Vernon Chalmers’s photography enacts what might be called the photographic breath: a rhythmic oscillation between seeing and being seen, between motion and stillness.
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| After Sunset : Sea Point, Cape Town |
"This essay examines the photographic practice and philosophical orientation of Vernon Chalmers, situating his work within existential-phenomenological and colour-photographic discourse. Through sustained attention to light, gesture, and temporality - particularly in his studies of birds in flight and coastal horizons - Chalmers constructs a visual practice of perception and being. The analysis considers his technical methods, thematic motifs, and underlying philosophical commitments, arguing that his images enact an ethics of attention that redefines photography as a contemplative and existential practice.
1. Introduction: The Insistence on PresenceTo engage with Vernon Chalmers’s photography is to encounter a mode of seeing that slows perception to the rhythm of existence. His imagery, particularly his “birds in flight” series, invites viewers to consider the act of seeing as an ontological event rather than a representational exercise. This stance recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that perception is “not a science of the world, but the background from which all acts stand out” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. xi).
In Chalmers’s photographic philosophy, the image becomes an extension of bodily awareness - a practice of presence that foregrounds the relational nature of seeing. His compositional patience and restrained chromatic palette express what Heidegger (1971) might describe as being-toward-revelation: the act of letting beings appear in their own light. Thus, Chalmers’s work is not only aesthetic but phenomenological - it engages the structures of perception that make experience meaningful.
2. Genealogy and influencesChalmers’s photographic orientation arises within a lineage of phenomenological aesthetics and post-war colour photography. His approach resonates with the thought of Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) and the later existential reflections of Heidegger (1971), both of whom treat perception as embodied, lived, and reciprocal. In visual terms, his quiet attention to light and temporal flux parallels the practices of photographers such as Ernst Haas, whose “colour as emotion” experiments articulated how hue might convey affect rather than description (Newhall, 1982).
The contemplative tone of Chalmers’s coastal and avian imagery can also be linked to the broader movement of slow photography, a term used by Lister (2013) and Shinkle (2017) to describe practices that resist digital immediacy and instead privilege duration, attentiveness, and ethical looking. Chalmers’s work - often produced along South African coastal margins - engages precisely this ethic of slowness.
Philosophically, he extends the Merleau-Pontian notion of flesh - the mutual intertwining of perceiver and perceived (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) - into a photographic modality. The camera becomes an instrument that records this intertwining: a site where perception folds back upon itself.
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| Purple Heron in Flight : Over Woodbridge Island |
Chalmers’s formal vocabulary is characterized by a restrained yet emotionally charged use of colour. His palette - predominantly soft golds, muted blues, and greys - evokes the transitional zones of dawn and dusk, corresponding to the temporal ambiguity of being. Colour, as Barthes (1981) reminds us, “is a kind of natural emanation” that can index emotional temperature (p. 47). In Chalmers’s hands, it becomes existential: colour as lived mood.
Light plays a central role. Chalmers’s images rarely deploy high contrast or saturated brilliance. Instead, illumination appears as a slow diffusion across surfaces, a painterly modulation that aligns with Sontag’s (1977) idea of photography as “an elegiac art” (p. 15). His low-angle light, often filtered through mist or early sunlight, materializes perception itself - the world shimmering into presence.
Temporal control is equally deliberate. Birds in motion are rendered with a clarity that defies their fleetingness, producing what Barthes (1981) termed the punctum: that instant of arrest in which time fractures. Yet Chalmers’s punctum is not a shock but a breath - the interval between motion and stillness. The act of timing, then, becomes a meditation on the boundaries of perception.
Technically, his practice demonstrates disciplined control of aperture, shutter speed, and tonal calibration. Depth of field isolates the essential while permitting contextual blur, evoking the phenomenological idea of the “horizon of perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Printing choices - often matte with subtle contrast - extend this phenomenology into the material realm: the print as tactile residue of vision.
4. Motifs and thematic constellations- Birds in flight
Chalmers’s most recognizable motif - the bird in flight - operates as both subject and symbol. The bird embodies freedom and transcendence but also fragility. Its flight is a visible trace of time passing, a manifestation of what Heidegger (1971) would call worlding: the coming-to-presence of being in movement.
In existential terms, the bird signifies the tension between the finite and the infinite. Chalmers’s compositions often situate the bird within expansive negative space, accentuating its solitude and emphasizing what Sartre (1943/2003) termed the “nothingness that haunts being” (p. 21). Yet the mood is not despairing; it is contemplative - a recognition of temporality as the ground of meaning.
- Coastal horizons and shorelines
The coastal horizon, another recurrent theme, functions as an existential threshold. The meeting of land and sea mirrors the interface between self and world. Water’s reflective surface, gently luminous, corresponds to the Merleau-Pontian concept of reversibility - the way perceiver and perceived exchange places in vision (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).
Chalmers’s horizons are rarely sharp; they dissolve gradually, suggesting an ontology of continuity rather than division. The sea’s rhythmic motion parallels the temporal rhythm of perception itself - constant flux under the guise of stability.
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| Ships After Sunset : Milnerton Beach, Cape Town |
Chalmers frequently works in series rather than isolated images, constructing visual sequences that encourage slow viewing. Such sequencing reflects what Batchen (1997) called photography’s “desire for self-difference” - its ability to turn repetition into discovery (p. 132).
Through iterative images of similar scenes under varying light, Chalmers develops a meditative rhythm. Each variation discloses subtle shifts in atmosphere, encouraging viewers to practice the kind of attentive seeing described by Ingold (2011), where observation becomes “a dwelling, not a capture” (p. 24). Repetition, therefore, functions phenomenologically: it trains the gaze to perceive difference within sameness.
6. Ethical and ecological resonancesThough quiet and apolitical on the surface, Chalmers’s work carries implicit ethical force. His patient mode of seeing models what Bennett (2010) terms “vibrant matter” - an attentiveness to the vitality of nonhuman life (p. ix). The bird’s motion, the shimmer of tidewater, the camera’s stillness: each participates in a shared ecology of being.
In this respect, Chalmers’s photography joins a contemporary discourse on environmental phenomenology (Abram, 2010). By revealing the interdependence between observer and environment, he cultivates ecological empathy without didacticism. His coastal series - especially those produced near South Africa’s Milnerton Lagoon - quietly allude to environmental fragility. The subtle pollution visible in certain frames becomes not spectacle but trace: a reminder of coexistence’s vulnerability.
Ethically, Chalmers’s practice resists the extractive gaze. His birds are not trophies; they are presences. The refusal of voyeuristic spectacle transforms photographic seeing into what Levinas (1969) would call responsibility before the face of the Other. Even when the “face” is avian or elemental, the gesture remains: to behold without possession.
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| Common Greenshank in Flight : Diep River, Woodbridge Island |
7. Dialogues and departures
Chalmers’s work can be situated within a global discourse of contemplative and phenomenological photography. It shares affinities with practitioners such as Pentti Sammallahti, Michael Kenna, and Masao Yamamoto, whose minimal landscapes articulate a similar ethics of attention (Badger, 2014). Yet Chalmers diverges in his emphasis on colour and motion - elements often minimized in those monochromatic traditions.
Compared with more overtly political photographers, Chalmers’s quietude might seem evasive. However, as Shinkle (2017) argues, slow photography can itself be political by “refusing acceleration and instrumental seeing” (p. 70). Chalmers’s slowness is a form of resistance - a refusal to let the image become another consumable instant.
8. The viewer’s encounter: From gaze to relationCentral to Chalmers’s aesthetic is the transformation of the viewer’s stance. His images ask not for analysis but for presence. The viewer, drawn into stillness, experiences what Barthes (1981) described as the “immobility of attention” (p. 92). Such immobility is not passivity but relation - a moment when seeing becomes mutual.
From a phenomenological perspective, this encounter mirrors the reciprocity of perception: the viewer becomes part of the scene’s unfolding. Abram (2010) suggests that “to see is also to be seen by the earth” (p. 134). In this sense, Chalmers’s photographs enact the reversibility of perception, where the world’s gaze meets our own.
The viewer’s slowed breathing or heightened awareness before his images testifies to their experiential efficacy. This contemplative pedagogy - training the senses toward attentiveness - constitutes Chalmers’s deepest philosophical contribution.
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| Mirrored Architecture After Sunset : Milnerton from Woodbridge Island |
Chalmers’s commitment to printmaking affirms his belief in photography’s material afterlife. In opposition to purely digital circulation, the printed photograph holds time; it becomes, in Barthes’s (1981) terms, “an emanation of the referent” (p. 80). The tactile quality of matte paper, subtle tonal range, and modest scale of his prints encourage proximity rather than spectacle.
His archival practice - systematically organizing long-term sequences - further expresses a phenomenology of memory. Each archive operates as what Derrida (1995) called an “impossible gathering of time” (p. 90). Through his collections of birds, coastlines, and cameras, Chalmers constructs not a chronology but an existential cartography: a map of attention over years of looking.
10. Critical perspectives and limitationsCritical engagement with Chalmers’s work must acknowledge its potential vulnerabilities. The first concerns aestheticization: by framing environmental or existential fragility in beautiful form, does the work risk neutralizing urgency? Susan Sontag (2003) cautioned that aestheticizing suffering might “transform pain into spectacle” (p. 109). Yet Chalmers’s tone - gentle, unheroic - suggests otherwise: beauty functions as invitation, not distraction.
A second critique might note the work’s insularity - its reliance on a personal metaphysics that may alienate viewers seeking explicit narrative or socio-political commentary. However, Chalmers’s very refusal of spectacle positions his work within a necessary counter-tradition. His photographs remind us that seeing itself can be ethical practice; that understanding the world begins with learning to attend.
11. Pedagogical and methodological implicationsFor photographers, Chalmers offers a model of existential methodology. Three pedagogical principles emerge:
- Patience as technique – Waiting becomes compositional practice; duration replaces decisiveness.
- Attention as ethics – To photograph is to care; each frame entails responsibility toward what is seen.
- Material fidelity – Print, tone, and calibration are not decorative but integral to meaning.
Such principles extend Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012) argument that perception is an act of co-constitution. Photography becomes, in this light, a lived inquiry into being.
For theorists, Chalmers’s oeuvre exemplifies what Pallasmaa (2011) called “the embodied image” - a synthesis of sensory, emotional, and intellectual presence (p. 18). His work thus provides fertile ground for interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy, art theory, and ecological aesthetics." (Source: ChatGPT 2025)
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| The Old Wooden Bridge After Sunset : Milnerton Lagoon |
12. Conclusion: The photographic breath
Vernon Chalmers’s photography enacts what might be called the photographic breath: a rhythmic oscillation between seeing and being seen, between motion and stillness. His attention to colour, light, and temporality transforms photography from representation into revelation. Each bird in flight, each quiet shoreline, gestures toward what Merleau-Ponty (1968) called “the intertwining of the visible and the invisible” (p. 147).
In an age of digital acceleration, Chalmers’s work stands as a meditation on slowness and care. By cultivating perception as presence, he reclaims photography’s capacity to bear witness - not to events, but to existence itself. The ethical implication is profound: to photograph attentively is to participate in the world’s unfolding rather than to dominate it.
Ultimately, Chalmers’s images remind us that every act of seeing is also an act of being. His photographs do not merely depict the world; they breathe it.
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