drmstream[writing]

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 […]

“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 […]

  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 […]

It is time to leave now. When it started, it was time to go.  Pick up and go from your home.  Take a bag.  Go live in this ‘camp’ behind barbed wire fences and men with guns. You have nar­row eyes.  Your lips are thin.  Your skin is dif­fer­ent.  You have to go away. Because you might kill […]

What I look at in one moment doesn’t exist in the next. What I see I can’t remem­ber. I can’t see it ever again. What I try to meld comes apart, what I try to tell becomes inco­her­ent. Images con­nect and dis­con­nect like the spray­ing frac­tals of the win­ter sun­light play­ing on the ever fainter mem­o­ries that […]