Author visits Winslow bookstore for lecture, book signing
Published 9:30 am Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Author and photographer Robert Dash will host a book reading at Eagle Harbor Books in Winslow this week for his book, “On An Acre Shy of Eternity.”
The event is 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19.
Over the past few years, Dash has been roaming from bluff to tree and from feather to seed, on just an acre of Orcas Island forest, meadow and cliff shouldering the Salish Sea. Using his camera, a scanning electron microscope and subtle metaphor, he finds surpassing beauty at scales ranging from miles to micrometers — from moon craters to pollen grains and leaf stomata.
To view objects at the micro scale, Dash used an electron microscope from the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island, which allowed him to photograph features hundreds of times smaller than a pinhead.
Dash views the mystery of this land as one might read a book, promoting a visual, poetic and ecological literacy that he calls “locavore art and ecology” — the art, science and discovery that beckons in our own front yards.
“There’s no end to what you can find right beneath your feet if you look with patience and the right tools,” he said.
Dash, formerly of Bainbridge Island and Indianola, is an Orcas Island photographer, naturalist and educator whose work invites people to take wild, contemplative “hikes” in miniature realms.
His photographs have been published by National Geographic, TIME, The Week, and Lensculture, and have appeared in galleries and juried shows in this country and abroad.
In 2016 he presented the widely-viewed TEDx Orcas Island lecture, “The Intercourse of Nature.”
