is in fact as precise as any other. Even though the Light may appear to be constant and unchanging on a bright sunny day, the rotation of the Earth is in fact altering it constantly, changing its intensity and quality with every second. The issue then of why we do not notice it in our photographs or in photographs taken close together is one of perception, of our inability to see it rather than its non-existence. Beyond a certain point I believe our journey through the medium is a journey towards a finer and finer understanding of the moment. And though the Moment may be very difficult to recognise in landscape photography, nonetheless i hold it to be present, and the Holy Grail landscape photographers seek. O f course we have to have some idea of what that Holy Grail looks like, otherwise we will ride straight past it.
Of course the Moment is a critical factor in portrait photography. In this case it is just as important. We will have made the decision on where to stand early in the session, perhaps even framed the image we are seeking. In this case we are already moving towards it. When it comes, we will (hopefully) recognise it and press the shutter. Of course our feelings about the subject and our relationship with him/her will have a powerful effect on the moment that we record on our sensor. Many factors come into play here, not the least of which is our ego, omnipresent in all the photographs we make. It is inescapable and a tricky imp at best. But that is a topic for another letter.
It has taken me a long time to answer your last letter. At first I put it down to being too busy and then I put it down to having little to offer in return. Now I have moved to a point where I can make an answer that (today) holds true for me. Before I unpack that, let me say that your comments compelled me to revisit my comments on the documentary header page. I wrote those comments some years ago and I needed to look at them again and re-examine them.
So to your question. No my quest is not rhetorical. I do seek to see Him looking back in my images (and those of other photographers as well). Years ago I read a short story by, I believe, Arthur. C. Clarke, in which the protagonist visits a Tibetan monastery which has a supercomputer. When he enquires as to its purpose, the monks tell him that its function is to record all the names of God. When that is done, Man’s raison d’etre will have been achieved and there will be no reason for our universe to continue. Of course the protagonist enquires as to when that will be done and is told that the computer is on the home straight. In fact it is done. The last lines in the story are chilling and go something like” As he looked up into the night sky, one by one the stars were winking out of existence…” As you can see, my memory of the story is not exactly accurate. Which raises an interesting question and leads me to the point I am trying to make.
At first it irritated me that I could not remember it sufficiently accurately, but, not having read it for forty years, I hope I can be forgiven. Then I began to ask myself whether in fact it really mattered (it obviously would to the author!) that my memory is imperfect. I decided perhaps it didn’t.
You mention the world is awash with absolute truths. I notice that the more absolute the truths, the more the purveyors of them are quick to persecute those who do not see it their way. Oops, I digress again! My degree in foreign languages which should have been called a degree in foreign literature exposed me to many of the great ideas in western thought from the Middle Ages to the present day. After three years, my head was spinning from argument and counter-argument, and cynicism set in for a decade or so. Perhaps that is the appeal for me of photography; a way to explore and express my own perception of absolute truth.
Of course I knew all along that the medium, being a selective one, was a treacherous servant at best, a kind of visual Iago which could bring me down. Can photography ever be truly objective? I have known from the start that such a thing is impossible. To come back to Hurn’s statement; the act of deciding where to stand and when to press the button immediately negates the possibility of objectivity. There is no way we can ever be objective. So why bother?
In fact the question may be irrelevant and immaterial. The Mexican photographer, Pedro Meyer makes the comment that ‘isn’t it about time that we come to terms with the fact that photographs have never been the truth about anything?’ There are many ways to read this statement, but his rejection of the photograph as historical document is quite accurate. ‘The camera never lies’ is of course an idea I believe few today would be willing to back. We all know it lies and has always lied. Objective photographic documentation is impossible. Lighting, choice of focal length and camera position are a few of the more obvious barriers to such an undertaking. There are other more insidious ones. In fact photographic objectivity is a demon of infinite subtlety.
If we are indeed spiritual beings on a human journey, if indeed our lives are the outer shell in which we live, the quotidian illusion that masks us from our inner truth, as St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order indicates in his Spiritual Exercises, then the photographs we make may well be the markers on that journey and the visual cue cards we need to follow the path inwards. If, as he says, god is within us, and it is our journey to name Him, then the photograph, made the best way we can, and in His knowledge, may contain Truth, rather than a truth.
If we see it that way, then we can never make ‘bad’ photographs for ourselves, only confusing ones. We have to learn to read the entrails of our own journey. (It is when we attempt to share our journey with others that difficulties begin). Our reading of our own journey in the tarot of our own photographs will of course change as we change. They are a cabinet of infinite curiosities, which reflect us back at ourselves at the place in time where we view them.
Perhaps that is why I am loath to throw any of my images away, why I now have 120 000+ of them, many seemingly indistinguishable; because I know that these personal postcards may one day offer me an understanding that is important at that point in time and that I will be able to differentiate between them on that day and from that day forwards.
The aging knight would really hate to ride past the windmill and not recognise it for what it was.
So, I have held my breath long enough. Your wife has to wait no longer.
I look forward to a day when we can both sit like two old men on the porch in the early evening and drink our favourite red wine together. No doubt you will bring one of those wonderful Stellenbosch reds, brimming with sunshine and the rich past of Africa; I will bring a bottle of Rabbit Ranch, my favourite Central Otago pinot noir, flinty-eyed and dry-humoured, with a sparkle in its eye and the sound of whispering tussocks in its voice.
Sometimes the finest conversations lie not in the words, but in the spaces between.
Arohanui e