Snake descends upwards,
Rails whisper lies to senses,
My mind believes none.

#haiku

Normally, I leave the haiku/senryu posts without additional words, but on this one I cannot resist. Sometimes you are just lucky, right place, right time. And sometimes it takes a lot of work, meticulous thinking, honest preparation, to make a picture whose visual tension pulls you in and messes with your spatial instincts to such a degree you don’t know what to think.

There’s this perceptual whiplash, like your brain flips its map every time it tries to make sense of the angles in the photo. “Are the stairs going up? Or down? What on Earth is going on here?”. The rail posts gesture “descent” while the frame says “ascent”—and together they spin a riddle in geometry. You feel off, or perhaps you realize you are seeing a simple staircase turned into a visual Möbius paradox where the direction collapses into disorienting ambiguity. Then, you glance at the surrounding trees who help ground you back in visual fantasy you’ve been accustomed to to seeing, which you call reality.
And things fall back to normal.
…Or do they??

When I took this picture, I took many and really worked the scene, playing with ratios, perspectives, leading lines, to give me the composition I was looking for. All JPEGs, no post processing whatsoever.

When I look at this picture I feel dis-ease, dis-oriented, dis-sonance. Precisely what I was aiming for.
Doesn’t happen every day that you create something you cannot stand looking at, yet you can’t help yourself but keep staring…

Now I’m having flashbacks—Van Gogh’s The Bedroom comes rushing back. The converging lines, the oddly angled furniture, the pictures on the walls that defy optical sense. Everything felt off. Everything. And yet I couldn’t stop staring. It was hypnotic, like visual poetry I couldn’t comprehend but craved more of.
It helped that I was standing in the gallery room, completely alone, just a few feet from the canvas. No distractions. Just me and the masterpiece. And stare I did…