Don't let me hear you say life's Taking you nowhere
God is in the details; walk with me and see
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 12
Don't let me hear you say life's
Taking you nowhere, angel
(Come, get up, my baby)
Look at that sky, life's begun
Nights are warm and the days are young
(Come, get up, my baby)
There's my baby, lost that's all
Once I'm begging you save her little soul
Golden years, gold (whop-whop-whop)
(Come, get up, my baby)
Last night they loved you
Opening doors and pulling some strings, angel
(Come, get up, my baby)
In walked luck and you looked in time
Never look back, walk tall, act fine
(Come, get up, my baby)
I'll stick with you baby for a thousand years
Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years
The Sunday Reader, June 20, 2024
You may have noticed I like to photograph trees. And wooden fences. In black and white.
Also there’s this fire hydrant...
There’s no denying the preponderance of trees and fences in Foto.Feola.Fridays, especially when you separate out all the photos I shot on assignment over the years.
But it’s even more constrained than that. It’s one fire hydrant and a small copse of trees and a few hundred foot of wooden fence, a small park encompassing a couple of acres a few blocks walk from home. And walk there I do, several times a week, as often as I can.
But why? I have been ridiculously blessed in so many ways, including as a photographer. Editors handed me cameras and sent me out to shoot when photography had never occurred to me.
Pretty much all of my many careers – the journalism, the photojournalism, the stints in academia, the information technology work, the data architecture with its patents – I stumbled into by accident while trying and failing to do something completely different.
These Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things have had a disconcerting tendency to cascade. I decided in 8th grade that wanted to be write the Great American Novel, like Earnest Hemingway or Mark Twain. By college I’d refined that to playwright and was working on The Great American Play, a very, very serious modern answer to Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown, complete with a cast wearing masks. This seemed like a very good idea at the time; in my defense, I was 19. Also, I was a pretentious idjit, wandering around the theater attempting unsuccessfully to smoke a pipe. Still, isn’t the only time acting sophomorically is forgivable is when you are actually a sophomore?
I dropped out when I got a job writing for a newspaper. Why pay to learn to be writer, when I could be a writer and get paid? Isn’t that how Twain and Hemingway and a bunch of others got started?
I was a theater major in college, working on playwriting and directing. In both I was fascinated by a technique called mise-en-scene, where actors were posed like a painting framed by the proscenium arch. So I dropped out of college because I could get paid to write during the day while working on The Great American Play at night.
On my first day as a cub reporter my editor handed me a camera and said “Reporters take photos for their stories.” I looked through the viewfinder, and was swept away; a camera was a little electromechanical machine for creating those same mise-en-scenes. Newspapers gave me all the film I could jam through my Pentax cameras, and developed all those rolls in the newsroom darkrooms, and I took advantage, shooting three or more rolls daily for decades.
And the things I saw! I photographed a Space Shuttle launch from a close-up photography position that was closed down after the Challenger disaster. Tanks laying smoke cover over advancing troops in the Mojave Desert. Night ops in the Sea of Japan as World War II steam-powered catapults threw fighter planes off the deck of the USS Midway.
I still haven’t finished that play…
So why the same trees, the same fence, day after day?
To live in the light.
Photography is a portmanteau comprised of the Greek words photos – light - and graphos – drawing or writing. Photography is all about the light, and writing with that light.
That’s why I see in black and white. It’s just the illumination without distractions. That’s why I walk the same walk and photograph the same trees and fence and fire hydrant. The only thing that changes is the light, and the light always changes.
Can you see it? Walk with me.
The thing about space shuttles and desert battles and aircraft carriers is that they are overwhelming, too overwhelming for you to see the details.
God is in the details.
I was planning to write something else this week, and then Freddie deBoer wrote this: You’ve got to remember that after even the most radical, romantic, and satisfying change you make, your life will eventually just go back to being ordinary life, your life, the mundane life of perpetual boredom and mild disappointment that most successful people lead.
I understand what he means, and I understand why so many people feel that way. We are a perverse species by nature, determined to forget 1,000 blessings so we can focus on a single slight. And our current year, flooded with endless coverage of politics and crime and outrage and acts of violence and endless analysis that all leads to the same conclusion: It’s the end of the world as we know it.
And yet I bring you tidings of comfort and joy. The reality is that we live in the best of times. We are healthier. Safer. Richer.
We don’t dream Disney dreams of growing up princes anymore, because no prince lived as well as we do.
Consider: in 1820 90 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 2015, that had fallen below 10 percent. 130,000 people escaped extreme poverty daily. Every day. Since 1990.
Add to that year-round access to fruits and vegetables and foods from distant lands. Notorious glutton Henry VIII never had it as good as anyone who shopped today at an HEB or Piggly Wiggly.
And we are surrounded by miracles. The sun comes up every day. But it comes up at a slightly different time. The light is a living thing, dancing on trees and fences and fire hydrants.
Walk with me, and see the details. I’ve become somewhat obsessed lately with vines growing through the wooden slats of the park fence. They grow a tiny bit every day, change in imperceptible ways. But the light changes daily, and the breezes, and as I photograph them day after day, week after week I absorb those details.
So walk with me. Find you a street or a yard, an alley or a park, a tree or a fire hydrant.
And see it. See it in the light, and the rain, those dog days of summer and crisp days of fall. See it in the light, and the shadow, the night and the day. Make it a routine.
Take you a camera, or a sketchpad, or your Mark 1 Eyeballs.
Walk with me and see.