I looked about me and, sure enough, there were a couple people
taking pictures from the same general direction, but so few by
comparison to the many who milled about directly beneath or far
out in front of the Taj, either side of or beyond the reflecting
pools, that I felt that these few fellow photographers must have
been on the same photographic journey as I. We were
photographic soul-mates in passing, capturing incredible details
that others may not have taken the time to truly appreciate.
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© 2011
Rick Clark. All rights reserved.
Strangely, once I’d exhausted the possibilities as I knew them and as determined by the capabilities of my camera, I found a last few possibilities for shots behind the edifice, above the river, where I combined the perspective of the long tall rear wall with silhouettes of the domes and towers of the east gate beyond. The last shot I took is of a pale wooden door coved, in mosque style, in the endless white marble, a seemingly insignificant detail in the mass of beauty that is the Taj. It occurred to me that detail wasn’t always as important to the conceiver, architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, as was the first grand, mystical, but distant impression.
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Then and only then did I put my camera away and abandon myself to the strictly flesh experience of the exquisite Taj Mahal, which, by the way, is not so much an expression of romantic love as it is Shah Jahan’s marking of the loss of his beloved wife and their child. It is not a palace of love, but a mausoleum, which he had built with white marble and not red sandstone—of which so many of the forts and palaces of the ancient Mogul empire were built—because he wanted to preserve an image of spiritual purity and not one of blood, as his wife died of a rupture during childbirth. Knowing this, then, I felt poetic justice in seeing and striving to shoot, beyond the expansive whiteness of the Taj, the blue bruise of deep shadow.
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Rick Clark is an amateur photographer shooting digitally with a small format Leica V-Lux 20. He’s an English instructor at Seattle Central Community College, a freelance writer and poet, and editor of CORRelations, Newsletter of COR Northwest Family Development Center. The documentary Beauty of the Fight, whose script he wrote, has been selected by 28 film festivals and won two prizes. Several of Rick’s poems can be found in Rose Alley Press’s Northwest poets anthology Many Trails to the Summit. He and his wife, Seattle yoga instructor Fran Gallo, offer yoga, writing, and now photography retreats at their Little Renaissance on the Washington coast.
Please visit www.frangallo.com.
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