Taylor's private struggles continued to fuel his quest; his marriage ended in 1971, a year after the birth of his son, Malcolm. In search of spiritual support, he was initiated into meditation and lived in ashrams, first in India and then in the Divine Light Mission in Denver, Colorado. Life in the mission required complete renunciation of possessions, family and his photography. It was at this time that noted Canadian photographer, Robert Bourdeau, with whom Taylor had maintained a professional friendship since their meeting in the mid '60s, asked to purchase Jeremy's 11x14 view camera. Bourdeau still uses this camera today. In 1976, after four years, Taylor decided to leave the ashram, move to Toronto and once again pursue personal growth through photography. The draw of photography on Taylor is a continuing thread in his life. He had been strongly affected by Edward Weston's work when he first saw it in 1960. Sixteen years later he became reacquainted when a major retrospective of 250 works came to Denver; again he felt an overwhelming affinity. Coincidentally the Denver mission had indicated to him that he would have to reconsider the conditions of his stay there. They had been told by the U. S. government that all expatriates living in the ashram must either take out U. S. citizenship or return to their native countries. Implied in this was the necessity to become self sufficient. Jeremy felt his skill in photography could support him. Because he did not speak French he chose to relocate in Toronto where he supposed he would be able to establish himself as a fine art printer. The challenge was difficult, but working at a succession of menial jobs he acquired enough equipment to set up a darkroom. The series from this period, Austere Horizon: views of Lake Ontario taken from the Toronto Beaches districts reflective.

The series presents a sense of oneness. The images seem to act as psychological and spiritual analogies for meditation; there is a centralized position of some subjects, expansive skies, faint horizons, still water. From my arrival in Toronto I began to find my own way. JEREMY TAYLOR

The emptiness in Pier, Gravel, Footprints, Sky is portentous. The distant marker in Stones, Buoy, Faint Horizon draws us into nothingness. Despair is palpable. We almost wince away from the rock shrouded by seaweed in Centred Stone. Once again, in 1987, Taylor gave up photography, selling his equipment to purchase a piano. This began a period in which he explored classical music. From the discipline of study, and the stimulation of concerts and recordings he attempted to find meaning.

Again in 1992 the photographer was lured back. Joseph Campbell notes: "The way of the mystic and the artist are alike except the mystic has no craft. Craft holds the artist to the world. The mystic goes off through his psyche into the transcendent. The artist goes to many of the same places but is held to the world." 12. For Jeremy Taylor photography is a vital expression. Four decades of darkroom experience honed his expertise and eye; meditation deepened his perceptions; dedicated personal study nurtured his intellectual curiosity. The challenge in Taylor's Pathways series is ambitious. The photographs were made in Toronto around the Don Valley, including the Moore Park Ravine but the sense is of Walt Whitman's look at America in Leaves of Grass. In his preface, Whitman lamented:" but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls." 13. Taylor's photographs respond to this challenge.

The ravines of Toronto are a landscape of miniature forms, intimate co-minglings of species; whereas, western landscape is monumental and bold. Sometimes with my camera I come to a complete stop struck by the complexity and persistence of growth in this tenuous urban niche.

Everywhere there is movement, even within things standing still like twigs, leaves and grass. Nature never stops as she creates a life-sustaining path through these delicate structures. For our eyes though, a path is an artifact of movement, countless steps taken and more to come.

When I look at my photographs from the Don Valley, which often have no centre, no figure/ground convention, I discover new ways of seeing and my eye is trained in an unfamiliar rhythm. JEREMY TAYLOR

Winter Grass pulsates with a sense of rebirth. Grass, which is matted and static after winter, appears more like the warm fur of a sleeping animal protecting the new sprouts awaiting spring. Twigs defiantly thrust erect waiting for buds to form. In Trees and Bridge the random and the regular are balanced. It is difficult to tell which lines are bridge and which trees. The bridge is like a tree but with stronger more geometric lines - the branches of its support system. There is symbiosis. In Leaves, Tree Trunks the viewer is invited into a verdant richness of foliage suggesting the Romantic woods of A Midsummer's Night's Dream or the forest of Arden in As You Like It where joy and restoration are assured. The vines invite entry into a primordial existence, yet the reality is the Moore Park ravine, surrounded, unseen, by concrete twisted into the jungle of the Don Valley Parkway.

Taylor's fascination with how the random and the ordered are balanced is pursued further in his latest series: Intersection. This series began in 1993 with studies of billboards and their placement in the Toronto cityscape and continues to the present. In these works the seemingly diverse details of the city's streets coalesce into a Gestalt whole. 14. The series poses many questions. Is eternity only a taunting illusion, like an open glass box where our stay will be but a brief respite, as suggested in Bus Shelter? In Roads, Bridge and Sky the written signs are diminished, but their suggestions are more ominous. Will we have to label nature to recognize it once the whirligig of the "Masonry World" transgresses it? These images speak to Andre Breton's expectations for surrealism. We view elements small and large juxtaposed into new asymmetric wholes somehow balanced yet in disharmony. Our sense of order is uncertain like the couple in Two People Waiting. Does Taylor fear we are becoming numbed like those in Mime and Pedestrians? If this is his fear, his genius is that his works reveal places of reconciliation by showing the viewer frozen moments of visual harmony. 15. Consider one of his most recent works Riverdale Park and White Buildings, made in 1997. This image speaks to us of a place beyond the temporal of daily activity - a wide expansive space offering solace.

The inspiration for Jeremy Taylor's work is the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual bounty of human experience. Taylor's forty year photographic offering shows us that art can lead us away from the often-jaded contrivances of post modernism, and bring about a renaissance of the noble intentions with which modernism began and which seeing through the eye of spirit furthers.

The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality. Jerry N. Uelsmann

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows but isn't attending to Emmet Gowin

1. From conversations with photographer Har-Prakash Khalsa.
2. Ibid
3. Robert Hughes, "The Faces of Power", The Shock of the New (England 1980), 93.
4. Ibid, 83.
5. Ibid, 82.
6. Ibid, 85.
7. Ibid, 95.
8. Meyer Scharpiro, "Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting", Modern Art 19th and 20^th Centuries: selected papers (New York 1978),242.
9. Ibid, 242
10. Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston (George Eastman House, 1961)entry for September 4, 1924, 190.
11. Joseph Campbell, The Way of Art, Sounds True Audio Recording.
12. Walt Whitman, from "Preface to Leaves of Grass", American Poetry and Prose (Boston 1960), 586.
13. From conversations with photographer Har-Prakash Khalsa.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid