Silken waters

Inside a small blue cardboard box that was wedged among all of Timm's photo CDs and slides are about 100 to 150 4x5 film positives of what are consistently Timm's best photographs. According to Christie, Timm was collecting images for a coffee table book. Certainly there are enough winning images in this collection to suggest they were intended for that work.

I asked Wade to scan them at high resolution so we can get the most mileage out of them, and now have those scans in my possession. (I downloaded them from Wade's iMac when over at Beth's parents' on Christmas Day.)

I'll feed these out in small dollops because each image deserves a good look.

In these first ones, each lends flowing waters a silky-smooth appearance. To get that effect, Timm reduced the shutter speed of his camera and held it very, very still (probably with a tripod). That everything else in the frame is so crisp and sharp means that but for the water, nothing else was moving.

Waters caught mid-motion, left, and extended, by lengthening the exposure, out to a silken pour.

The effect of silky waters shows up in so many of Timm's images that it's one of his trademarks, an obvious favorite, his most consistent accomplishment. It's something only a skilled photographer can catch. Each of these images shows that Timm had earned a place among the best photographers of that moment, that image.

And what of it? Silken waters are motion's quintessence, a secret only revealed to the inner eye and the photographer skilled enough to emulate it. As Heraclitus said, Nature loves to hide; Timm had to wander far into the wilderness, peer so many times, so many ways, to come across vistas which were revelations, and then slow down his camera to catch the jolts of wonder hidden in the sanctum.

Silken waters: stillness inside the illusions of transit. To pull these images from the river of our life's incessant motion reveals a deeper serenity, seen only by the spiritual eye. Timm may have been refining a craft, but he was also reaching with his soul, finding in the right frame eternal depths.

Just a picture, Timm would probably say, but there is no denying that each lavishes an almost uterine pleasure to the viewer, sighing, from one's deepest inner ear, "You are here" or "welcome home" or simply this: "All is well."

For one so incessantly in motion himself, for all those years, to be comforted by such an image by its voice of silken waters would be of greatest healing and affirmation. Timm worked his way back home in each of these images, if only for a moment. For him and now us.

Thanks again to Wade Boggs for his tireless efforts scanning all of these images in.