“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
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Click this link for a slide show of additional photographs from Trick or Treat O8
“Adopt the pace of Nature; her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Headline about sums up my life. Forty (or so) years ago poet Philip Whalen wrote:
Our main difficulty: fear and distrust of freedom
In America we’ve been fighting each other 100 years
We pretend we’re unimaginably rich
But we’re poor and afraid of the poor who must become
The Army to defend us against right and wrong
The real shame of America is the lack of an anti-clerical
Movement or party. All parties try to compound
With invisible State Protestant Church that theoretically
Doesn’t exist. Rubes who think of themselves as
Members in good standing are bilked and robbed
When did the dumb-bunny bomb first hit U.S.A?
How come everybody appreciated it so much?
Almost all Americans aged 4 to 100
Have the spiritual natures of Chicago policemen
Singer/songwriter Shawn Mullins performed at the historic Pabst Theatre Sunday, 9/21/08 (with Dar Williams headlining). Shawn reinforced my belief in the power of a talented story teller with a deep heart and a guitar. His character sketches bring to mind the people we’ve all met along life’s highway.
Selected “photographic” lyrics from Another Look by Shawn Mullins
Another look into her might just free me now.
I feel the drowning pounding of her pain
and her dreams like eyes,
as she looks into my sin.
So knowing where and why she’s looking through my window.
The cameraman wants to take her picture.
Now words spill out of hearts onto the stone,
and her image ties the knot of never knowing
the whole truth from lies.
Feels like I’m just now showing pictures to the man
whose dreams are realized.
He’s older now but he’s got newborn eyes.
Another look into her might just set me free.
I took her like a shot into my arm
yesterday my 62nd year ended
today my 63rd begins
the day before yesterday I found this fellow, and song
“Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.” — Peter Adams
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yesterday afternoon, lunch with Bert Stitt
then a walk about
the “east side” looking
and a drive to see Sophia
“No matter what you talk about in life there seems to be a scale: left to right, top to bottom, right to wrong. I can now add a new one… journalism to design. These are the two ends of the scale that I exist in as a photographer. At one extreme my work is pure journalism and at the other it’s little more than eye candy.” — Neil Turner
“Photography suits the temper of this age — of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.” — Edward Weston
Indian Summer Festival, Milwaukee, WI — 2008
Link to slide show of additional images
“Fashion, flowers, nudes and portraits — they’re all the same: light, form, color. And mystery. And mystery is very important. When I started photographing flowers, I thought, ‘My God, where have I been?’ I’m totally addicted to this project. I’d never seen the mysteries of a flower. We walk by wonders every day and don’t see them. We only stop at what shouts the loudest.” — Barbara Bordnick
“You give a man color film, and sooner or later you will catch him out in the garden taking pictures of flowers. This seems inevitable. He just can’t resist. He’s got this colorful film, y’see, and he spies this colorful flower, and… well, not being a chimp, he does realize that there are enough flower pictures in the world already, and that the one he’s about to take isn’t going to be of any use to anybody. But he can’t help himself. It’s too great a temptation to resist. He succumbs to the weakness.” — Anonymous – from his 1/18/04 Sunday Morning Photographer article
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some days
people flock to the edge
where water meets sand
they sculpt, toss things back and forth,
and mingle with birds
A dad, sculpting sand on the beach
with his daughter, Mia, said to me,
“It’s all about the kids.”
I think, perhaps, it’s all about returning
to childhood for a brief,
careless time.
“I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects.” — Joseph Sudek
one of Dad’s vises
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“I have no way of portraying the lives of others. I portray my own.” — Jan Saudek
Scheme to put yourself in the path of beautiful landscapes, buildings, art, and creatures.
as a child i chased
butterflies with a net
now i chase images
Once caught, I never knew quite what to do with the butterflies. I looked at them under a microscope. I marveled at their color and delicate lightness. I ended up feeling uneasy that, as I studied them, they became less beautiful; battered and wounded. In the end I gave up catching butterflies in nets. Now, catching fleeting moments on a light sensitive surface, I find the opposite. The images become more beautiful as I study them; push the edges around; pull information from them; adjust the colors, tonality and contrast. Yet, I still don’t know what to do with my catches.
Yesterday, arriving at a favorite bluff, overlooking the great lake Michigan, I found and caught the following:
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