I spent the past week hunkered-down with work. I neglected my blog and hadn't had time to pick up my camera. I felt detached from photography and generally removed from that aspect of my creative process. This morning I was resolved to regain my creative momentum. Since I had no new images, I searched through my image library, seeing if something resonated with me. And there it was! A photo I'd made some three years ago while spending the holidays in Venice. It instantly brought me back feelings of the city. It made my heart ache for the place.
Several years ago we spent the holidays in Venice. Venice is a city of dreams, an island of aching and unreal beauty. It is stunning that even its deterioration is sublime. Most photographers choose to photograph the crumbling and settling facades of ancient buildings as testament to Venice's fading glory. This is entirely appropriate as the city feels like a giant stage set, its public face bold and dramatic. The facades are so enticing it is hard to see anything else. There is something poignant about peering through their thin veneer and into the exposed flesh of the buildings. It is sadly lovely to see something so exuberantly extroverted fade into homely decay.
Almost to a person, if you ask an East-Coast transplant who now lives west of the Mississippi what he or she misses the most, the answer will be: the change of the seasons. More pointedly, most everyone longs for fall foliage, something that is seen in California, but is sort of like setting off a firecracker after watching fireworks.
I've written here before about Edward Steichen's shadblow tree, a small tree outside the window of his home in West Redding, Connecticut. Steichen, tired of the rigors of fashion photography and museum administration (he was the director of the Department of Photography at MOMA), found inspiration in this small tree and photographed it exclusively for six years. Steichen found great meaning in the seemingly insignificant tree. To him it represented the changing and cyclical nature of life.
If you are regular reader of this blog, you know that my buddies and I hike Grand Canyon every year. The trip is generally exhausting and to help us forget the pain which is shooting through every fiber of our bodies we tend to resort to an endless loop of repeating banter. To the casual observer it is mindless, silly, and incomprehensible nonsense. But, to three stooges from New Jersey, who have known one another for some 45 years, it all, scarily, makes perfect sense.
The sunrise was shrouded in a thick blanket of low fog. I took one look out the window and decided a hot pot of coffee was a better idea than an excursion down to the park. The alarm had been accidentally set to go off at 2:30 AM and I still felt the crankiness from an unexpected wake-up. The cats were also agitated and they demanded that I rise early. They wanted proper attention. Coffee was a much better concept than exercise.
I had to rise at 4:00 AM this morning, earlier than is my habit. The morning light is lazy this time of year, not getting around to lighting our neighborhood until after 7:00. As I write this the trees outside my window are nothing but dark shadows looming over a dim sky. It is a time of day that brings out the optimist in me. The world awakens to all possibilities.
It's been a rough couple of months for almost everyone I know. It's in the air. The elections seem to be sucking us all into the shadow. Deep in the shadow we find the opportunists, who like to stir things up at exactly this time, every four years. *There's money in them thar stirrings.* Ratings. Fame. Attention. I suspect attention is the most important motivator for the loud-mouthed pundits and politicians. "Look at me. I'm here. I matter!" Sadly, a fool attains attention more easily than a sage. It's just the way things are.
oThis blog had been down for a few days. The old server was getting cranky and it was time to upgrade. I'd been putting it off for months. Now I know why I waited so long. Once I pulled the plug and pointed the universe (Internet) towards the new server, my web site, email, and blog all broke. My heart sank.
Four days ago we moved our blog to a new, larger, and more secure server. When we did, the entire blog broke. Since then we have been working hard to get back online. Last night the blog was resurrected but the photos still aren't linking and uploading properly. This is not good when one is trying to write a photo blog. In any case, we hope to back to 100% by this evening. We apologize for the delay.
