Category Archives: Springtime

JUNE 1, 2015

You Will Be Surprised

When I am out walking with Maggie (who, among many other professions during a well lived life, was a dancer) the unpredictable often happens, so carrying a camera is a foregone conclusion. She, spins, and kicks, and runs and laughs, like a 6 year old, and she is more than 10 times that, but her energy and humor are part of the bounty she has brought into my life. Every so often I think; ‘why haven’t I made a book about her?’

While considering a photograph for today’s blog this one popped into view, as did that thought once again. I must have a thousand photographs of Maggie from our 20+ years together, probably more. This is a photographer’s dilemma; the thought that someone close to you is not the stuff of a book. In fact the family and loved ones constitute a great subject for an intimate work, if only we are willing to take the time to look closely at what we have. It also is a portrait of how one ages. Consider Nick Nixon’s series of the four, Brown sisters. When looking at them we see the wear and tear of lives spanning 40 years which, even without words, is an amazing document that grows deeper with each reading and every year.

So, look into your files for those images that you though were too personal, or too familiar, and try looking at them as if you were a stranger who has discovered this trove in a flea market trunk, the way John Maloof discovered Vivian Maier. You will be surprised.

MAY 25, 2015

MAY 7, 2015

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What Catches the Eye

Who knows why any one stops any time, anywhere? Why this trough, which is probably a truck tire track, filled with rain water in a gravel-bedded parking area. But there it is, the puzzle that all photographers deal with all the time. Something catches the eye, with no rational reason for it. Maybe it was the color of the light as the day waned, which, when seen against the new green of the hills at that hour set off the slightly warmer feel of the gravel, or perhaps it was the piece of sky that made its poem in the trough, falling to earth in a way that made me pause. These are the mysteries of this remarkable medium that so many of us are in dialogue with, and that makes it is so compelling.

So the dialogue continues.

APRIL 18, 2015

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Eye Work

There is a winery about 45 minutes away from Bonnieux which had some interesting contemporary architecture and site installations, so we were told. We made a trip there with some friends to have a look, a picnic and enjoy a spring day. Of all the works there – and there were some by well known artists – this cage of color strips provoked me into a playful mood and made me feel the ‘quality’ of the dappled light I had experienced in the woods I walked through to get to it.

How do you judge if a work works? If you feel something when you come near it, or within its space, and the feeling brings up a range of fresh sensations and thoughts, then I think it is a ‘living’ work, and becomes like nature in some strange, new way. This jungle gym of color strips made my eye work hard and set up spatial conditions and confusions that kept me engaged, and playful, which is what a work of art can do. I know that photographs, which are so tied to the material world that it is often hard to make them seem special, can, at their best moments, lift us from the bare facts and bring us a new understanding.