Lately I have been inspired by the long-exposure photos of Alexey Titarenko. I think his “City of Shadows” is beautiful and haunting. To be sure, some of my fascination comes from my fascination with 1990s St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, I find the images lovely. So I thought I would try some long or, in this case, […]
I find physical books comforting. Each one is a statement, somebody somewhere saying “I was here. I made this.” Books are human. By almost any measure they are less convenient, take up more room, and weigh more than digital versions. They require shelves. They collect dust and boring insects. It’s not difficult to take one […]
Style has become both a fetish and a marketing device. We read or, more likely in today’s podcast- and YouTube-dominated world, hear and see over and over again that we have to discover our style as if it’s some buried treasure or a form of therapeutic self-realization (the alternative formulation, “we have to find our […]
I do not write for the public. G.M. Hopkins I don’t quite know how Hopkins meant this comment. His poetry suggests, to me, that he meant he didn’t write popular verse. He wrote for an audience of one or maybe for no audience. He wrote what he needed to write and didn’t give any thought […]
Seven women sit in the cafe. I’m the eighth person. Aside from the worker’s voice that carries, the room is quiet. One woman is writing something, her pen poised above a pad of paper. One woman reads a book. Two are working on class assignments — like most students, “work” seems to mean announce that […]
The old guy is asking questions, offering suggestions, and taking notes. He’s there with a young couple, planning the music for the couple’s wedding. At first glance he looks like the leader of some cover band, but he’s probably DJ. A full head of lovely silver hair, he is in his mid-60s and easily twice […]
I don’t know quite how to begin. These ideas are just beginning to take shape. Maybe I can start simply, by describing what concerns me, what seems, at least to me, to be a problem. The other day, while stopped at a traffic light, the two people in the car next to me were both […]
I envy Vivian Maier. Not because I like her work — I have seen too few of her photos to know what I think of them, though I doubt they would appeal much to me. No. I envy Vivian Maier because she seems not to have cared whether or not I liked her work, or had […]
That a photograph must tell a story is commonplace. “Storytelling” has conquered every form of photography, from landscape to street photography to elaborately staged scenes. I prefer to see photographs as fragments, extraits from a now lost present. John Berger remarked on the gap between the moment photographed and the present, saying All photographs are […]
— make something every day, something for an audience of one;— give away the things I make, leave them behind, stash them on shelves in stores, send them to strangers, and otherwise cast them into the universe for others to find;— look around with the eyes and curiosity of a child;— talk to strangers to […]