I've decided to buzz off....

...and start anew. If you want to see where I landed,

pollinate here.

I C U, C'ing Me, C'ing U...

[August 5, 2009.] We drove to the Ammersee, a lake west of Munich, and had planned to ferry across on a steamboat. Shortly after parking, I saw a few men in Lederhosen, some of them carried musical instruments. While waiting for the steamboat to arrive, the music started. A contagious dialect of Bavarian folk music. Then, the crowd broke out in dance.






Two women dancers bore a striking resemblance to each other. One of them glared back at me in presumptive disapproval, the other smiled. In an instant different emotions were summoned, and contrasting reactions glared at my lens. I still can't decide which expression is more honest. I still can't decide which expression I like more.

a Beetle at the BBC...

Today the BBC's photoblog, Viewfinder, led their post with a familiar set of footprints.


You can check out my beetle photograph and the others selected this week for the theme of Repetition. Click here for the gallery.

In Trance-igent Transit...

Nostalgia is either...the barren landscape itself, the terrain that invites us to trespass and revel in hallucinations of the past; or perhaps, it is a determined spirit, cloaked in exoskeletal darkness that simply relishes the journey itself.

(Sicilian Sand Beetle, Colonna Pizzuta Beach)

The most gratifying element of travel is domesticating the memory of experience in the desert...dissolving yourself in the hourglass. Here are some of the mirages, as best I can remember...



If you prefer to make your own travel arrangements, click here.

WNYC, Street Shots

The Big Apple's WNYC hosted a street photography contest last year and posted a video of the winner, Joe Wigfall, on their site.

Take a look. You will be pleasantly surprised at Joe's dedication to the art of street photography. He doesn't earn a living doing what he does in the video, but he makes a powerful argument of engaging the streets with his camera...art for art's sake. (And, he doesn't rely on a camera that looks like a piece of field artillery. You will see him carrying a bag from which he draws a small point-and-shoot camera, as well as a more common DSLR-type.)

Joe has his own technique for capturing images as he negotiates the schools of New York City's pedestrians, taxicabs, and bike messengers. He sees with his hands.

Flashback Flourish...

Daniela's Onkel Hermann has an incredible garden, a Blumengarten to be precise. Last week, I spent many early morning hours pacing around the colors with my lens. The flowers were a stark reminder of transience. So, much of the week in Bavaria, I relished the present. The colors. The shapes. The perfumes. The pollen. Trying to push back the inevitable end to a vacation.

Tonight, I revisited the past...one petal at a time.



If you prefer to take your own time, click here.

Photolocutions...

Monday. Back at work. Thinking in pictures. Dwelling on options, alternatives...reality and constraints. Pause. Read a few photoblogs...and found some worthwhile wordy pictograms from some icons in the field.

Antoine d' Agata:
"I don’t believe in photography as art or a job or anything. I think of photography as a language and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say. So the only things I have to say about my life and what I know about the world, is the way I see it. So, it’s not about photography… I think people should just use photography to say things and not just photography for the sake of photography… The world is full of talented photographers. The problem is just so many of them just don’t know what to say, they think life is one thing and photography is another but they don’t realize that photography is just a way to reflect what you are."

Joel Meyerowitz:
"I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it 's got lots of accounting going on in it - stones and buildings and trees and air - but that 's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there."

Agata's framing of photography as a fluency, a language of self-expression made think, for a long time. Then I felt at a loss for words. Meyerowitz's talk of space and the challenge of evoking emotion made me wonder about scarcity and exuberance. Then I felt a bit of cabin fever.

So, I went for a walk, and remembered a series of lines from an article written by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The article, written decades ago is titled, "The Difficulty of Reading." I do not recall the precise quote, but Ortega y Gasset wrote about the nature of language, and the act of reading. He wrote about how reading was always a negotiation between a text that said too much and too little...an act that teased and tantalized...indeterminacy and meaning.

I felt wedged between a philosophical banality and an alluring photographic arrogance. I kept walking and thought to myself...depressing the shutter is a brief, but complicated enterprise.

Still Monday. Back to work.

Fußgängerzone Follies in München...

The "Fußgängerzone," or pedestrian area in downtown Munich is a street photographer's paradise. My eyes seized on many more opportunities than my lens, but I did not dwell on missed opportunities for too long. This strip of human congestion is a living museum, a collection and arrangement of human complexity, and I am going to miss it. Here is a series of thirty-something street glances....mostly from the hip.



If you prefer to linger in the Biergarten and finish your Weißbier at your own pace, click here.