A few weeks back on our way to the Isle of Wight with friends, we drove through the New Forest. Unwittingly, unsuspectingly!
The rain lashed down furiously that morning as we passed the wild ponies that have come to be characteristic of the Hampshire woodlands; standing as silent sentinels watching the passage of time and traveller through the millennia. And I’m a dreamer, a hungry, insatiable one who’s constantly in search of the new, untouched and unblemished experiences that I haven’t tasted yet; and one who also has the pleasure and privelege of raising a daughter who is in that sense similar.
Driving through this beautiful, yet daunting geography on that grey and tidal day, I began to view Rahel’s small and chiseled face in Picasso’s reductive terms – her heartshaped face with its aquiline nose; her strong almond eyes condescending on her thin, small mouth now filled with emotion. In my mind’s eye, I’ve come to view that scene as one from a pastoral landscape, with the characters and their idealized desire for the unity of man and nature, a restoration with the Divine – a hairsbreadth’s distance, an abysmal divide! I believe that being there made me feel that all we were or are is nothing more than a group of dust covered vagrants, passing through bare, intermediate landscapes! Maybe that’s what being confronted with the magnitude of nature does to us… so this morning, armed with coffee, camera and just one lens, I went back to capture a little of something we might never see the same way in more clement weather!
Here are these ancient steeds of the south photographed on a desperately foggy, damp, 5˚ C day!
*This is my attempt at capturing a family moment, and I dedicate these ten photographs to my Rahel…for being a fellow dreamer and a believer in the delicate beauty of wild horses!
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