Through a Jungian Lens

A plane is coming in for a landing at the small airport just outside of the Fond du Lac reserve community.  There are no roads that are maintained allowing the outside world to penetrate too deeply into this northern settlement.  At times during the year, a trail can be navigated by those unconcerned about the torture on their vehicle, a journey of hundreds of kilometres through an empty landscape, empty of human presence.  And, during the summer, boats serve as the predominate form of transportation between communities along the stretch of the lake and river.  This place exists in relative isolation and because of that, has a measure of insulation from the larger southern society.

Images such as this one seem to work a magic within me.  Whether I have taken a photo of such a scene or simply allowed a scene to be witnessed, the images are powerful as they work often unspoken within my psyche.  James Hillman, a post-Jungian speaks and works from his understandings of Jungian psychology, from a viewpoint he calls Archetypal Psychology.  As withing Jungian psychology, Archetypal psychology understands images as psyche (“image is psyche” – Jung, CW 13).   Hillman states:

… the soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity … (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology,1983, p. 6)

With this in mind, the photos I take have ceased being a recording of time, people, place or event; the photos are more than factual pieces of evidence that indicate my presence on the opposite side of the camera lens; the photos are also about imagining, about connecting with a larger, archetypal world, an alchemical inner world.  In discovering these scenes, I continue the journey of self discovery in relation to the larger whole.