Margaret A. Harrell was led to photography through dreams that depicted her standing alone, looking up at the sky, noticing the strangeness of the clouds, that moved in shifting, cinematic scenes that astonished her. They were clearly impossible. Though she had been a writer since age seven, she also dreamed that later in life there would be no more pages to write on, the “light” would come on, and she would see her book pages replaced by a museum of previously unknown beautiful self-portraits of old masters.

This preconditioning led her to quickly react when one day a casual shot to finish a roll of film (for an unrelated event) off a balcony produced her first (unimpressive but interesting) cloud shots. This led to much experimentation with the sunlight (that darkened the ground so as to reveal unsuspected images in the sky) and questions about what energy fields were in the cloud formations. Mariah Martin writes, about her photography book, “This is Margaret A. Harrell’s gift, the images and the writing that goes with them. . . . She is an energy manifester and she’s bringing it through these energies. . . . This is not only an art book, it’s not only an intellectual book, it’s about raising consciousness. . . . These images are something uniquely different . . . aren’t in the Earth archetypes.” Innerchange Magazine notes that she uses “clouds as a meditative tool.” Bernie Nelson goes further, in describing how the cloud optics increase perception: “the high quality, detailed photographs began to focus attention to an inner point or source. . . . Like white sunlight entering a crystal - revealing its hidden rainbow manifestations - leaving whole and white again.” He calls the photography book, Toward a Philosophy of Perception: The Magnitude of Human Potential—Cloud Optics “one of the most perceptive works available for our time.” With a solo exhibit in 2005 in Sibiu, Romania and an exhibit in 2010 in Montreal, CA, and inclusion for several years in the Marquis Artists Gallery and Marquis Who’s Who in American Art, Harrell went to great lengths to find master scanners and printers—to digitalize the film—and now uses Tango drum scanining and other expert options to produce the traditional Silver Halide enlargements by the finest fine art digital means.