Man seeks to make sense of the world and of himself. One way is by pattern recognition. We see this already in the way infants explore their environment. There's a very old philosophical and artistic tradition of seeing harmonies in nature. These perceived patterns seem to imply some intention or purpose beyond the literal surfaces of whatever we are looking at. Maybe they imply something about ourselves as well.

I like to think my photography works in this tradition of pattern recognition, of seeking harmonic relationships. The approach doesn't depend on subject matter per se. It's what attracted me to photography in the first place in the work of such diverse artists as Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Strand, and Robert Frank. In a fraction of a second, or a bit longer, their pictures achieved a unified composition of formal tonalities and personal feelings.

Compositions are a kind of pattern recognition. The world out there, and our ways of seeing, become a unity. Thus, compositions make a coherent statement about the world and ourselves. The magical part is that, in doing this, they imply something beyond the world and beyond ourselves. This gives meaning and depth to existence. It's what I would call the spiritual.

In other words, we are working in the esthetic tradition which St. Thomas Aquinas summed up by saying that beauty consists of three qualities: wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

So it happened that while my work as a professional photographer and writer was presenting enormously diverse of subjects all over the world, I was training my eye to quickly recognize patterns within that variety. Then after 1982, in this more recent fifteen year period of working with the nude, circumstances allowed me to make a radical change in my approach. In session after session, in the studio and in the darkroom -- incidentally, I had never been a studio photographer before -- I was dealing with the same subject: finding a variety of patterns in different ways of lighting and framing and printing one basic natural form.

In the book I point out that photography of the nude celebrates the meeting of the most elemental thing in the universe -- light -- with the most sophisticated thing we know of -- the human body.

Why this sudden change in my work? I'm still wondering. I do know that it came following six years of intense personal evolution centering on a program of strict spiritual exercises under the broad term of meditation. It's been rightly said that western man seeks to master nature, whereas eastern man seeks to master himself. The nudes project has this kind of unwavering concentration. Also, I've been lucky enough to have had the time to devote to it in these years.

Seeing the slides, you may notice that my images of the nude have plain backgrounds -- no props, no fashionable references, no ironic comments on the art scene, no indications of time or place. I'm trying to use the camera, which so uniquely documents and frames a particular time and place, to go beyond time and place. In other words, to express universals.

This is a type of photography, and a way of addressing time, that Weston Naef, of the Getty Museum, has called "the eternal present." Words reminiscent of Cartier-Bresson's phrase and book title, "The Decisive Moment," or of Ruth Bernhard's, "The Eternal Body."

Wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

Nearly two hundred years ago an English poet and artist summed up this tradition of expressing the limitless by limiting ones attention to achieve pattern recognition. William Blake's four famous lines could easily have served as an anthem for a long lineage of classic California photographers:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower;
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.