Didn’t have anything in mind that I wished to write this morning. Memorial Day brings mixed feelings. I do not enjoy the parading of grinning politicians, old soldiers, and vintage military equipment. We’ve not fought a war in defense of our country since WWII, the many since have been colonial wars to protect markets. …
These photos with the exception of the last one were taken, once again, in my backyard. The final and forth photo belongs in the series to offer a more complete “picture.” Why mislead and why be self deceived, that all is well? Perhaps, And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I continue to read On Photography by Susan Sontag. Today I finished the essay entitled, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly. There Sontag surveys the intent of a number of well known chroniclers of our grand experiment, beginning with Walt Whitman, concluding with commentary on the life work of photographer Diane Arbus. Sontag is a…
I remember the one of my first occasions to hold a camera in my hands. I was a teenager. I borrowed my fathers Kodak box camera, a black and white film camera with a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. The camera was little more than a black box, postage stamp-sized viewfinder,…
Nearly a week has passed since my return from the West. I revisited in my mind our hike to the site of the old silver mine, the abandoned Stockton Hills Mine. “Stockton the liveliest mining camp in Mohave county” is written in the old records of the area. The mines played out, as did…
