‘Abdu’l-Bahá With Flowers
Abdu'l-Baha With Flowers
In 1972 I took a close-up Kodachrome photo of a painting hanging in the home of Margaret Gallagher, an Auxiliary Board Member in Hayward, California. Then I went out to her garden and saw the bright back lighted red flowers and double-exposed them onto the same frame. I made two slides, but one didn’t work because it was overexposed. Cameras of that era did not offer simple ways to make multiple exposures. You had to rewind a little and make your best guess about where the previous frame was located.
Many years later I scanned the original 35mm slide at 5,400 dpi (16-bit, 250 MB) and restored it because the original was damaged in a flood. I electronically and meticulously removed the canvas and oil paint texture on the left side of the photo. I was told that the painter’s name was Samimi and he lived in Monaco. The right half of the image is my photographic addition to it.
When I was on pilgrimage in 1973 I brought a few hundred copies of the photo with me at the request of Hand of the Cause A. Q. Faizi. He gave them away during his many teaching trips around the world. Though he asked me to sign the backs of the photos I never got around to it and was satisfied to remain anonymous. Among my treasures are hand-illuminated letters that Mr. Faizi wrote me in the 1970’s that include a reference to this image and to three other images on my website. You can find them online at the Bahai-Library in an unpublished book of his letters by Shirley Macias.
Because of Mr. Faizi’s travels this photograph has gone all around the world. It’s mostly found in second or third generation copies. I’ve heard fanciful stories about its origin, none of which were true.
I give these away for free on a very limited basis. I do not accept payment for copies of this image. It may be freely distributed by Bahá’ís as long as it’s not modified and the source of the image is included (the website address and author). It is a copyrighted image and not in the public domain. Accompanying text documents must not be edited or modified. If you wish to make a payment then please consider the Chilean Temple Fund.
Sometimes I make archival quality pigment ink prints as special gifts for friends and family. However, recently I’ve been using Shutterfly’s website at http://www.shutterfly.com to make prints. The high-quality JPG image on this website is contained in a ZIP file along with a copy of this document. You can download it and make your own prints using any service you wish including your own inkjet printer. You will probably want a print between 8×10 and 11×14 inches. Always specify “No Cropping” or “Custom Cropping” when ordering prints larger than 4×6 inches. There are several other quality printing sites and all are easy to use.
Download location for this image
The file contains three images which are optimized for three different standard paper sizes and a PDF document which gives more information about it.
Web page where the image is located.
If you don’t want to do the large 8 MB download you can just get the PDF file from my web page about the image. The document tells how to access the high resolution files and how to print them.
“Ministry of Flowers”
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s personal wants were few. He worked late and early. Two simple meals a day sufficed Him. His wardrobe consisted of a very few garments of inexpensive material. He could not bear to live in luxury while others were in want. He had a great love for children, for flowers, and for the beauties of nature. Every morning about six or seven, the family party used to gather to partake of the morning tea together, and while the Master sipped His tea, the little children of the household chanted prayers. Mr. Thornton Chase writes of these children: — “Such children I have never seen, so courteous, unselfish, thoughtful for others, unobtrusive, intelligent, and swiftly self-denying in the little things that children love. …”
– In Galilee, p. 51.
The “ministry of flowers” was a feature of the life at ‘Akká, of which every pilgrim brought away fragrant memories. Mrs. Lucas writes: — “When the Master inhales the odor of flowers, it is wonderful to see him. It seems as though the perfume of the hyacinths were telling him something as he buries his face in the flowers. It is like the effort of the ear to hear a beautiful harmony, a concentrated attention!”
– A Brief Account of My Visit to ‘Akká, pp. 25-26.
He loved to present beautiful and sweet-smelling flowers to His numerous visitors.
– Dr. J.E. Esslemont, Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era, p. 57
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Through a Scanner Brightly – Part 4
The Writings of the Baha’i faith say: “Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified. –Bahá’u'lláh
One of the images I scanned during the past four weeks was processed in a special way. I took the photograph through a deep magenta filter. Although it was 35 mm slide film I developed the film as if it were a negative. The photographer’s term for that is cross processing. Insofar as visible light is concerned magenta and green are opposites. This is a detail of the image as it looked in the preview scan.
Similar to most of my other older images, this slide also had considerable damage in addition to fading and color degradation. The hexagons are an effect of lens flare which comes from pointing toward the light source without using a lens shade to reduce flare (it was deliberate). I configured the Silverfast scanning program to restore fading and colors. The end result revealed colors that I had only imagined but didn’t really exist in the original photograph. This shows the first glimmerings of sunrise near Crystal Springs Lake 15 miles south of San Francisco.
Say: O friends! Drink your fill from this crystal stream that floweth through the heavenly grace of Him Who is the Lord of Names.
Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
This detailed section shows what looks very similar to a painter’s brush strokes. It is, in fact, an unchanged and unretouched part of the original photograph. I developed a technique for doing this in the camera, the darkroom, and sometimes with the aid of an optical slide copier that I built out of spare parts. It was in the mid-1970’s when digital image processing did not even exist.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
O thou dear one! Impoverish thyself, that thou mayest enter the high court of riches; and humble thy body, that thou mayest drink from the river of glory, and attain to the full meaning of the poems whereof thou hadst asked.
