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Entertainment By Surprise
Continue ReadingToday I experienced an unexpected all-morning pleasure. Two verdins — who are rare chickadees, desert-dwelling insectivores as tiny as hummingbirds and just as prone to plunging and darting, built a shelter right outside my library window to hatch their hoped-for offspring. It was most energetically and skillfully done, took six hours of continuous work by […]
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Ghost Musician Near the Sunflower River
Continue ReadingThe Sunflower River flows serpentine-fashion through Clarksdale, Mississippi. In the same curvaceous manner it runs north and south out of the city among surrounding fields — planted mostly in cotton. I talked for an hour by the water with the subject of our street-portrait before making this image. I cannot remember his regular name or […]
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A Luckless Great Depression Family
Continue ReadingAs a child whenever possible I asked the adults around me for details about common ancestors and living family members. Not everyone complied in a forthcoming manner; some lacked interest in history altogether, while others clammed up for undisclosed personal reasons. The three people in our image — and everyone who knew them in life […]
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Ghosts #1 — Great-Great Uncle Frank Ezra
Continue ReadingHe does not seem like a Frank, Or an Ezra. He looks like me, At his age. Setting aside aspects of his nose — and the mutton-chops, Together we make two poles of a doppelganger pair. Photograph from the 19th Century — image creator(s) unknown.
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Hands & Fingers In Anticipation
Continue ReadingThe picture is an emanation from what seems the deep past: the year 2006. I made this image at Keeneland Racecourse outside Lexington, Kentucky. Walking toward that track across a park lush with grass and trees, about to enter an institution esteemed among lovers of thoroughbred horses, you sense you have stepped upon consecrated ground, […]
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Human Hands VI — A Modern Mona Lisa
Continue Reading“Paying attention directly to objects and people in our world comprises maybe half our waking consciousness; the remainder of the day and night we spend in dreams, visions, and essentially comatose states of being.” From the Notebooks of C.R. Howerton The right hand of our foreground subject (the round-faced lady with curly hair) […]
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Human Hands III — The Ferry Driver
Continue ReadingOur subject pilots a passenger ferry many times daily across the Nile in Upper Egypt. I am standing with camera and longish lens on a raised platform making up the second-tier of his boat. Later on the observation deck — seated alone — I wonder about the gesture and open look bestowed on me by […]
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This Says It Better
Continue ReadingAges ago I made a straightforward monochrome rendering of this photograph. The image above created recently expresses better the lightness of that afternoon by the Aegean Sea, in a higher emotional key — closer to the lived experience — which included lots of fun alloyed with a definite recklessness.
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