Vernon Chalmers’ phenomenological sensitivity is ultimately existential. His photography explores not only how we see but why we see - how perception grounds the search for meaning.
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| Pied Kingfisher : Table Bay Nature Reserve |
This essay explores Vernon Chalmers’ photographic practice through a phenomenological lens, focusing on the concept of lines of flight as a metaphor for perception, movement, and becoming within the lived world. Drawing on the thought of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger, this paper situates Chalmers’ photography within an existential phenomenology of vision and temporality. His work - particularly his representations of birds in motion and tranquil seascapes - reveals a deep attunement to the phenomenological field of experience, where presence and absence, motion and stillness, converge. The essay argues that Chalmers’ “lines of flight” articulate a dynamic relation between consciousness and the world, illustrating the intertwining of perception, embodiment, and meaning in the photographic act.
IntroductionPhotography, as both an art and a phenomenological encounter, mediates the relationship between self and world through perception and temporal awareness. In the work of Vernon Chalmers, this relationship unfolds as a continuous negotiation between stillness and movement, presence and becoming. His visual compositions - whether documenting birds in flight along the South African coastline or the silent geometry of light over the sea - invoke an awareness that extends beyond representation toward phenomenological revelation.
The term lines of flight, though originating in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conceptual vocabulary, can be reinterpreted phenomenologically to describe how Chalmers’ images trace the pathways of consciousness as it opens toward the world. His lines of flight are not merely literal - of birds cutting across the horizon - but metaphoric, expressing the dynamism of intentionality and perception. Through the act of photographing flight, Chalmers participates in the flight of consciousness itself, seeking to apprehend what Husserl (1970) described as the “living present” - the temporal synthesis where meaning emerges through the flow of experience.
This essay thus proposes that Chalmers’ lines of flight articulate a phenomenology of vision, where perception is both an act of seeing and of being-in-the-world. It explores how his photography enacts core phenomenological ideas: the primacy of perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), the horizon of experience (Husserl, 1970), and the existential openness of being (Heidegger, 1962).
Phenomenology and the Horizon of PerceptionTo understand Chalmers’ lines of flight phenomenologically, one must first recall that perception, for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is not a passive reception of data but an active, embodied openness to the world. Vision is intentional - it is always directed toward something, shaped by the perceiver’s embodied being and situatedness. For Husserl (1970), the horizon of perception is never complete; each act of seeing implies what is not yet seen, what exceeds the immediate field of view.
Chalmers’ photography embodies this horizonality. His seascapes and avian compositions rarely fixate on static subjects; instead, they invite the viewer into the continuum of perception, where the visible and the invisible co-constitute meaning. The bird in flight, for instance, is never fully captured - it is always escaping, exceeding the frame, much as consciousness itself overflows any single moment of experience.
Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) insight that “perception is not a science of the world, but a means of entering into it” resonates deeply with Chalmers’ photographic ethos. His camera becomes a mode of entry into being, not as an observer outside the scene, but as a participant within the field of perception. Each photograph traces not only the trajectory of a bird or the ripple of light but also the photographer’s perceptual engagement - his bodily attunement to the flux of the moment.
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| Pin-Tailed Whydah : Intaka Island |
Flight, as Chalmers captures it, is both physical and existential. It signifies movement across time and space, but also the temporal flow of consciousness itself. Husserl’s (1964) notion of inner time-consciousness describes how every moment of perception is constituted by retention (the just-past) and protention (the about-to-come). This temporal synthesis structures the continuity of lived experience, and it is precisely this temporal flow that Chalmers translates visually.
In photographing birds in motion, Chalmers enacts the phenomenological paradox of stilling movement without extinguishing its vitality. Each frame arrests a moment of becoming, yet the sense of motion persists. This is not the mechanical illusion of speed, but rather the phenomenological tension between presence and absence - the way consciousness holds together what has passed and what is anticipated.
Heidegger (1962) might call this the ecstatic temporality of being: the way human existence (Dasein) is always already ahead of itself, stretching into possibilities. Chalmers’ lines of flight are thus not only visual compositions but temporal gestures, expressions of the human desire to dwell in the flux of becoming. The camera, for Chalmers, does not freeze time but discloses its unfolding; each image is an event of perception, a manifestation of temporal being.
The Embodied Gaze: Presence, Intention, and AttunementMerleau-Ponty’s (1968) late ontology of the flesh - the intertwining of perceiver and perceived - illuminates Chalmers’ photographic sensibility. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty proposed that vision is a reversible relation: the world looks back. Chalmers’ images reflect this reciprocity; they do not impose form upon nature but receive it, allowing the sea, the sky, and the bird to emerge through an attuned gaze.
This embodied relation between photographer and environment reveals itself in the compositional balance of his work. The horizon line, often softly rendered, functions not as a divider but as a threshold between the visible and the infinite - a phenomenological “line of flight.” It marks the boundary where perception meets transcendence, where the world withdraws even as it discloses itself.
Chalmers’ practice suggests that perception is not an act of control but of openness - a letting-be, in Heideggerian terms (Heidegger, 1971). The photographic moment becomes a dwelling within the phenomenon rather than a capture of it. The bird’s trajectory, the ripple of water, and the shifting light are not aesthetic objects but temporal presences that call for attunement. Through this attunement, Chalmers’ gaze becomes a mode of being-with the world, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) insight that “to perceive is to be immersed in the things perceived.”
