Ariel
Portfolio
The Dreamtime
Australia's North West Territory
As if awakened by a sensitive interloper, the land in Ariel's photographs exudes a powerful vibrational energy that is recorded in black and white infrared film. "Infrared film reads temperature as well as vibration," she says. "There is no doubt that subtle currents from the earth exist - quantum physics has proven that there is invisible energy in nature. Infrared film is simply a medium that establishes that this energy exists."
According to Ariel, this vibrational imprint is most pronounced in "extreme hot temperate climates and intense light" like in Australia, where she feels she has taken her most poignant photographs. Australian Aboriginal spiritual beliefs recorded in an oral tradition known as the Tjukurpa (pronounced chook-oor-pa) actually speak of a vibrational residue in the land that is sacred and, in Ariel's view, visually recordable. The Anangu people who inhabit Australia's "Red Center" believe they have inhabited Australia since time began. During Creation Time, also known as Dreamtime, the landscape was made by ancestral beings. The Anangu believe that Dreamtime is eternal and that it also permeates the present. It is their belief that simultaneously it includes the past, present and future.
When Ariel reached Alice Springs, she hired a driver to take her into the Outback in a Land Rover. The route to Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park was the same one that the Anangu believe was taken by their ancestors on their way to Uluru. The Outback roads were so rough that Ariel used her camera screw drivers for the first time in over five years to tighten screws in her camera bodies that had become loose. Besides the rough ride, her other ongoing challenge was the invasive dust that seemed to find every zipper, crevice and cranny in her camera bag. "Outback dust does not leave, it becomes part of everything. It seeps into your clothes, your shoes, your skin, your hair and every crevice of your cameras," she says. The dust was so invasive that Ariel had to buy new cameras when she returned to New York at the end of her trip.
Although the weather was oppressively hot, Ariel walked a five mile trail at the base of Uluru and also climbed to its summit, where some of her most striking photos were taken. Climbers are not permitted to ascend to the top in windy or rainy weather because the climb is too perilous. Although handrails and guide chains are provided in a difficult first section the locals affectionately refer to as "chicken run," most people who attempt the ascent never make it beyond this first 100 meter test. Ever determined, Ariel reached the summit in two hours and forty-seven minutes. She admits, "I did not want to climb down. The view was spectacular and I lingered up there until descending at sunset."
From Uluru, Ariel traveled to the Olgas, a sacred feminine aboriginal site. Also known as Kata Tjuta, meaning "many heads," the Olgas are a cluster of rounded rocks that may be viewed from a walking trail known as the Valley of the Winds. Later, after camping outdoors in Palm Valley near Uluru, Ariel flew to Perth on the West Coast of Australia to photograph the Pinnacles in Nambung National Park. The Pinnacles Desert is 85 kilometers north of Perth and two kilometers inland from the beach. Consisting of thousands of surreal looking pillars that stand as high as five meters, the Pinnacles are made of hardened limestone that were formed under water 30,000 years ago. Over thousands of years, the water receded and strong southwesterly winds removed the surrounding sand exposing the formations that Dutch sailors thought were the remains of an ancient city. The Aboriginal people will not set foot on Pinnacles Desert for fear that it is haunted.
The area around Perth is inhabited by the Nyoongar Aboriginal clan who believe the landforms around the city's Swan River were shaped by two huge serpent ancestors during the Dreamtime. Serpent dreaming stories are most prevalent in the Central desert and arid regions which are Ariel's principal focus. "The serpent is connected to vibration and flowing energy," says Ariel. "Invisible energy is often referred to as the Rainbow Serpent portrayed as a wave of many colors just like the electromagnetic spectrum."
Ariel first developed her love of the desert growing up in Tripoli, Libya. Her father, who was a geologist, took her on frequent expeditions into the heart of the Libyan desert. As a very young child, she learned to appreciate the vastness and what she refers to as "pure solitude where you can finally hear your own breath." Her father toted a Leica camera on their various excursions which led to Ariel picking up her first camera in 1964 at age 10. It was then that she shot her first landscapes, which remain in her possession. Ariel is a self-taught photographer, referring to her photography and her art as a very personal and secret love.
