An Invitation To Follow
by Robert Epley

Medium: Photograph/Digitally Enhanced
Date/Size: 2008 / 18" by 20"

Like others of God's creatures we too are drawn to the light that beckons us to travel into the foggy unknown.

Notes to Myself: Persistent Curiosities

I pulled the picture out and looked at it again puzzled about why I kept coming back to it. Several of my photographs draw me back to them this way. They are like messages sealed in a bottle bobbing up and down on the water. I get intriguing glimpses of the message folded up and sealed inside. Again and again I wonder what I should find hidden in these images. Frustration at being unable able to make good traditional prints could be what keeps drawing me back. But that really doesn't feel like the right explanation. There is something more here than what appears on the surface.

Would working on a digitalized version of the film result in prints that feel right? In the digital darkroom the images take on a life of their own. I became even more curious about what was in the bottle bobbing up and down on the water. They were more than snapshots, but how could I read the "thousand words" each picture represented? What was I saying? My memory of what the original image felt like is shown in the main picture of each image. The inset approximated a wet darkroom print.

Our invitation to follow the LIGHT leaves to us the decision as to whether we follow it. We don't know the specifics of what lies ahead on that path. Is it the road that I followed in response to the invitation or is it the road not taken? Sometimes I think I did follow the invitation. At other times, I'm not sure.

Curiosity about myself like the interest most of us have about ourselves is what I believe impels me to return to these images and explore their meaning. Because many of the images were made half a lifetime ago, my curiosity about them could also be the wonderings of my age mixed in with my EfM (Education for Ministry) experience. I am certain that the images in this series are signposts from various times in my life. Each one of them a message to me about my life.