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It Blesses You When You Find It
Continue ReadingYou might see a river on a map of Arizona and decide to pay a visit. However, often when you look for the water you do not find it. Water is rare here — and flowing water vanishingly rare — so when you discover a cottonwood gallery like this rising from the banks of a […]
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The Eyes Are Hardly Necessary
Continue ReadingA portrait requires a look into the eyes of the subject — or does it? Here I think we can tell a lot without the eyes. The lines and folds on the man’s face and neck reveal like tree rings a long life, a witness to an eventful stretch of history. There is an […]
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The Repetition of Like Forms
Continue ReadingElementary treatises on composition advise looking for and capturing photogenic repetitions of similar objects, a fundamental technique. These motifs can be overused, but have not become clichés in my estimation, because subjects can vary so widely. A better description might be stock-in-trade or standard equipment. The street vendor whose cart appears above has carefully arranged […]
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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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Alone in the Mostly-Empty West
Continue ReadingOn a solitary trip last year I was daily reminded that our continent remains mostly empty; you can travel for miles in the Far West without seeing humans or human structures (except roads and railroad tracks) anywhere. When geographers and demographers declare nearly half our population lives near the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts, […]
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Emulating Cezanne
Continue ReadingPhotographs taken with normal lenses naturally diminish the size of distant objects. In this image that Renaissance perspective has been defeated. Using electronic means, I have elevated and enlarged the mountain range by a factor of three, and likewise stretched the foreground trees and slope. This has organized space more explicitly into overlapping planes: foreground […]
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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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