Ariel uses only wide-angle lenses. In photographing landscapes, she originally used a 28 mm lens but she felt frustrated by its inability to take in the vastness of what she experienced. She wanted to find a way to pull the entire view she witnessed into her photographs. It was then that she discovered that she could do more with a 24 mm lens including bending the edges of the frame slightly with a simple tilt. But still she was frustrated with her inability to record more of what she was perceiving.
Ariel is drawn to infra-red film due to what she calls its "unpredictable nature." Traveling with Kodak Infra-red film and two changing bags, she feels the film is a "being" that has humbled her many times in order to teach her new lessons. Ariel challenges other photographers who say they can control infrared film and its outcome - in her experience, it is impossible to predict what infrared film will do. "The film is capricious and mecurial," says Ariel. For example, the photo of Uluru in this article was shot when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Later, in the darkroom, the print revealed mysterious turbulence across the entire horizon. Ariel explains that a printer's skills are crucial to the success of her images. She works closely with Katherine Pollak, a fine art printer in New York. "It takes three elements to create a breathtaking photograph: the photographer being in the right place at the right time with the proper sensibility and sensitivity, the film, and the intuitive skills of a fine art printer to carry out your vision."
Ariel is currently working on a book of her photographs that she hopes will awaken viewers to other levels of awareness and act as a catalyst for an understanding of other dimensions. As she says, "Now that inter-dimensional physics has been recognized as a legitimate science, we're free to explore what is beyond three dimensional reality in numerous ways."
For more information about Ariel's work, visit her Web site at www.arielphotography.net or send her an e-mail at ariel@arielphotography.net.
"It wasn't enough to take pictures of deserts," says Ariel des Loup-Garoux. "I need to explore the boundaries of reality and create images that reveal the truth about energy in the land that the human eye refuses to see." Ariel's unique photographic style and unique artistic vision are based on what she refers to as an "inter-dimensional reality," an aesthetic that permeates her work and grew out of her interest in shamanism. Shamans are natural born psychics present in many indigenous societies. They are trained to interact with spirits and the spirit world through trance and other extraordinary states of consciousness. Although this "other worldly" aspect of different cultures is overlooked by most Westerners, it has long interested Ariel - and has led her to travel to arid regions in the Australian Outback, the American West, New Zealand and Kenya, East Africa.
Ariel believes the reality-bending that is characteristic of her work reveals parallel and unseen worlds. As she explains, "Beyond childhood, we are conditioned to deny that anything and everything exists beyond a three dimensional world. Things in the physical world are more than what they appear to be."
In Australia, Ariel traveled to Uluru in the Northern Territory, considered to be one of the world's most compelling natural attractions. A large monolith that towers 348 meters above the desert floor, it has been called a "Cathedral in the Desert." Uluru is located in Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park accessible from Alice Springs, the only significant sized city in the Central Desert. To reach Uluru, Ariel chose to take the Ghan train - the provisional and occasionally ill-famed train that delivers passengers from Adelaide to Alice Springs in twenty-two hours.
One day she discovered a 16 mm fisheye lens. Finally - a lens that allowed her to capture not only the vastness but also the depth and the energy that were present in everything but undetectable by the human eye. With her fisheye lens, she felt that she could finally step through the doorway into other dimensions and satisfy her craving to experience the versatility of other worlds. Ariel's most recent acquisition is a spherical lens, which she says "Has not only challenged my vision but has created a spark of artistic passion that has exploded into an entirely new way of perceiving the world." She is presently creating a new body of work that is entirely focused on the application of her spherical lens.
Although a boab tree is light gray in color, it turned up exceptionally white in a photograph Ariel shot outside of Alice Springs. The unusual looking grass trees in several of Ariel's other photos are also known as yaccas. "These trees are ancient," says Ariel. "The boab can live for thousands of years and the yaccas live for 600 years. Aboriginal shamans believe the leaves of a tree hold elemental energy and subtle natural currents. In the Aboriginal view, the undulating energy present in nature is the voice of the earth's Dreaming."
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