Haiku #1

HAIKU #1

“Haiku#1” by Dave Tavanti distils the landscape to its most essential forms. Trees emerge from dense fog, their outlines reduced to graphic presences against a pale, indeterminate ground. Infrared light does not reveal colour here, it reveals structure. What remains is only what cannot be removed.

Informed by the formal economy of the Japanese haiku, the image operates through restraint. The fog is not an absence but a curatorial act: it suppresses detail, compresses space, and forces attention toward what persists. The composition breathes with the same precision as a three-line poem, each element placed, nothing accidental.

The concept behind the work

The fog enacts a fundamental visual principle: to perceive something clearly, the superfluous must first be removed. It dissolves everything secondary and leaves only the essential architecture of the trees — their forms, their spacing, their relationship to a sky that has become pure light.

The title draws a direct parallel with the haiku tradition, a form that achieves depth through compression rather than elaboration. In both the poem and the photograph, apparent simplicity conceals a layered interior that reveals itself only to those willing to remain still long enough to look.

The work asks for that quality of attention, and rewards it.