Summer 2021 Issue

EDITOR'S NOTE

Our World with Water

Water is a prominent dialect in the language of all living things. It’s a pattern that seeps, rushes, weeps, and meanders throughout our lives from beginning to end. Our very own bodies contain up to 60 percent water, and the surface of the Earth is covered by 71 percent. To quote the late Jacques Yves Cousteau, “We forget that the water cycle and life cycle are one.”

When I took on the role of photo editor of Edible Aspen some 14 months ago, I knew early on to look for patterns that might appear. Patterns in the stories, the seasonality, the people, the land, the air, and the water. For the past couple years, water has already spoken to me in a way that I knew I had to give it some deeper visual exploration. And with the looming reality that water could become scarcer than any of us want it to, we all simply speak more often of it, with concern for it—and with that attention drawn to it, we simply cherish water more than ever.

The ebb and flow of water is a powerful metaphor in how we view our own daily lives, from the re-charting around newly encountered obstacles to the well established paths of the known quantities etched in our minds like a deeply carved canyon. Water is also the great equalizer in that nearly all living things cannot live without it—we all have water in common.

As I produced and curated the photographs for this issue, I noticed that water was a recurring theme. The abundance of it and the potential lack of it kept popping up as a messenger, telling me to explore it more this time around, to reveal it in ways that might inspire another look from a different frame of mind. Using photographic techniques of timing, water can appear like blown glass when figuratively or literally frozen, or like clouds when softened by long exposures. One can see right through it to the world beneath it or, in the case of this issue’s cover, the sky above it.

Dan Bayer
Photo Editor