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Posted July 24, 2003

 

Traveling Light: A Photographer’s Journey

Nonfiction and Photographs by Deborah DeWit Marchant

Impassio Press, 2003

ISBN 0-9711583-3-9

86 pages

$18.00 paperback

Deborah DeWit Marchant has spent her life looking for a way to capture changing light. In this, her first book, she writes about her life-long journey as a photographer. Her text accompanies stunning photographs, taken from Oregon to Scotland to Australia. And indeed, it is clear that Marchant’s penchant is for light—how it resides in windows or doorways or stairwells, how it illuminates the fog rising from the ocean or the trees.

Her first attempts to be a photographer, though a failure, were driven by this desire. On a trip to Scotland, through the windows of a car, she remembers “breathlessly contorting myself in the back of the car, the unfamiliar camera in my hands, trying to record, through the rear window, the movement of those cloud-bound moors as we sped by them. Each click, seconds after the one before it, captured a distinct and new moment but with such competent subtlety that when I got the film back after our return home, there was nothing but an envelope filled with dozens of pictures of the seemingly same drab hill and uninspiring sky. The Life that had animated that spare, clean landscape was hidden somewhere between my memory and the pictures I held in my hand….I didn’t understand the light’s significance, its subtle qualities, or how to capture it. I only knew that traveling light made my pulse quicken” (5).

Passion turned to obsession and perfection over the years, and Marchant records the experience of long, cross-country driving trips, taking photos of the dawn and the sunset, over and over, trying to capture the sense of light. “My body was electric with the anticipation that accompanies youth, a time when each sensation is a momentous, sparking discovery….I would have this experience many times in the presence of light, and relief came only when I took a photograph” (8).

She describes the camera as a “light-catching machine” and explores her journey from obsession to fulfillment or satiation. Eventually, her focus shifted “from outside to inside” (67). While she is technically referring to the inside of houses—stairwells and doors opening into other rooms—her entire journey of photography is one of spiritual meditation and emotional need. She is searching for herself and for fulfillment. A trip to her childhood home makes her realize that through her life’s work, “I wanted, somehow, to describe the light I felt, not the light I saw—the light which was the source of my experience. It is, for me, the difference between discovery and creation. We each have a source inside which grows by living our lives, yet—at the same time—this source is the origin of our life’s map. It is the mystery within us” (83).

Impassio Press publishes fragmentary writing. It is devoted to making diaries, letters, journals, and other forms of “fragmentary writing” an accepted part of the canon of literature—on par with novels or poetry. With books such as this, Traveling Light, they appear to be on the right road.

—Jessica Powers

 

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