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| Water Thick-Knee : Table Bay Nature Reserve, Woodbridge Island |
Chalmers’ coastal environment - especially the landscapes of the Western Cape - forms more than a backdrop; it is a phenomenological space where perception finds grounding. Place, in phenomenology, is not geometric but experiential: it is the lived space (Lebensraum) where existence unfolds.
Edward Casey (1993) described place as “the stabilizing persistence of experience,” a notion that resonates with Chalmers’ recurrent engagement with the same coastal horizons. Through repetition and variation, he reveals that each moment of seeing is new; the same horizon becomes other, mirroring the temporal renewal of consciousness itself. The horizon thus becomes a phenomenological motif - a line of flight between the finite and the infinite, the seen and the unseen.
In these images, Chalmers’ sense of place becomes a meditation on the dwelling of perception. Heidegger (1971) wrote that to dwell is to preserve the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. Chalmers’ photographic encounters embody this dwelling: the earth and sea as ground, the sky as openness, the mortal photographer as perceiver, and the divine as the ineffable horizon that continually recedes.
The line of flight, then, is not an escape but a return - a return to the immediacy of being through perception. Chalmers’ horizon lines, subtle and luminous, are phenomenological thresholds that invite the viewer into contemplative participation, reminding us that seeing is itself a form of dwelling.
The Aesthetic of Stillness and the Ontology of LightIf movement is one pole of Chalmers’ phenomenology, stillness is its complement. His photographs often evoke a profound quietude - an atmosphere of suspended time where light becomes the medium of disclosure. For Heidegger (1971), light (Lichtung) is not merely illumination but the clearing where beings appear as themselves.
Chalmers’ manipulation of light - its softness, reflection, and tonal gradation - enacts this clearing. His seascapes are not depictions but unveilings; they reveal the world as phenomenon, as what shows itself. The luminous stillness of dawn or dusk in his imagery draws the viewer into the rhythm of perception itself—the temporal openness where being comes to presence.
This stillness is not absence of motion but presence of awareness. In the pause of perception, the world discloses its texture and depth. Chalmers’ stillness thus functions phenomenologically as a moment of reduction—a return to the essence of perception, akin to Husserl’s (1970) epoché, where the world is bracketed not to be denied but to be seen anew.
Through such stillness, Chalmers’ lines of flight acquire existential weight. They are not only trajectories of motion but gestures of consciousness reaching toward clarity - a flight toward the horizon of meaning.
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| Blacksmith Lapwing : Table Bay Nature Reserve, Woodbridge Island |
Lines of Flight as Phenomenological Metaphor
Reconsidering the term lines of flight in this phenomenological context, it becomes a powerful metaphor for intentionality and transcendence. Chalmers’ photographic lines - the path of a bird, the trace of light, the edge of the horizon - visualize what phenomenology describes as the movement of consciousness toward the world.
Each photograph articulates a pathway of perception, a trajectory where the visible gestures toward the invisible. As such, Chalmers’ work resonates with both the Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian conceptions of perception as an open field rather than a closed object. His images are events of consciousness - embodied lines of flight where seeing becomes a mode of being.
Moreover, these lines suggest the intertwining of subject and object. The flight of the bird is also the flight of the perceiver - the expansion of awareness into the world’s unfolding. In this sense, Chalmers’ photography exemplifies what phenomenology seeks: the dissolution of dualism between observer and observed, revealing their co-constitution in lived experience.
Existential Meaning and Photographic ConsciousnessChalmers’ phenomenological sensitivity is ultimately existential. His photography explores not only how we see but why we see - how perception grounds the search for meaning. In his practice, perception becomes a form of care (Heidegger’s Sorge), an engagement that reveals being as relational and temporal.
The flight motif, recurring throughout his work, symbolizes freedom not as escape but as openness to the unfolding of existence. It expresses what Merleau-Ponty (1962) called “the ambiguity of the human condition”—our simultaneous rootedness in the world and transcendence toward it. Through his lens, Chalmers transforms this ambiguity into a visual philosophy, a meditation on the fragile equilibrium between movement and stillness, seeing and being seen.
In this way, Chalmers’ lines of flight become existential affirmations. They remind us that perception is not merely visual but ontological - that to see is to exist within the field of meaning. Each image is both a moment of apprehension and a gesture of release, echoing the phenomenological rhythm of consciousness itself.
ConclusionVernon Chalmers’ lines of flight represent more than photographic compositions; they embody a phenomenological poetics of perception. Through his engagement with light, movement, and horizon, Chalmers visualizes the fundamental structures of experience - intentionality, temporality, embodiment, and openness to the world. His images articulate the intertwining of seeing and being, suggesting that photography, at its most profound, is not a representation of the world but a revelation of our being-in-the-world.
In the end, Chalmers’ phenomenological lines of flight trace the pathways of consciousness as it unfolds toward meaning. They invite us into the horizon of perception, where presence and absence converge, and where the act of seeing becomes a form of existential dwelling. In this sense, Chalmers’ photography is both phenomenological inquiry and poetic meditation - a visual philosophy of flight, light, and being." (Source: ChatGPT 2025)
ReferencesCasey, E. S. (1993). Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. Indiana University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Husserl, E. (1964). The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness (J. S. Churchill, Trans.). Indiana University Press.
Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.