Tuesday Afternoons

This is the Carol Winder, the woman next door who has brightened my life since I first arrived in Winston-Salem 15 years ago. I still remember the day I met her. I was busy unpacking when the doorbell rang. I went to the backdoor and there stood Carol holding a plate of homemade oatmeal cookies. Talk about Southern hospitality.

Carol turns 95 this month. 95! Getting around isn't easy anymore, but she stays busy knitting, reading, visiting with family and friends, and watching cooking shows.

Every Tuesday afternoon I get to see Carol when I go pick up the fresh milk and bread that her beautiful daughter brings me from a local food coop. Every Tuesday afternoon Carol's sitting on the couch, the big windows behind her, a smile on her face. Every Tuesday afternoon I am reminded how lucky I am to have such great neighbors.

To Believe

What happens when you hit the street with a camera and a few hours to look around, no hurry, no assignment, is that you get to have a lot of fun. I did that in Charlotte for a few afternoons recently.

Open time and city streets reminded me how much I love roaming around, looking, seeing who and what I might bump into. Those afternoons refreshed my spirit.

People, many people you meet and talk to, are incredibly trusting and open. Sure, they say, you can take a picture. What do you want me to do?

Exit Sign

I just left a workshop at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. I attended a daylong blitz with photographer Ernesto Bazan. My mind is full of ideas and confusions.

For one thing, I am thinking about the use of the full frame. Do all parts of the photograph - left and right, up and down, close up and background - work as one complete whole? It's a demanding task that's harder to achieve than it may seem. The color of a coat, the way light falls on a cheek, the sign above a store can ruin everything, to say nothing of exposure, composition, or point of view.

The other thing that I am stuck thinking about is mystery. To conjure mystery is another demanding task, but, that too must be contained in the image. How do you create that? Who knows. When it's there, it's obvious, but how it got there is not so clear.

Today is a beautiful and sunny Friday and I am not quite able to leave for the street. The thoughts from the workshop block me like this chair that sits empty beside the door.

Light Lines

When I worry about what to make next or fall into the trap of wondering what's the point of another picture in this world, I am reminded that nature does what it does freely, without worry, without angst. Nature creates art every day. Nature was and is the first artist.
So, what's the point?
Being alive.

There Are Kicks

The photo is an honest to Pete mid-flight soccer kick.
Two more seconds, and the boy, still airborne, wailed the soccer ball with his left foot, sending the thing about twenty, thirty feet high. The ball tore a straight line up toward the sky.

"I've won three trophies," he said, matter of factly, head looking down, foot sweeping the wintry grass.

I asked him to do it again. I had to see this mind-boggling stunt again. There are kicks, and then there are kicks that freshen the world.

Up until that moment, the day had appeared like any other.

Around the Corner

When you live on a street called Lookout Circle, shape truly is part of the location.
Living on a circle with its gentle curves and soft suburban edges framed my early viewpoint.
Our house stood three stories high at the top of the hill that rolled up and down this circular street. We were perched in such a way that the curve of land with its band of houses stretched nearly equally left and right. Surely the idea of a center also figured into my visual upbringing.

If my childhood horizon- tree-lined and spotted with Con Ed electrical hardware, was a lens, it would have to be a fisheye lens, arched and slightly warped, with just a hint of weirdness.

But, enough about my childhood.

In this image, the lookout appears to be the person in the corner, the one on the left looking out across a frame.

Pulling Threads

I picked up a thread recently. It was an image I made two summers ago while taking a workshop on photographing the nude. The image had three thin lines and skin. Lots and lots of white skin. People who saw the image knew it was a part of the body, but they couldn't locate it, weren't sure exactly what it was. The familiar indecipherable intrigued me. There was an abstraction that seemed to veer away from the literalness that is tied to the camera and to photography in general.

This month I decided to pick up the thread of that initial image and create a series of work based on the abstracted nude. Here's an image from this exploration.