Thursday. More mulch to spread, the last of ten yards. After more rain, the plants are “happy.” Happiness is about well-being is it not? I am compulsive about using the camera at this time of year. Each springtime is new, as if there has never been one just like this one. I do what…
Wednesday midweek, I reel at the news of another mass shooting. This time the slaughter was visited upon children (19 children and 2 adults) at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. And the reason? Why there was no reason, in the classical definition of reason. A few of the causes: a society awash in…
How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled. Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately. I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within. What child does not have a nightmare from time to time? It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning…
The Cannes Film Festival is in progress, Tue, May 17 – Sat, May 28. The New York Times reported on the festival in the email dispatch that I received this morning. I was captivated by the quote used in a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Perhaps the Russian war to obliterate Ukraine is the…
It is a Sunday morning. A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday. A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies. Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the…
Saturday morning and Starbucks is abuzz. Yesterday afternoon we attended an open house to celebrate the graduation of my wife’s brother’s son’s daughter from high school. The graduate was radiant as she greeted well wishers just inside the foyer of the great room. We were not sure who would be present at the event. …
Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after…
Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is…
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,” as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is…
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be….
