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 […]
This is how we age, the way Fall unfolds, not all in a rush, but in pieces and slow, at night when we sleep and the body cools. We’re young still in parts, the veritable green shoots of youth sprouting through the enflamed palette of age, the staging of decay. This is our most profound […]
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. Leo Tolstoy A Russian chapel, photographed […]
The photographic record is a distinctly modern artifact. Before the portable camera, visual record emanated from the imagination, translated by an artist’s hand. The photograph captured visual images in a deceptively accurate rendering, with detail that could be placed like a scrim over our eyes and keep images unmarred. Smart observers point to the inaccuracies […]
Plate 36 A Harvest of Death. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. July 1863 Photographed by Timothy H. O’Sullivan Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg—as all reluctant to expose their ghastly horrors to the light—came the sunless morn, after the retreat by Lee’s broken army. Through the shadowy vapors, it was, indeed, a “harvest of death” that was […]
When I walk along the street, the imagery is vital and immediate. A strong jaw. Her lips make deep creases when they purse. He’s got his shoulders thrown back like he’s been congratulated about something that he didn’t do. Her forehead is pressed forward as if she’s looking into life through a plate glass window. That […]
Experience presents a constant puzzle: the fullest sense of experience is to be wholly in the world, immersed and accepting of the things that we encounter, surrendered to the moment. To share these moments requires tremendous art. You can’t force meaning, say to yourself that you’ll use this technique or that technique to mimic something […]
To make art, we have to let go of our conceptions, trample our structures, release our soul. When we have laid it all out, we’ll understand ourselves, the essence of our sound. This takes courage. This great photo is one of many musician photos by Juan Carlos Hernandez.
I was a deaf boy and the trees spoke to me. I walked through the woods at night. The wind rioted around me, pulling at leaves and branches, trying to tear the roots from the ground. The moonlight turned hard and thin. The air was cold with the salt spray from the bay. The trees moaned dully. […]