Artist’s Statement

Open Window pairs poems with photographs using renku-like linking techniques, and in many cases you’ll find a link from photograph to photograph as well. Rather than having the poem and photograph mirror each other too closely, I’ve mostly linked them together by colour, mood, time, or place, and sometimes by subject or season.

These photographs, mostly taken on the west coast of the United States and Canada, are half of a slide show created for my “Come to Your Senses” haiku workshop. I first presented these photographs and haiku at a Japanese arts festival hosted by Kazuaki Tanahashi at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin, California in July of 1998.

I believe both haiku and photography are a window to the amazing world around us. I invite you to open these windows.

—Michael Dylan Welch