Kyoto Botanical Gardens, July 4, 2012.
Throughout that year, I visited these gardens almost every day, photographing them again and again.
Morning light.
The deep green of summer.
Flowers just beginning to bloom.
Flowers at their height.
Flowers quietly approaching the end of their season.
Leaves moving in the wind.
Light falling across the water.
And everywhere, forms of life that existed only on that particular day, in that particular moment.
No matter how often I returned to the same place, I never encountered exactly the same landscape twice.
The gardens changed little by little each day.
The light was different.
The flowers were different.
Life itself appeared in a different form.
This film, a little over eighteen minutes long, is built primarily from photographs taken at Kyoto Botanical Gardens on July 4, 2012.
The music is J.S. Bach as reimagined for orchestra by Gustav Mahler, performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bernard Haitink.
There is something timeless in Bach’s music: an order that seems to exist beyond the passing of human time.
Through Mahler, that music enters a larger orchestral space, acquiring new colors and a different kind of breath.
And in the hands of Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, it unfolds without display or exaggeration, with extraordinary depth and naturalness.
As I placed these photographs beside that music, the plants themselves began to seem like part of a vast musical structure.
Every flower has a beginning.
A moment of fullness.
And an ending.
Yet after one ending, another life begins.
Light, wind, flowers and human beings cannot remain in the same place forever.
That is precisely why a single moment can be so beautiful.
Photography, I believe, is an attempt to preserve something of that moment which will never return.
In 2012, I walked through Kyoto Botanical Gardens almost every day.
This film is the photographic record of just one of those days.
Yet within that single day lies something of the entire year I spent watching these gardens change.
From Bach to Mahler.
From Mahler to Haitink.
And from music to the flowers and greenery of Kyoto.
A little over eighteen minutes.
Please watch without hurrying.
Kyoto Botanical Gardens on July 4, 2012 still lives here.