You know you love his stuff. You know what a great guy he is. Lorenzo could use your vote - so do it!
This is Rosalie, my great granddaughter. She came to me last month in all her innocence. She is God’s reassurance to me that all is well with the world.
Anne Geddes -
When her first work started to appear in public, I was quite impressed. A new style had emerged from the mind of an obvious artist. It was neither tripe nor maudlin. It had an essence, a sweetness, an innocence of view. They were happy photographs. They were the stuff of infancy and dreams.
Looking back at her early work, there was a simplicity of focus that I embraced. A quality I find lacking in today’s artistry.
I am about focus. Anyone who knows me, knows I am a pitbull when it comes to that.
I was pleased to come across this photo, black and white, essential, entertaining, elegant as it is.
And focused. It is timeless in appearance, caught somewhere in the cosmos, away from all the clutter of our lives here upon the earth.
It is simplicity.
This photo was taken in Viet Nam during the war.
It is not what many think it is.
The man with the gun had interrogated the other man thoroughly before reaching this point.
What we do not see is the face of the man with the gun who had first found his neighbors, his relatives, his wife and children dead in the streets, murdered in cold blood as they ran from the man who is bound.
Each man had a job to do.
Each had a role to play.
Each did what they were assigned to do.
Each completed their task to the best of their ability.
War IS hell.
I love Audrey Hepburn.
I love this dress.
It is THE DRESS of all dresses, not just to me, but to an entire generation of girls who believed …
I snagged this photo off the net years ago. It made me believe I could create beyond what I could see in a photograph. This picture is the seed of inspiration of a dream.
I liked and reviewed Bob Seger
“New bonus track on the WalMart disc is beautiful. That’s the Bob I remember. It’s the sound of him heading back out on the road quietly ticking off the white stripes as he glides into the distance on…”
Photography
Tri-X is truth. That’s what I told Tom Weschler last spring while discussing the pros and cons of digital photography over film.
Tom and I have been photographers for years. He and I grew up in the same generation of black and white documentarianism.
While Tom does all his work digitally, I became a fan of his work because of the way he used to use black and white film.
He is a Nikon man although we both started out on a brownie box camera.
I was six. I still have my first photograph.
I discovered that I could freeze a moment of time in a photo. I had tangible proof, a hand-held memory I could refer to in moments of doubt.
I was born with a photographic memory which came in handy having also been born deaf. The intangible world does not exist to those who do not hear. History is a hard concept ot convey without words, unless, of course, you have a picture to prove you were there.
This is where it all began for me.
I took photos before I could read or write or talk. They were my proof, my validation, my truth.
I photographed everything from my pony to natural disasters as a child. My mother hid the camera time and time again from me but I would always manage to squirrel it out and take photos she had not pre-approved. Looking back, my family appreciates my subversive photo activities, but at the time it was a rather dangerous undertaking for me.
We moved to a very small town when I was in high school. I took journalism as soon as I was able to get into the class. I quickly became the school photographer using a twin lens Yashica. The majority of my work was black and white with this camera. The great thing about it was that the light metering was off-system and the photo image was shown upside down in the camera box. It forced me to learn to take good, clean, pre-cropped photos. Everything was abstract upside down so I learned about balance and linear form through the skewed images I focused on.
I spent several weeks one summer at yearbook camp learning black and white darkroom photography. While rudimentary in nature, the class laid the groundwork I needed for my own darkroom developing. I bought a darkroom set-up before I went to college and took it with me to school.
I went through several personal cameras in high school, low end Polaroids, Kodak Insta-matics, and the like. It wasn’t till my semester in Europe in 1977 that I finally got a Canon 35mm camera. I took slide photos while I was there as per the course requirements. After our first group critique the teacher in charge told me to ditch my regular assignment and take only people photos from there on out while we were in Italy. I ran out of film while there and spent my food money to purchase more, a huge investment back then considering it was a system where you bought the film but paid for the developing at the same time as the initial purchase. For film that was being shot on the fly as I traveled, it became quite an expense, especially the slide film. By the end of the trip I was shooting black and white film, a perfect choice for a northern European run up the Rhine and across to Belgium to catch the flight home.
I shot constantly till my head injury in 1981. At that point, my artistic vision was robbed from me. I put my camera down and did not pick it up again for years. I had no interest in photographs. I had no eye for color, form, contrast. I lived a life wholly un-inspired.
A photograph brought me out of my head injury. It helped me back into the light of day. It was evidence, proof, tangible truth in my hand once again of a life I had lived before. It was a photo Tom Weschler had taken.
Then, last spring, while at a concert, my vision returned to me. I had started taking pictures again over the years but they were lifeless, unreal. The right side of my brain was blocked from it’s normal function, from it’s sight.
The photos I took at the concert brought my vision back. They were of someone who had always believed in my artistry. I don’t know if that was the emotional connection, the break in the blockage, if it was just the timing, or simply an act of God. All I know is that I suddenly saw everything in technicolor once again.
I saw the light, literally, in my friend’s eyes.
I have been seeing the light ever since. I am fascinated by light. It is a whole new concept to me. I see it differently than I have ever seen it before. I feel like blinders have been torn from my eyes.
I am still photographing moments of truth. I have proof of my life. It validates the very breath I take. I will continue to do so as long as I can see.
Photography will always be truth to me.
