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Ironic Juxtaposition — Evolution #2
Continue ReadingOur image might make you smile while you are enjoying its rich pigments. Perhaps you snicker at the garish misfortunes of others. The irony of the juxtaposition strikes you soon enough, creates a feeling of unease gradually devolving into remorse — a way of life has been lost; anarchy now prevails. A bed lies askew […]
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Concerning Formalism, Entry #3
Continue ReadingOnly the rusty hardware in our foreground — fastened to a rail along the Wisteria Canal near Mexicali — saves this image from a colorful but still sterile formalism. The implements have a zoological quality, almost-alive robot animals with their snouts held at differing angles, seeming to express various (imputed) personal attitudes. We find them […]
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Is This The California You Imagine?
Continue ReadingWe are far from the emerald cities along the Pacific Coast — very much detached from their knowledge industries and mythology factories by the sea — surrounded by hundreds of square miles of farmland reclaimed from desert, watered here by the Coachella Canal and its concrete tributaries, tended and inhabited by a population of brown-skinned […]
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The High Cost of Having Fun
Continue ReadingThere is a universe of sand in Southern California and a four-wheel weekend army to exploit it. The glare you perceive in our photographs gives just a foretaste of the rigorous atmosphere awaiting as you cross this arid land. The boy in green with relaxed forward-sloping shoulders might be our subject. However I think we […]
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Is She Portraying An Insane Vision?
Continue ReadingOur subject pulls her face taut against her skull. Her ice-blue eyes bulge under stiffly-arched brows. She locks her stare on the infinite distance where no information exists in a pale sky. This must be private vision and not a reaction to the external world. Whether she is experiencing herself in a purely fictional story […]
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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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Environmental Self-Portraiture, 1970s Style
Continue ReadingI pushed from Las Vegas to Santa Fe, New Mexico stopping once to spread blankets on the ground and nap under vivid constellations; eating nuts, jerky and raw vegetables, drinking flawless spring water I drove a foreign car which steered like a tractor, rolling with barely space for a suitcase, ice chest and spare tire. […]
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Considering Human Hands (1)
Continue ReadingPictures of hands make a freestanding genre of photography. Some operators take older hands for subjects, making the work more likely to succeed; even relaxed digits of elderly humans reveal character and tell a personal story. An electronic search reveals pictures of human hands in the hundreds of thousands: for instance, feminine hands hold flowers […]
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