drmstream[writing]

a place for things that don't have a place elsewhere

Category: photography

Kishimi and the gift of knowing

A gen­tle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond sur­rounded by high trees.  The pond was a lime­stone pit once; the still sur­face mir­rors the dark­ness below.  An oak tree fell into the shal­low south end and in the warm months a slen­der grey heron […]

What makes our heart quicken

  When I walked out­side the wind was rac­ing through the trees and I thought to myself, This is alive. This is alive, the wind, the sky, the air. This is alive, me in this moment, my foot sink­ing into the ground. This is alive. The moment passed as quickly as it man­i­fested. Later I took a walk […]

Leaving the viewer a changed person: Irving Penn

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 […]

You can’t hide, Vivian

  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? […]

A pile of wood crates

  We aren’t meant to ever wit­ness lives in their total­ity.  The long view smooths out the highs, fills in the lows, and reduces every effort to the mean.  We come face to face with the over­whelm­ing scale of exis­tence, the futil­ity of pas­sion, the incon­se­quence of our work.  We might call it beau­ti­ful, but […]

I see the fat girl gazing into the future

When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that she had been a fat girl. I didn’t know what to make of it.  She wasn’t fat when she said it, and even when she would com­plain that she was fat, I’d think to myself that she was small and slim and not like all […]

You were cruel, Vivian

  That was a mean choice, giv­ing her the mir­ror, point­ing the cam­era past her fleshy arm. You aren’t being ambigu­ous.  You don’t like look­ing at her but you want to pho­to­graph her.  She’s a Gor­gon; her hair is filled with snakes and if we look her in the eyes we freeze to stone. You say […]

Five photos a day for 50 years

Imag­ine tak­ing 5 pho­tographs a day for 50 years. After 18,250 days, you would have more than 100,000 pho­tographs. You would have stepped out of the flow, peered through your viewfinder and cap­tured a sin­gle moment more than 100,000 dif­fer­ent times. What else will you have done out of inten­tion, out­side of the flow, more than 100,000 […]

She never showed her photos to anyone

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 […]

Jackie & Ethel

They were pulled in by the forces of Jupiter, a potent wind of ambi­tion and oblig­a­tion, less noble than immor­tal, God-like and unwit­ting. They brought the dif­fer­ences of dis­tant uni­verses: the cool dis­may of icy beauty, the clutch­ing grasp of fer­tile loins. They were bound by the rude com­mon­al­ity of oth­ers’ blood: the stains left […]