July 15 2009 Moment versus location

As much as this blog is about writing, it is about the photos. I've noticed there are two main types of photos: one is the preservation of a moment of time, a permanent record of something transient. The other is a photo of something perpetual, a location, a place. I could go back day after day and take the same photo of a particular spot. What makes this second type of shot impressive is the perspective: this is how I see it, a manner instead of a subject. "Look at this thing like I do" it begs.

I remember going to an art show in the gym at my first high school and there was this photographer with a name I remember as being odd in some way, and she took this picture I could not wrap my mind around. It was a pile of rusty nails. "Yeah, so?" I remember thinking. My dad is a carpenter. We had milk jugs with the top carved out so they were open jugs with handles and that's where he accumulated all his nails, and it looked just like rusty nails, just like the picture. So what about it?

So what, then fifteen years has taught me something? No, it isn't the fifteen years that taught me. It is the constant quest for the reason behind the photo of rusty nails. Eventually I learned to appreciate that photograph. She wasn't trying to show me something extraordinary, she just asked me to see it in an extraordinary way.

Thus, join me at looking at the only reserved parking space I'll ever get: as a customer at my bank.



I had the lanyard of my camera looped into my belt and shot this from my hip, which is an odd angle to peer into one's display, there.

Tomorrow's word: rope