Thus it hath been made clear that these stages depend on the vision of the wayfarer. In every city he will behold a world, in every Valley reach a spring, in every meadow hear a song. But the falcon of the mystic heaven hath many a wondrous carol of the spirit in His breast, and the Persian bird keepeth in His soul many a sweet Arab melody; yet these are hidden, and hidden shall remain.
Bahá’u'lláh, The Seven Valleys
This image felt dull to me so I had almost discarded it. Its title is Angels on a Ladder of Light.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
I rescanned it last week to restore its original colors. It still needs a little work but now it’s a little closer to what I wanted to convey.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
By pure serendipity I often come home with photographs that have exactly nine things in them, birds, flowers, trees or people. It’s actually just a fortuitous accident when it happens. Here is a recent photograph I took of nine birds.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
Say: Through the ascendancy of God, the All-Knowing, the Incomparable, the Luminary of divine understanding hath, in this day, risen from behind the veil of the spirit, and the birds of every meadow are intoxicated with the wine of knowledge and exhilarated with the remembrance of the Friend. Well is it with them that discover and hasten unto Him!
Bahá’u'lláh, Tabernacle of Unity
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Going With the Flow
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
Poetry doesn’t come to me as easily as it does to many other writers. Sometimes poetry comes to me in the form of visual imagery. I work on it and deem it a poem although the medium of the moment may be totally visual.
What I really want is a poem that flows, a picture that flows, a website that flows. The images were all made in a state of flow. There are no digital manipulations here: Bird Images.
This previous Blog entry describes my image making process in a metaphorical way. Evanescent Images.
“You have heard about how a musician loses herself in her music, how a painter becomes one with the process of painting. In work, sport, conversation or hobby, you have experienced, yourself, the suspension of time, the freedom of complete absorption in activity. This is “flow,” an experience that is at once demanding and rewarding–an experience that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates is one of the most enjoyable and valuable experiences a person can have. The exhaustive case studies, controlled experiments and innumerable references to historical figures, philosophers and scientists through the ages prove Csikszentmihalyi’s point that flow is a singularly productive and desirable state. …” Flow (http://www.amazon.com/)
I want to learn how to do these things eventually because they apply to writing also: Designing for Flow.
“Go with the flow”
Cary (The ‘a’ is short like in cat and accented)
Tags: painterRelated posts
If a Sunrise or Sunset Could Speak
“The English landscape painter JMW Turner said his work was not to be understood but ‘to show what such a scene was like’. Now global warming experts are taking advantage of his prosaic nature to improve their predictions of the consequences of climate change. The scientists are analyzing the striking sunsets painted by Turner and dozens of other artists to work out the cooling effects of huge volcanic eruptions. By working out how the climate varied naturally in the past they hope to improve the computer models used to simulate global warming.”
“The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. The 554 pictures included works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Hogarth. They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption. There were 54 of these ‘volcanic sunset’ pictures.
Prof Zerefos said five artists had lived at the right time to paint sunsets before, during and after eruptions. Turner witnessed the effects of three: Tambora in 1815; Babuyan, Philippines in 1831, and Cosiguina, Nicaragua, in 1835. In each case the scientists found a sharp change in the red/green ratio of the sunsets he painted up to three years afterwards.
Writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the scientists say the redder sunsets seen in paintings ‘can be tentatively attributed to the volcanic events, and not to abnormalities in the colour degradation due to age, or other random factors affecting each painter’s colour perception’.” The Guardian UK
The article inspired me to look through some of my old unscanned slides of sunrises. This one was a sunrise photographed from my balcony in smoggy San Carlos, California. The left portion of the image strongly suggested the shape of the Middle East and Africa to me. I plan to work on the image and develop its theme.
I began to reflect on various meanings and metaphors of sunrise.
Verily, these servants are turning to Thee, supplicating Thy kingdom of mercy. Verily, they are attracted by Thy holiness and set aglow with the fire of Thy love, seeking confirmation from Thy wondrous kingdom, and hoping for attainment in Thy heavenly realm. Verily, they long for the descent of Thy bestowal, desiring illumination from the Sun of Reality. O Lord! Make them radiant lamps, merciful signs, fruitful trees and shining stars. May they come forth in Thy service and be connected with Thee by the bonds and ties of Thy love, longing for the lights of Thy favor.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Compilations, Baha’i Prayers, p. 111
A cabinet in the great hallway of the Mansion of Bahjí near Akká suggested another sort of sunrise — one in the heart which comes about from inspiration of the creative word. The cabinet contained illuminated pages of Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words. I painted this image from memory. My only photograph of it had been badly damaged in a flood and was unrecoverable.
Image Detail. 
My final thought brought me back to this image of my Bahá’í ring. Midway through development I exposed the film to a very short burst of yellow light to produce a solarized (fogged) effect.
The significance of the symbol on my ring is here.
Tags: Baha'i, bahai ring, bahai ring stone symbol, California, painter
