THE FADING

‘The Fading’ © Simon Dow Photographer 2024

My work generally delves into the personal and larger questions of existence, ‘what is self?’, this human experience, the search for ‘truth’ and essentially questioning everything...yes, actually everything.

This ongoing, developing series I am naming ‘The Fading’ is a look at the shifting, changing, morphing disappearance act that is ageing both in the body and in Nature.

The seeming realness of this body in youthful vigour and unquestioned strength begins to change before and behind our very eyes beginning a process or movement or ‘unbecomingness’ of maturation where the once assumed smoothness, plumpness, muscularity, tone and speediness step away to reveal a fading of sorts...a gradual, almost unnoticeable thinning of surfaces. Skin becomes more transparent than translucent and the mapping of lines emerges like the pages of an old book of travels and travails with crispy pages and barely visible trails.

This fading and hardening and stiffening and weakening are miraculous magic tricks of transformation inviting us to peer into the eyes of this crinkling form to remember, to re-member or put back together the previously familiar road map that was once...me. But this is still me in some strange new/old version, at times feeling like twelve and at times like one hundred and twelve all within moments of each other. Without the mental, mind contrived sense of a perpetuating, continuing self there is just this experience of ‘is’.

And yet this personal ‘me’ form of ‘isness’ fades and is quiet and then roars into being and then lies down silent and defeated but gloriously and always only this.

The fading is a miracle wrapped in a fear ribbon that may or may not hold this all together. This ribbon frays with the passage of life and sometimes fades away altogether, as in Nature.

May 2024

More images from this series are on the home page under ‘The Fading’

‘The Fading’ © Simon Dow Photographer 2024