Eva Creel (Hirschau, Bayern, Germany) with Silver Lining. “Underwater above and somewhere in between. I’m a photographer. My goal is to suck a little less with every shoot.”
How do you sum up something that’s so huge?
April 25, 2020 by 28 Comments
How do you sum up something that’s so huge?” asks Alexei Hay. “One of the only answers is the emptiness, the thing that speaks to whatever everybody’s going through. The absence is more telling than taking a picture of anybody.” Not long after the citywide clampdown began, Hay, like a lot of photographers, realized this was a fleeting extraordinary moment, one he wanted to document in a grand way before it was gone. What’s on view here is neither a completely depopulated New York nor its usual bustling self but something eerily stuck in between. These are middle-of-the-night photos shot in broad daylight, snow-day pictures without the snow…
The very overfamiliarity of some of the sites — the Flatiron Building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral — is paradoxically what, at this one unusual time, keeps you looking. Nothing is visibly wrong, exactly, but everything is wrong. Ordinarily, if you see pictures of normally busy and now deserted streets, it’s the emptiness that gets you, as your mind goes right to Vanilla Sky or the Rapture. Here, the thing that triggers alarm is not the absence of people. It’s when you see the few souls who are out and about, and they’re less than six feet apart.
~ Christopher Bonanos, from “New York, Four Weeks In Portrait of an empty city.”
Don’t miss Alexei Hay’s photos in the New York Magazine: April 13, 2020.
T.G.I.F.: It’s been a long week!
January 17, 2020 by 63 Comments
Sunday Morning
April 28, 2019 by 45 Comments
It’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves…
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam…
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
– Tony Hoagland from A Color of the Sky in What Narcissism Means to Me
Notes – Photo: Dogwood in Blossom by David Castenson. Poem: Thank you Whiskey River
Smell the earth
March 7, 2019 by 23 Comments
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape;
you can still see very little but you can smell the earth
and feel the wind blowing.
~ Iris Murdoch, from her debut novel: Under the Net
Notes: Quote via punlovsin. Photo by Arend Ruizendaal with Reading.
T.G.I.F.: “Oh, Rob!”
March 1, 2019 by 19 Comments
It’s been a long day
February 13, 2019 by 31 Comments
That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.
– Marilynne Robinson, Lila: A Novel
Notes: Photo: Tatiana Koshutina (via see more). Quote via quotespile
I yearn to go back…I want the days to be mid-summer all year long.
February 8, 2019 by 37 Comments
Notes:
- Inspiration: Brian Kirk – “I want the long hours back but you can’t give me that. Sometimes I yearn to go back even further, to a world defined by family, fields and railway tracks, the sham abandon of the long school holidays. I want the days to be mid-summer all year long, those childhood games that lasted until darkness fell and twilight was a midnight walk back home with a ball at my feet and my head completely empty. Each night I close my eyes and we are young again, before time dragged us down its hungry maw. On waking I can feel I’m falling, but reaching out into the dark I find you, hold on tight.“
- Photo (via newthom)
