It was a long and cramped drive to the park, but a steady supply of itunes kept the time passing smoothly. We rambled along some of the not-so-popular roads slicing through brushy landscape. Eventually, we settled at a gate at the base of a ridge and trekked over and into a grove. This is the first I saw of the wild ponies in Newforest, and to see it, unbridled by any of man's garb or gear, grazing as it willed and wanted, made me feel as if I were imagining up a mystic, Neolithic scene, before man enslaved nature and built civilization through its servitude, with all its wonders and atrocities. I felt like there was no civilization.

I take most of my inspiration from mystic photography. Freeman Patterson, as I have mentioned in the descriptions of other photographs, is my contemporary favourite.

However, predating him are the masterpieces of earlier geniuses. As Sir Isaac Newton stated, "If I see farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." These early martyrs and temple-topplers dug their heels and toes into the gritty mud, braced themselves against the titanic pressure of popular, conservative art, and in so doing, held back its frenzied foray from rending their ideas into tatters: Hippolyte Bayard invented a new form of photographic paper that revolutionized the medium, an achievement so scorned and shunned by his peers that it drove him to the maddened depths of genius in which he created his most famous work; Emerson destroyed the popular notion that an entire scene should be in focus, pointing out that the human eye does not see in such a way, and that only the center of vision is in focus. He purposed that photography should mimic the eye, and so should focus on one area, usually the center, and gradually go out of focus from there, a technique or affect called vignetting. But these are just a few...

Among my favourites were such photographers/photographs as Anne W. Brigman's Soul of the Blasted Pine, an exquisite portrait of one Hamadryad's tragedy, Hippolyte Bayard's The Drowned Man, Jewgeni Chaldej's On the Reichstag (4 May 1945), Robert Demachy's In the Grass, Dr. Peter Henry Emerson's Buckenham Ferry, Norfolk, Leon Gimpel, The Flying Cup Club, and Fred Holland Day. Each of these photographers contributed a great lesson to the photographic community, and most were persecuted for their contributions like Louis Lumiere (whose autochrome process was employed by Leon Gimpel) and Holland Day.