drmstream[writing]

She’s get­ting car­ried off to the evil witch, cap­tured by her demon mon­keys who were sent out to col­lect the inno­cent intruder.  Look at the Tin Wood­man doff­ing his cap, Dorothy sit­ting at the edge of her seat like a lit­tle girl at the movies, and the winged mon­keys wide-eyed and intent. Where’s the fear? There’s […]

  An image was stuck in my head. I saw a sin­gle tree in the dis­tance. A dog stood beneath it. The vista was all greys and whites and blacks. The dog and the tree were soli­tary but sep­a­rate. The image evoked some­thing nec­es­sary and almost for­got­ten. I went to Flickr and typed in the […]

“A good pho­to­graph is one that com­mu­ni­cates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed per­son for hav­ing seen it; it is in one word, effec­tive.” Irv­ing Penn Irv­ing Penn reminds us that there’s a com­mon thread in the expe­ri­ence of beauty, whether it’s organic or inert, whether it’s tamed or wild, whether […]

A pho­to­graph can make some­thing mun­dane appear unique and dis­tinc­tive. The ren­dered image metas­ta­sizes into some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. One of my favorite exam­ples is street pho­tog­ra­phy. A tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher can take a can­did photo of two women at a street cor­ner, star­ing jaun­tily at the cam­era. If we encoun­tered these women in every­day life we […]

… All these moments in the individual’s life, when the uni­ver­sal laws of human fate break in upon the pur­poses, expec­ta­tions, and opin­ions of the per­sonal con­scious­ness, are sta­tions along the road of the indi­vid­u­a­tion process. This process is, in effect, the spon­ta­neous real­iza­tion of the whole man. The ego con­scious per­son­al­ity is only a […]

  I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work. “I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said. I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly dis­tinc­tive. He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his paint­ing. “I painted a very […]

  What I see clearly I pass by. What I see but do not see, I stand to wit­ness. My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee. All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see. Then […]

Some­times when I talk I hear my voice echo­ing in my head so I stop. In mid-gesture, mid-sentence, I’ll stop and go fol­low the echo. The moment that I am in — that absolute instance of inter­ac­tion — is sep­a­rate and unique from any other moment and I want to com­mu­ni­cate in a pre­cise and fresh way. The […]

  You worked hard to keep us from see­ing you straight on, didn’t you? That was hard, I imag­ine, when you walked through your day with a cam­era around your neck. No, you put your­self on the other side. The other side of what, that’s what I won­der. Was it the other side of life altogether? […]

She was eccen­tric, strong, heav­ily opin­ion­ated, highly intel­lec­tual, and intensely pri­vate. She wore a floppy hat, a long dress, wool coat, and men’s shoes and walked with a pow­er­ful stride. With a cam­era around her neck when­ever she left the house, she would obses­sively take pic­tures, but never showed her pho­tos to any­one. Descrip­tion of […]