Three
Trees
A Square Window
A Reflection
Live Stone Wall
Worn Color On Old Stucco
A Masonry Base
Nearly Dusk
Harmony
JANUARY 28, 2015
5 Replies
Tag Archives: Dusk
JANUARY 23, 2015
Wake Up Call
After 5 days in Paris the countryside feels good! Even when there is nothing of conventional beauty to see, particularly this late in a grey, damp and cold day with the light going and the sombre feeling drawing the energy out of the drive home.
Yet there is something to be seen; the way the trees, in their spare branches and woven asymmetries seem huddled against the season, or the diminished yet radiant tone of the colors of winter, or the flattening of the light lending a last, eerie, tincture of blue to the onset of nightfall. All this puts me in a reverie, and out of it I feel the freshening of my vision, the desire to look harder at what this moment of reality is offering me. Another call to wake up and see!
JANUARY 19, 2015
Exotic Birds
This unforgettable woman passed me on the street while I was being filmed for a documentary about my street work ( you can see the filmmaker in the background). How fortunate was I that she appeared just then?
She was lost in thought, glove dangling from her lips, extreme hairdo, like an exotic birds’, and an angular and chiseled face. I kept pace with her for perhaps 10 seconds of backpedaling on the crowded street, during which she never saw or felt me and my fascination with her.
In moments like that the street is still a wonder for me, mainly because we are all such exotic and mysterious creatures, and when instinct calls my attention to another human being, or the interaction between people, I simply accept and move with it as quickly and invisibly as I can. It’s amazing to me that I can still keep up, and that I still desire to see and know something about the moment.
This curiosity about strangers has been my passion for more than fifty years, and I am grateful to have learned the necessary behavior to be out there seeing it all and not bruising the situation in any way that might turn it from reality to something staged or predetermined.
January 2, 2015
Photographs made on the streets of a city like New York, or any dynamic urban place, usually require an immediacy and responsiveness that often leaves one somewhat uncertain of what the whole image might contain, or how it may ‘work.’ Of course this is part of the mystery and risk of making photographs.
So when I found myself in Bonnieux, a small village in the Luberon valley of southern France, a place where not much was happening, I realized that I must adapt to the pace of the locale and ‘feel’ out the temperament that was required to simply be there. I understood that I had to learn how to see what there was there that stopped me for whatever reason. I guess my first lesson was that ‘awe’ comes in many different, and unexpected forms, and will surprise me if I simply take the time to stand before it and allow myself to be taken in.
On a late afternoon walk around the village on the first day these small gestures; an accumulation of a few stones by someone’s hand, and the peace of an empty street at dusk, said to me, “this is where you are, make the most of what you have.”
ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN 