Sometimes, for me, it is enough that a photograph is just what it purports to be. It doesn’t conceal some meaning or tell a story, doesn’t point to the photographer’s social agenda, and doesn’t reveal the photographer’s psychological anguish. It isn’t reportage or social commentary or documentary photography. This, e.g., is a photograph of a […]
Robert Mapplethorpe Flora is a lovely book that highlights the subtle and varied beauty of flowers. And while we can read all sorts of meaning into his photos, meaning most often it seems shaped by what somebody thinks of Mapplethorpe the photographer, in the end they are just beautiful photographs. I don’t think every photograph […]
Everybody takes photos of flowers. Snapshots. Artsy black-and-whites. Bold colors against dark backgrounds. Everybody. They are a photographic cliché, though I confess I don’t know quite what the original meaning or significance was in taking photos of flowers and so I don’t know what the practice has lost. I suspect part of the draw is: […]
Detritus (noun): waste or debris of any kind. Cf., discarded matter, refuse, litter, flotsam & jetsam, dross, chaff. Maybe sediment (noun): matter that settles to the bottom (usually of a liquid). Cf., dregs, lees, residue, alluvium. The difference, to me, is we can’t help but produce sediment. Just our being generates a trail of sediment everywhere we go. Detritus, however, is often a willful […]
I was asked to take photographs of the local area for a soon-to-be revamped community website (brynfordcivic.org). I wanted to do something different, something that captures the experiences of walking and living in the area, or at least how I see and experience living in the community. Here is some of what I see as […]
I am working on a long-term project to talk to the people who own and run local businesses, the people who make our community unique and real, and to photograph them at work. Rather than a set of portraits, I want to focus on their hands because they tell the story of their efforts. And […]
It was a chilly afternoon, weak sunlight scarcely warming the few people sitting in the square or those walking their dogs. At the corner, two men stood across from each other engaged in a sometimes frenetic sometimes contemplative game of chess. In a flurry of moves their hands nearly collided as pawns, rooks, and bishops […]
Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages […]
The last weekend of summer in Philadelphia offered the chance to look for contrast between light and dark. Nothing metaphorical or profound. Just shadows. Looking for and at shadows invites a different way of seeing the city, a way that often requires looking down, looking for lines and patterns, for fragments of people going about […]
There is a special aesthetic to religion in the South West. A starkness to the architecture and design, born perhaps from the struggle to survive in the harsh climate. Amazingly, some of the missions and churches have survived centuries. The San Xavier del Bac mission south of Tucson, for example. Founded in the late seventeenth […]