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 […]
Linger for a moment to think about ruin and decay. What if ruin is not the result of neglect but is, instead, an expression of value? Ruin and decay are not accidents but choices, as is our fascination with them. The one, perhaps, creates the other. We live and wander amongst ruin. Ruin dots the […]
There by itself, in the weak sun that fall afternoon, The Aermotor windmill turned slowly in the breeze, marking time with a rhythmic scraping of the rotating axle. It was a sort of sentinel, standing watch over a barbed wired fence and wide open range. At some point, this windmill probably served some purpose, but […]
Behind some pine trees, in the corner of the park, stands a swing set. The old, heavy-duty kind. All galvanized pipes, chain, and hard rubber that will probably survive armageddon. This swing set happens to be for toddlers, the seats those horribly uncomfortable baskets designed by somebody who can’t recall the abrasions and pain these […]
Wandering through town the other day I walked by a building I’ve passed a hundred times. The most interesting aspect of the building was the astrology and tarot card reader that had a shop there for a couple years. With that gone, I scarcely give the building a second look. For some reason, I paused, […]
Linger for a moment to look closely at the shell in the display case. It has been there, the label claims, for more than a century. The curator who first selected it for display along with how many of the other workers who have tended to it over the years are now dead. Yet the […]
Carrying around a camera gives me license to look at things most of us walk past without noticing. The camera seems to give me permission to linger, to observe, to look around and behind, to look down and up. One rainy afternoon we took shelter in a portico. There in the shadows I noticed stairs […]
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me. It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original […]
I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the […]
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 […]