​An Offering in Blue, by Janelle Lynch

Metamorphosis VII, by Janelle Lynch (USA) 2023

​An Offering in Blue

On tiptoe, bare-breasted and bent-kneed, I laid my heart down on the table, over coated paper, under rays, and breathed, while it raced. My heart.

Arced over my limbs were those of a Russian olive, heavy with age. Naked, like me, after a long winter. But with promise.

Ten minutes, twenty. I watched the treated surface below me change in response to time and light, like you, after a long winter apart from me. A distant image, emerging: chartreuse, cerulean. Silver.

I was shielded on the patio, behind the humble house on the private lane they named for whalers. Still, the April wind reached me cold on what was for others a table for summer meals, but for now was one to hold an offering of another kind. A spring together.

Like farming and fishing, whaling was an industry here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whalers’ blubber was boiled for oil to light lamps. For lubricants. Even margarine. I recoil at the thought of the mammoth creatures I see swimming freely today hunted for their flesh, but understand the drive to do what is needed to survive.

On his own table, across centuries and the ocean at my door, a man searches for survival of a different nature. Sir John Herschel, a scientist knighted for his contributions to the stars, sought a method to capture and preserve an image. When something matters, we want to keep it forever. We can’t let it fade.

Janelle Lynch

Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery.