A blog about photography & transformative art
Summer is a season that makes me want to hide. I cannot seem to escape a sun that is now high and white. And bright. For someone who lives in the shadow, the brightness is almost debilitating. I have come to embrace my hypersensitivity to light and to use it as part of my artistic process. While high noon on a summer day can make for intensely boring photos, there is a searing saturation to the images of summer that I often like.
The day is filled with activity. Yellow jackets built an angry nest in the front yard. A man in a bee suit arrived to take care of the infestation. And my handyman is here, fixing some dry rot from the winter rains. With the drone of electric sanders in the distance, I try to make art and update the web site. I look for yellow jackets out of the corner of my eye. Contemplation is nowhere to be found.
My near vision is softening into a blurry haze. It is nothing more than age-related presbyopia, correctable with lenses. Precise photography is more difficult now as I flip my glasses on and off while working with my camera's tiny typography. Working a 4x5 is particularly challenging. But, it's not all bad. There are times when my fuzzier world is a blessing. For example, looking at myself in the morning mirror is better without glasses than with.
The more public the place the more private we become. It's gotten worse lately. I was having a drink in a bar with a friend when I watched a young man approach an attractive, young woman who was seated on a bar stool. He did his best to charm, cajole, brag and strut his stuff like a mummer in Philadelphia on New Year's Day. The woman was hardly impressed. She turned to her smart phone and disappeared into her own little world. The young guy stood his ground for a few minutes, then tried to look cool as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. He walked away in rejection, his mummer's strut gone.
It had taken two days to prepare the food for a lens-based show several us had curated back when we were graduate students at JFKU. Curating a show is the only way to learn the art business and there are myriad mistakes to be made in the process. The first mistake of my fledgling career was to put the food in a separate, secluded room away from the artwork. You want people to mingle amongst the art, not somewhere else. Worse than that, I'd forgotten about the Shrimp People.
Everyone seems to be trying to get somewhere. Is all this effort getting us where we want to go? The sweetest moments in life are those that are aimless, when your spot in the world ceases to be a pin in a map and transforms into the only place in the universe to be. I suspect most all of us have experienced this tiny window into bliss.
My memory mellows with years. Edges lose their sharpness. Perspective changes. Try going back to your old grammar school or high school and see if the halls are the same as you remember. I'll bet they're much smaller than is the expanse of your memory. Memories are like that. They either become bigger than life or they hide themselves in the recesses of our psyche—as if they were bad kids smoking in the school bathrooms.
I see them every week, which is more often than I see my best friends. The patrons at the farmer's market pass me as if I were a ghost. I wonder if they recognize me too, or if I'm invisible. Italians believe that you never age at the table and, therefore, you should stay there as long as possible. If that is indeed true, then that law of nature must extend to the market—at least a *good* market.
A bucolic path filled with the scent of jasmine—the old rail path is dotted with mothers and their strollers. A leaf blower in the distance says its time for the neighbors to keep up appearances and pick up debris. We wouldn't want to seem unseemly in this little spot of paradise. What would the neighbors think? It's another day in suburbia, the morning working its way into midday.
"I wonder who he is," I said to myself as I walked along the flood canals. A worker with a bright-orange vest stood atop the large apparatus that keeps the bay out of our neighborhood. Brief encounters mystify me. So many people come and go throughout a brief life. We never get to know ourselves let alone the myriad passers-by that cross our path. "I wonder who he is," I said again. This time I reminded myself not to talk aloud in public, a bad habit that has gotten worse as of late.
