“Like doctors, photographers work with what is present. I suspect our chief emotions are anticipation, frustration, and patience, balanced by a marvelous sense of elation when things go right — when we think we’ve captured within a photograph some missing feeling, some sense of beauty, or bit of mystery in the fabric of life.” — John Loengard
Sunday brunch at the Centennial. Watching Ann’s son and his partner as they listen to Ann speak (don’t remember what about, because now I look rather than listen). Not famous people. They probably won’t even like the photograph. No amazing action. Yet, they’re young and lovely in this window light. A 28mm Summicron on the M8. I slice one forty fifth of a second and a small span of five feet out of the infinite possibilities of space and time. Seemingly mundane. Then, examining the photograph on a computer screen, it seems that the parts equal more than their sum. That the individuals behind the eyes have nothing to do with one another. They seem to have more power, and beauty, when isolated. A closer look. Always looking. Closer.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Grant Park, Chicago Illinois: 70,000 ticketed guests, with who knows how many additional participants, gathered to listen to President-elect Barack Obama; elected just minutes before. This group of hundreds of thousands of young and old, rich and poor, of all colors, genders, and ethnicities gathered to hear our first Irish-African-American President inspire them with a message of hope and determination to make the country, and indeed the world, a better place for our children and grandchildren. While not there, I watched this event on a screen, through tears of great joy; shared with Spike Lee, Jesse Jackson and Oprah.
Wednesday, August 29th, 1968, Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois: Just 40 years earlier; just 4 years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law; at the hight of the Viet Nam War and the military draft; as a twenty two year old photo journalist, I was in Grant Park with 15,000 others, including Jean Genet, Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs (none of which lived to see today). Instead of tears of joy and hope; we had tear gas, clubs and blood to contemplate and record on film and in our memories.
Today the memories of 1968 blend beautifully with 2008 memories.
We wanted change then and we want it today.
“If I had to pick a single word to describe what my pictures are all about, I would say ’secrets.’ As a child I always had a secret world and my favorite book was A Secret Garden.” — Joyce Tenneson
Each time the shutter clicks I’ve always had that feeling; as if my little black box may have just captured something like a secret. Something no one else has seen. When I opened the above image I felt as if I’d stepped back in time, to those wonderful fall days, as a boy lost in fantasies of adventure, at the edge of land.
“In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.” - Clarence John Laughlin
“It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country. Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field. It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual’s temperament and environment.” - Bill Brandt
“…the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.” — Garry Winogrand
My good friends at the Leica User Group have created a tradition called Friday flowers. I offer these in the spirit of that tradition. The blue flowers are a mere 5mm in diameter. Both of these were photographed with a 20 - 30 year old 65 Elmar lens on an M8.
Last week I walked to the mail box and found five of these walking about in my front yard. This one seemed to be saying, “dude - like back off!”
Fall has arrived and new forms and colors delight the eyes.
Today: two men will meet, for the last time, face to face, before citizens of the United States go to the voting booth on November 4th. Make the correct choice.
“Adopt the pace of Nature; her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A week or so ago I had the opportunity to return to a subject I’d photographed last spring. This gate, created by Dan Nauman, fits so well into its environment that photographing it becomes very difficult during daylight. The natural surroundings seem to absorb the organic forms of the metal. We created these night photographs in an effort to separate the organic metal forms from their natural environment (for an upcoming magazine article). If you open and drive through this driveway gate you will arrive at the residence, above the great lake Michigan seen in the black and white photographs above.
