Category Archives: Evening light

MARCH 7, 2015

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Before cars and people came down this street, before roads and houses were built, before walls were mounded up for defense or boundaries, the stones themselves felt water rushing past. I never cease to wonder when I stop here, about the marks grooved into the stone, and how many millennia of rising and falling waters have passed since this was part of the sea bottom or shoreline of what is now the Mediterranean Sea.

The courses of stones and the courses of the smoothed ridges blend together in a stony harmony that delights my eye, and I always seem to find a reason to lift my camera and try to make a photograph that describes what it is I see. This image, made at the end of day, when the light was flat and had the faintest lavender cast to it, may (or may not) work, because it doesn’t depend on the glory of sunlight, or the drama of some action, to set off the place from the rather ordinary seeming place that it is. It is just its unmediated self now.

It’s the rocks that first produce the ‘beat’ that means something to me and makes me stop, so I need to reconsider what it is I want to say about them. Fortunately I had time here to look again and again, since I walked this way every few days. It’s a little like solving a math problem in one’s head, and by going over it again and again the meaning may resolve itself.

Once, when I was around 15, I saw Albert Einstein walking the back streets of Princeton, while I was on a day trip there from summer camp, and had slipped away from my group. He was on a back street; tree lined, quiet, nothing to mark it as special from the next one, and as I watched him from a hundred yards away, he stopped and stood for a long time doing nothing, head tilted slightly up, possibly watching the leaves trembling, or listening to the birds. Perhaps he was following a line of reasoning that was out there in the universe of his mind’s embrace. Of course it was impossible to imagine then, as it is now, what anyone else thinks about, but standing still, and taking it all in, like Einstein, is part of the photographic act at certain moments. And certain moments are what photographs are made of.

Like this one.

03-7 L1026540

 

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

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The Presence

I had to run out to pick something up for Maggie from the pharmacy before they closed. I always take the camera even if I am just going around the corner, which is where the pharmacy is. What a moment! It may seem like an ordinary evening, and to the extent that nothing happened, it was. But we have to make the most out of what we have, the hand we are dealt as photographers is always a straight. It is what it is. The dull moments and the exciting ones, you never know what you’ll get.

But, in fact, it is our recognition of something special, to us, within the overall moments of life that puts us near the presence, the sense of necessity, that makes us gasp and say, Yes!

For me it was the hour, and the color of the street lights seen against that particular winter evening blue, and those shutters! Their blue off by just enough toward the cyan to make the last of the magenta in the blue of the sky seem even more radiant. These color events,these relationships, small as they are, are enough to bring a rising sense of joy to me. I stand in them, breath them in, linger, while my mind and eye let me know how wonderful it is to be alive.

This is what photography means to me.

Feb-25 L1026365

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

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Plain Sight

Serenity after chaos can make itself felt in various ways. And it is needed to rebalance ones state of mind. I found myself drawn to this humble photograph because of the expansive and yet ordinary characteristics it uses to hold me for a moment, not let me move on, and then to draw me in, to transform my resistance into a small smile of wonder at the recognition, once again, that the most we can do is to work with what we have at any given moment.

This is where I am. This is what I see. This is what the world looks like.

A kind of honest appreciation of the fact that the sublime is often hidden in plain sight.

Feb-12 L1026140.

FEBRUARY 7, 2015

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Standing Still

Some days it might be the simplest of things that moves me; like the smokey yellow tone glazing the horizon, seen in relation to the russet underbelly of the cloud superimposed on the delicate celeste blue of the sky.

The poetics of the moment cause me to stand very still and watch the trio of colors slowly dissolve into a colorless wash of grays and blacks. It’s good training to observe something change right in front of my eyes. The long slow phase of one mutation into another. I always find it fruitful to search my mind for precise names of the colors that I see. The more precise I am the more I sensitize myself to where I am, and what is actually happening right then.

Stillness and taking in are two states of being that have always nourished me, particularly in the countryside where the tempo of life supports that kind of tuning in.

Feb-7 L1026007

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

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Out the Window

Some days just slip away, and I wonder, ‘where did the time go’? Interior days in the winter are perfect for dealing with the backlog of work that seems to accumulate so quickly now that we’re  in Europe, new exhibitions and projects which are time sensitive, and then all the catching up with the many things that computers were supposed to make easier for us.

So here it is nearly 5:00pm and I am called to the window by the last bit of sunlight doing its rosy golden number in the deep blue background of oncoming night, and once again – no matter how many times I have seen this – it never fails to make me drift into a reverie about time, and how I use it, and in these later years, how can I stretch it out.

Standing at the window I see that Maggie has lit the candles and the fire is dancing in the fireplace, and then I see the spatial illusion of near and far and behind, which has a surreal, Magritte-like quality; the overlap of the twin fires of nature and the hearth played out on the stone wall, and my reverie joins me to them, and the question of time goes out the window.

Feb-4 L1025828

JANUARY 27, 2015

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The Humble Stuff

Some days just get away from me. I spent a good part of the day working on exhibition planning and a book layout, and I made a few still lives, though these were not speaking to me so I let them go. It was chilly and the fire inside was keeping me close to home. Then, suddenly, I realized that before the day disappeared I should go out and see something, keep the one-a-day work ongoing.

Frankly I was so caught up in the museum work that I was kind of flat and groping for somewhere to take myself, but it was getting late and it was bitterly cold, so I walked around the garden looking for a view or some play of light, anything that might spark my interest, and whaddya know, right there in front of me, on the grounds of the house we rented, was a kind of formal arrangement that I found oddly pleasing.

In a way – let’s be honest – it’s a little like an accounting of objects; trees, deck, stairs, wall, etc., but it also had its own rhythm, and a simplicity that grew on me the more I stood still and allowed myself to enter its particular expression of ‘place’. “This is where you are!” it reminded me. Sometimes a photograph is just about that; a sense of place, and your place in it, a place  where the mystery emanates from.

So I let myself be taken in by it, by the colorless hour of the day, the stepped stone wall and the wooden steps, the paring of the chairs, the pacing of the trees, the point of view from below the deck that brought it all into being for me. It’s good to look hard at the humble stuff, because, in truth, most of life is like that. And once we accept that we do not have to be in the exotic to be turned on, we have much more to look at.

Jan-27 L1025720

JANUARY 24, 2015

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Rapture

The lesson is; always carry your camera!

We were having dinner guests and Maggie, realizing we needed a fresh baguette, asked me to trek the 100 yards from our house to the baker. So out I went, and as it’s my habit to always carry a camera, whether it is 100 yards or a hundred miles, it gave me the chance to pause on my walk back to take in the spectacle of this nameless corner in a small town, in the Luberon valley, in the southern part of Provence, just as nightfall brought a rapture to these old walls and hills. And to me.

To stand here and breathe in the colors, because I believe you can breathe them in, how else to  account for that surge of knowing something, which comes from standing still some place and simply being, breathing in the all of it in that particular moment. And so what if the moment is illuminated by street lamps and window light, and the colors may seem a little garish. In fact it is the union of the two competing sensations that brings them into their momentary harmony.

Just to look at it all for what it is, is enough to fill me up with wonder about how remarkable, at any given moment, our world is.

Jan-24 L1025627