Back in 2007, I knew I wanted to do this new thing called a blog and I knew what I wanted to do with it -- have a place for the many photos I made for the paper but were never going to find space in print. The one thing I didn't know was what I was going to call it. I settled on Picture Window, for obvious reasons, but one name I also considered was a phrase I used pretty regularly when describing things in a general way, "This, that, and the other thing." (Another silly phrase I'm known to use, "I know a thing or two about a thing or two" would probably also be good.) the blog was never officially done for the paper but it was featured on the Observer website for several years before I chose to remove it from there about a year ago and about seven months ago made a decision to stop posting work-related images on it. It has been home to my personal work -- like my Portland street photography and Crescent City book project -- exclusively ever since.
Earlier this week I was let go by the paper after 13 years. In some ways it's not surprising, in other ways it certainly was. I wasn't expecting it, but sitting here a few days later I'm really not sad or angry about it. It was time for a change and this is just how it came about. I've always loved doing the blog. One of my favorite comments that someone made to me a number of years back at an uneventful, rainy event where nothing went as planned but interesting pix were still presenting was, "at least you'll have something for the blog."
This site has been the one place that I've shared thoughts and feelings, like after my divorce or when my dog died or when I fell in love with Natalie. It has also been where the evolution of my work has been most visible. If you go back a few years and look at what was posting and then look at today, it's very different. Nat has really promoted the idea of "chasing my joy" and finding the kind of photography that inspires and interests me the most and then going out and trying to do it. This site has been the home to whatever I've come back with on that search.
So maybe the blog will be renamed now, maybe not, I'm not sure yet. But it will still be the place to chart my journey and see what I come back with, wherever I go.
"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poém of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
and beautify it
-Walt Whitman
Brilliance is what?
Be it bright orange, yellow, green?
Or a withered leaf?
