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 […]
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 […]
“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 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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]