72. Roman Holiday

September 04, 2018

I just read The New Yorker profile of Wolfgang Tillmans and that has inspired me to post photos after a long hiatus. Inertia. As if my fingers had been suffering from the gravity of Saturn and could not press the keys to make it happen

At an average exposure time of, say, 1/60th of a second, Cartier-Bresson's great career is cumulatively a couple of minutes of having the shutter open. He was right to call it the decisive moment.

The Invitation, Rome 2018 — The Invitation, Rome 2018

71. Giverny: Exit Through the Gift Shop

July 08, 2017

Giverny

Going to Giverny was my idea and I knew it would be touristic but hoped for the best. And, as a backhand prompt, Margaret had never been. I had no interest or expectation to take a beauty shot but this one leapt at me, overcame cliche. How could beauty become cliche? Well, beauty can take a beating, and I took a beating walking obediently down the hemmed paths, trudging in file through the house filled with canvas textured copies of masterpieces.

70. Dash (as a found object)

July 08, 2017

Modica, Sicily

I love how the detergent box comments on the warning sign, and how the blue garbage bags mediate the distance from sign to symbol and back again. And I can't say that I thought about any of this as I viscerally reacted to a tableaux that instantly and intuitively felt right, memorable, worth framing.

69. Not a tree

January 21, 2017

If Magritte can paint not a pipe why can't I photograph not a tree? And why can't I ask Magritte that question? I can imagine Magritte tipping his bowler hat and saying " 'scuse me while I kiss the sky." Or not.

I'm listening to Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" while I post this. I heard it for the first time today and is one of my favorite recordings ever. It was number 1 on the Billboard chart 11 years after his death.

68. Le Peyrou: plane tree shadow on pitted wall

January 15, 2017

Tonality as texture and vice versa, shadow as surface, and, as everywhere and always, death. The old country. Black pits in the stone join the shadow of branches like leaves or fruit. I admire and am inspired by the delicacy of Andre Kertesz.

67. You buys yours ticket and your takes yours choice

January 14, 2017

Humphrey Bogart said this. But not in French. The ticket window is closed. It's a long wait and there is no one ahead in line.

66. Torn From Yesterday's Headlines

January 12, 2017

65. Bustle Descending Staircase

January 11, 2017

OR: "Found art of a spinster stripped bare of her bachelors."

Although one event has no direct correlation with the other, I did see the Bride Stripped Bare of her Bachelors a month earlier in Philadelphia.

64. #9

January 10, 2017

63. RUN

January 09, 2017

Anchored by a word, sized with perfect aggression (RUN!), with echoes (for me) of Rothko and Basquiat, not that I thought about any of this when I got excited by the gift in front of me.

62. Intuition in the winter-light shadow of art historical reference

January 08, 2017

My recent visit to the Menil was powerful. I spent a long time in the Cy Twombly gallery, almost always alone with the paintings. It is a remarkable gallery and remarkably underpopulated. The The Twombly viewing was in conjunction with the Menil's show of Picasso drawings ("The Line") and all the Rauschenberg work on display, and the show of West Coast Beats. There was a cumulative impact of all these elements that still reverberates.

(Regarding the Beat show, there were several George Herms pieces. Back in 2007, George Herms led a children's art workshop at the Norton Simon that I took Dot to. To demonstrate how to make an assembly George took a plastic disc, pipe cleaner, and seed husk and instantly created an assemblage. I quietly took it home after the class. So I've got a clandestine, undocumented Herms in my apartment.)

There are many things I like about Twombly. The images are sophisticated in a very non-slick manner. There is a great balance to the imagery and yet they feel like assemblages. They are like a painterly version of street photography. Cy Twombly and Gary Winogrand are brothers.

These images from Montpellier are street photography. The human element is in the hands that played a part in creating and accreting these man-made images.

Seeing Ernest Haas' photographs when I was young had a big impact. Haas had a great influence in that he used photography to capture and create abstraction. Sometimes I feel a bit like an action painter when I seize upon these images in the street.

61. GAZ -- The Sequel

January 07, 2017

Wandering Agde in cold December twilight came across this GAZ, which in reflection yielded a discreet self-portrait -- the eye is easiest led to the ghostly orange Texas Longhorn baseball cap. As this is France, the GAZ is likely neither Polish nor English slang, but on the empty street there was no one to ask.

60. Iceland: Gray Scale Rothko

September 25, 2016

I was struck by how this landscape of earth sea sky is purely on the gray scale. It was as if the spirit of Ansel Adams had conjured a perfect Zone System image. The full range of black and white tonality, that Adams wanted to get in an ideal balck and white image. Here it is in nature. I've seen grey sky and grey sea but never a black/gray beach. Volcanos have a great sense of style.

Letting the image drift a little out of focus then it seems sort of a Rothko image, spiritual blocks of tone, stacked atop each other.

59. Krakow: gaz

September 18, 2016

Gaz is "gas" in Polish. In England, the nickname for Gary is Gazza and the short form of Gazza is Gaz. As in "Hey, Gaz!"

58. Marseille

September 12, 2016

The old saw is that by a certain age you have the face you deserve.

57. Portes de Carcassonne

August 28, 2016

These four images were shot one after another while perambulating the streets of Carcassonne. That's never happened before, for a series to materialize by happenstance, without premeditation or editing. I am drawn to traces of human habitation. Traces, of something that has happened, or an image that conveys a sense of something about to happen. How the world inside the frame implies the world outside the frame. In this case the traces of human habitation are traces of canine habitation, but I can imagine those dogs on end of a leash, in the slack hand of "The Owner." There is a spatial consistency to where the artifacts have landed. In terms of "something about to happen" noone has yet stepped in the traces of canine habitation.

Keywords (for all you internet robots): merge, shit, chien, dog, puppy, cute puppy, doorway, economic depression, South of France, American tourist, irony, disgust (of memories of stepping in dog shit in France).

56. Krakow

August 25, 2016