Timeless
To stand in the shadows, looking out into the light, is like a child’s game of thinking that the treasure is down there, just past the sunlight, around that bend. But the treasure is to be standing still, in the quiet cool at the end of a June day, and drinking in the sweetness of it, the silence, the timelessness that it suggests. And then raising the camera to affirm the sensation of contentment that overcame me.
Softening
Some moments are rich with meaning and yet so simple as to be ordinary. Gianni was walking down the road with his son Giovanni, a 24 year old who, like many young adults, has been in revolt against all the values of his parents. It’s normal. And Giovanni has a tough act to follow with his father, who is rooted to the Tuscan earth like few people I have ever met. Often they are capable of a give and take that is complicated.
But this year something has changed, and as I watched them go down the road, in the glow of the last light of evening, I saw what could on the one hand be just a cliché, but in reality is the softening of differences that maturity brings. It was beautiful to me on all counts.
Simple things
A late evening walk after a soft rain. Gianni accompanied us so we could all catch up with the events of the season we had spent in France. Suddenly he leaped over the edge to grab some flowers. His spirit, and the joy he takes in everything, reminded me of why we love Tuscany so much.
It’s not only nature that calls to us, but a friendship with a man of this land whose connection to it is so natural and deep that it has added a respect for all things Tuscan to our way of thinking. And out of that has come a kind of image making that is open and relaxed and about daily pleasure. And so portraits and gestures, and landscapes, and still lives, and the simplest of daily comings and goings mark my days. Everything seems photographable.
May 1st.
It was a travel day. We left Bonnieux early in the morning after 4 months living there, on the first leg of our year long experiment living in Europe. So we said goodbye to the baker where our daily intake of baguette had become a morning ritual. Boy-o-boy, were they good! It was to be an 800 Km drive from Bonnieux to Buonconvento, so we broke it up into an overnight stop in Camoglie, a seaside town in Italy.
Ah, dear old colorful, worn out, beautiful, generous Italia! Color! Like Italian opera. It is everywhere, and joyous to be in. Even though this blog is about one photograph a day, this kind of travel day is so refreshing in terms of stimulus, that I thought I’d simply lay down some of the eye candy that Camoglie offered on our arrival. Look at this! May 1, and they are already in the water!
As we walked down the seafront I saw this crazy structure on the beach and immediately Fellini’s imagery came to mind. What was this wooden scaffolding all about? And how easily it fit in and seemed normal.
This wall, part of the crumbling beauty of Italian cities struck me as something I might ant to use as a background for a still life. I found myself collecting a few ‘wall’ images that day for possible printing as a field to look at some objects on. Just instinct talking, and I always follow instinct and try not to second guess it.
And then came the giant Frying Pan. Another Felliniesque motif leading to the surreal landscape of Italian life.
Sitting at dinner in the lovely hotel dining room on the sea, the long day coming to a close, a really good Italian seafood dinner in our bellies, the sun slipping into the sea, gave us a kind of perfect end to a long day on the road. More adventures on the road to Buonconvento to come.
Seeing the Light
I look out the window never knowing what I’ll see that may be of interest. Will it be the weather? The landscape? Street activity? Even if we are familiar with our window’s frame, expecting it to show us the same old scene just altered by time or season, we can be surprised. The frame can move our attention just as we move the camera in front of our eye. On this bleak day, with a light rain falling, the delicate tracery of the cypress trees on the water, and the subtle coloration of the pool’s structure, made me feel as if I was seeing lavender in the overall aqua that I wasn’t sure was there. There was no lavender in the grey sky. Yet the grey bands in the pool delicately resonated with color. My feeling was that all that aqua produced a lavender echo in my eye, and on the sensor. And it is that magic of color seeing that has always seduced me.
April 6
Carrying the camera always makes me interested in something along the way, and thus I am always having to catch up to family or friends who are already ahead of me. But sometimes it pays off if even in small ways. Seeing Maggie and our friends ahead of me as we hurried to the cinema made me appreciate the now lengthened hours of the day, and the lovely mix of last light and lamplight in this old town’s narrow alleys. I had that jolt, as I so often do, that, “I am Here, now!” And the recognition of the meaning of being in every moment becomes ringingly clear. April 7
Nature takes hold wherever it can, it is, after all, nature’s dominion that we live in. So when I stand in front of something as simple as an ivy covered wall, naked in this season, I see the vivacious complexity of it all, and thrill to the marvel of it once again in yet another form. I imagined a print of it at 8 or 10 feet, and see how something so simple can also convey great power, depending upon its scale.
April 8
I pulled into an empty lot to turn the car around and swung into line with the back wall of a cemetery filled with crazy topiary bushes and trees. But what really called out to me at this late hour of the day, was the enormous pile of stones banked near the wall. There was something so funereal about the pile and the way it was stacked and ordered, that i got out to walk around it and take it all in. The scene became more mysterious as the light faded and the stones emanated a ghostly radiance. I guess it was just right for a cemetery.
April 9
What a riot of color this restaurant was! Earlier in the week I was taken with the barely discernible lavender tones in a green pool, and was questioning color’s way of working in a subtractive or additive way. But here, the mix and bounce and reflection and blending of colors was a whole lesson in primaries and complementary colors, and the wait for our food to arrive was taken up with the beauty of how light transforms wherever we are and what we see.
April 10
With all the various kinds of light this week presented, when it comes to feelings of intimacy there is nothing like candlelight. That old touch of primitive fire, flickering and dancing the shadows on the walls, making moods and mystery where electric light would elaborate the harsh details and leave us looking at the repairs we need to make rather than at the beauty of the moment. The cameras of today do very well in low light situations, and in fact have advanced our ability to see into the dark in ways that film struggled with. I am grateful when the technology of our times adds expressive potential to our ideas.
April 11
Like This
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.
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.
Now
Our year in Europe feels a little like we ran away to join the circus. Two older adults who left it all behind, packed 2 suitcases and some equipment and off we went. And who better to run away with than this woman! Maggie has enriched my life in indescribable ways. She is wife, lover, friend, consigliere, healer, business partner, co-author, and many more things to me, but always a joy to behold.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see her doing something intimate, or lost in thought, or writing, gardening, preparing something delicious, engaging with local merchants, so many minor, ordinary moments which are lifted out of the ordinary by the joy that emanates from her. And when she looks at me I am smitten once again.
So I make countless images of her, and the story they tell is our story, of love in the time when the years are fleeting, but joy is to be had in every moment of consciousness, that Now is the only moment we have. And every photograph is Now!
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.
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.
ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN 