By Connie Leinbach
Islander Ann Ehringhaus will be at Books to Be Red on School Road Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to sign her new book “Send Me the Wind.”
In the book, which combines photographs by Ehringhaus and poetry by Massachusetts poet Ed Wanamaker, the longtime friends have sought to connect with moments.
“The photographs are timeless,” Ehringhaus says.
They reflect connected moments she has felt in her travels, and on Ocracoke.
“When I feel a connection to what I’m seeing, I click,” she says about her art.
That feeling is difficult to verbalize, but it’s a moment of wholeness she feels to everything around her.
For example, the photograph on page 22 shows holograms of trees projected in a city park in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“That’s a flat image, but it has so many layers,” she says.
And so, it becomes a contemplative mirror of the complexities of life.
“I feel all those layers at once,” she says.
In her quest to “actually see what it is I’m responding to,” her art is an exercise in “making” not “taking” photographs.
Ehringhaus will have the chance to make more art later this month when she participates as an artist-in-residence at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.
She will live in a house in the national forest there, create photographs and conduct some workshops and public programs while also enjoying the restorative 142-degree natural mineral water in the public baths in the historic row of bathhouses patterned after the bath houses of Europe in the 1800s.
A reiki master and massage therapist who swims in the ocean every day that she can, Ehringhaus believes in the restorative power of water.
She says, “(The residency is) a complete combination of all of my interests—photography, health, water and massage.”
Ehringhaus is the author of Ocracoke Portrait (1988) and Ten Thousand Breakfasts (2013), both about life on Ocracoke.
