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WYSIWYG, Portrait #1
Continue ReadingI am neither related to — nor acquainted with — my subject. I do not know how she occupies her time and have no biographical data about her. Her face interested me while I watched a Veterans Day parade from the sidewalk; she looked straight at me when I raised my camera, then gifted me […]
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A Struggle Among the Street Ladies
Continue ReadingOnce a month in the street below my apartment in the Dokki district of Cairo, alms were distributed from the local mosque to widows and poor women of the neighborhood. This often gave rise to a dispute. The destitute ladies would crush one another trying to reach a woman in the center handing out paper […]
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On The Distractible Tendency of Crowds
Continue ReadingI once believed that crowds were more or less unified; at first glance it seems that way. After all, people have gathered in the same place at the same time for the same reason, presumably to enjoy the same event. Then I began taking photographs in the midst of human assemblies, studying the images […]
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I Didn’t Think She Was Real
Continue ReadingShe calls herself a Living Statue. On street corners in Asheville, North Carolina she is known as The Silver Drummer Girl, a woman who has trained her muscles to an extreme degree, and therefore is able to remain utterly still on public sidewalks in excess of five minutes at a time, while standing on […]
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Imitating Another Man’s Process
Continue ReadingIt is fun and also instructive to imitate the style of a different type of photographer — in this case Garry Winogrand, a prolific artist who died with many rolls of film unprocessed plus several hundred thousand pictures developed but unedited, and still he passed on to us an extensive body of finished work. He […]
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Luxor Madness
Continue ReadingIt begins when you hit pavement in Luxor — a city upriver in Egypt on the Nile, and home to the biggest religious complex ever constructed: The Temple of Karnak, a human cultural analog to the Grand Canyon. Many folks live here in poverty hustling for a living, and survive on money extracted from […]
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The Three Mounted Officers
Continue ReadingMounted police geared up like this project strength and low-key swagger. In our photograph I think the isolating of certain details adds to this impression, beginning with the powerful hindquarters and flanks of the horses, and continuing among the luxurious folds of the officers’ leather jackets. Three of anything brings to mind a triangle or […]
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Changing Cultures
Continue ReadingEvery world traveler has a tale of culture shock. I met a middle-aged man at a cafe in Istanbul before I plunged into the Nile Civilization; he constructed a sentence in a fashion I had not heard before. He made a city the subject, shock the verb, and culture with a possessive marker the direct object: […]
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In The Days of Street Photography
Continue ReadingI am sharing two favorite images from my street photography days. There is good action in the foreground of both pictures, however the expressions of onlookers in the background — including those of the little kids in strollers — give me the most delight.
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