Interview with photographer Nathan Wirth

​"It's kind of like what Emerson talks about, like what a lot of writers talk about, it's the return to that wonder that you had as a child that you kinda lose track of."​

Nathan Wirth
​is a photographer, teacher, and father living in Marin County, California. He's won numerous awards for his work and has published a book of his photography called A Slice of Silence. These are images of natural world, many of which were taken at Point Reyes National Sea Shore, about a 50 minute drive north from his house. It's gorgeous country, if you know it, and if you don't, Nathan's photographs will tell you. 

​Sometimes Nathan appears in his photographs, always from behind, always beholding the greater mystery in which he--all of us. really--finds himself immersed, enmeshed. The silence he captures in these moments, these "slices" of time, speak of deep relationship and connection, even though there is a sparse, vacant quality found in many of the images.  Nathan would call this silence solitude, and it is anything but lonely. 

"there is a whole society of birds, and creatures, and seals, the rocks themselves, the wind, the clouds..."

"I don't want the mind to be involved. I just want to create. I just want to be, I simply want to exist in those moments as best as I possibly can because I don't get that in my regular life."

​So I was interested in Nathan's regular practice of photography and how he sees it affecting his quality of mind and his sense of well-being, I was curious about his practice especially--the almost ritualistic performance of the same kinds of actions over a long period of time which cultivate a skill, but even more importantly, a particular state mind, which doesn't involve the thinking ego.

"Silence, not in the way that there is no noise--there's actually probably a lot of noise--but maybe silence in the sense that my own inner voice is finally quieted and I can let go."

It seems in silence and stillness there is a lot going on.

But it's not the busyness of the ego.

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