Tag: Photo

more, more, more

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Unlike writing, which is a vocation mired with maybes, the camera, for all of its complex mechanisms, can only say yes. Photography is, for me, a medium of unanimous affirmation, the shutter creating a yes so total, so entire, nothing in its frame can be denied presence. Though the impulse to fire the shutter can be entangled with doubt, the act is swift and irreversible. Once the photo is made, the only way to turn back is to destroy it.

If, as the photographer Garry Winogrand has said, we take photographs to see how the world looks when photographed, I make pictures of my brother to see the parts in him I cannot see in real time, my eyes too myopic, fleeting or faulty. The photograph invites true study, the frame fixing the world in place so that myth and truth accrue within our gaze. In this way, the image offers more of a person than what was first attainable at first glance. The shutter goes from saying yes, yes, yes to more, more, more.

— Ocean Vuong, from “My Brother’s Keeper” (NY Times, June 11 2025)

Notes:

  • Photo of Strawberry Moon @ 4:19 am this morning @ Cove Island Park. See more pictures of the moon, the fog, the sunrise, egrets, herons, and an amazing TIME LAPSE VIDEO — all found here.

Year of the Dog

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“A baby in a hospital in Bangkok is dressed in a dog costume to celebrate the coming Year of the Dog.”

And here I thought every year is the Year of the Dog…

Notes:

 

There’s the eagle’s world, and there is mine. Let’s Fly.

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eagle-close-up-eyes-beak

As I watch the eagle rise above the bay, I let myself drift out beyond an edge, as though I were moving across the edge of sleep…I am filled with the same disdainful surge that releases him from his perch, feel the strain of air trapped in the hollows of his wings…The eagle sweeps away in great, lazy arcs, drifts against the corniced peaks, and soars up toward the smooth layer of cloud…At three thousand feet, the feathered sails flex and shake against a torrent of wind…I can feel the lash of gusts as the eagle planes above the mountain, gaze through his eyes at the fissured, snow-laden peak, and share the craving that draws him more deeply into the island’s loneliness…I have flown, however artificially, and have looked down over the island and the strait. But I can never know what the eagle sees with those blazing eyes, what are the shapes of mountains and shores amid the maze of detail that leaps into his brain.

There is the eagle’s world, and there is mine, sealed beyond reach within our selves. But despite these insuperable differences, we are also one, caught in the same fixed gaze that contains us. We see the earth differently, but we see the same earth. We breathe the same air and feel the same wind, drink the same water and eat the same meat. We share common membership in the same community and are subject to the same absolutes. In this sense, the way we receive what surrounds us is irrelevant: I have the eagle’s eyes and the eagle has mine.

~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Notes:

Every stub. Every whisker. Every mole. Every freckle. Every eyelash.

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bald eagle

The bird cranes his head down to watch me, so the plumage on his neck fluffs out. HIs head is narrow, pinched, tightly feathered; his eyes are silver-gold, astringent, and stare forward along the curved scythe of his beak. Burned into each eye is a constricted black pupil, like the tightly strung arrow of a crossbow aimed straight toward me. What does the eagle see when he looks at me, this bird who can spot a herring’s flash in the water a quarter-mile away? I suppose every stub of whisker on my face, every mole and freckle, every eyelash, the pink flesh on my eyelid, the red network of vessels on the white of my eye, the radiating colors of my iris, his own reflection on my pupil, or beneath this reflection, his inverted image on my retina. I see only the eagle’s eye, but wonder if he sees down inside mine. Or inside me perhaps.

~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Photograph: Fairy-Wren

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: You up yet?

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cute,close-up,photography,funny

“The pictures were taken by veteran nature photographer Steven Kazlowski.  The images were taken in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, along the Arctic Coast of Alaska.  There are currently around 20,000 wild bears living in the Arctic Circle.  That number could be cut by two thirds by mid century if the Arctic continues to warm due to climate change.  In 2008, the US government declared polar bears an endangered species and banned all American hunters from returning from Canada with their trophies.  Norway is the only country that has banned all hunting for the species, with Russia, Alaska and Greenland allowing native communities to hunt the bears as a food source.”

DON’T MISS Kazlowski’s other incredible pictures of the polar bears here.

Quote & Image Source: Dailymail.co.uk