Picture Notes

This photograph was made with a sparkler for a boys camp in Maine and it was used on their annual cover and as a post card. It never brought in new photography work of the same type, but received many compliments anyway. It’s just a trick that can be exploited by the medium. I never photographed a sparkler trail for any other client, but created other photographs that helped businesses sell services and products either by making technical or conceptual photographs or by presenting the product artistically.

I will tell anyone that photography is merely a selection of reality, a moment in time, and there is no truth beyond the image on the computer monitor or on paper. Photography can tell the truth, but this truth is always framed by the restrictions of the medium and the photographer and in rare photographs this truth ends up being the feeling we are reminded of by seeing.

On the office wall at work there is a list of people that have to sign off on a document before it can be published, or sent out as a press release. Over the past three years the list has gone from 3 or 4 people to about 15 and sometimes it still gets rewritten in the end. I wonder why.  I’ve found that when I think I know something, that’s probably when I know it the least or really not at all.

The highlight of the government worker’s day. It seems like this sub is smiling at me.

Accountability and Transparency, where have we heard those words?

Trust is a very odd thing, isn’t it? Once it’s broken, like this window, it can’t really be repaired, only replaced and the memory of the broken window will last for a long time. I’m not sure how broken trust as a concept can be made visual, but thought this was a good start. Broken trust brings up larger issues and reminds me of this fable of the Scorpion and the Frog.  As an optimist I think the fable makes a strong argument for going outside of our nature, for positive change.

I found this cracked window at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. I don’t know why the window was broken, it might have been because the building is round and supported on pilings and has many visitors.