Fire

Fire represents energy. My fire pictures are everything from actual fire, to electrical transmission lines, to gas stations. Our culture is utterly dependent upon abstracted fire (I just made that up!). By "abstracted fire," I mean the energy of fire removed from its source - a distillation.

I have a love/hate relationship with this abstracted fire. It is a marvel to be able to flick a switch and have light. We have devised many magical contrivances to modulate that light. On the other hand, this abstraction has turned into complacency. This abstracted fire typically has its origins in fossilized sunlight, in the form of oil, coal and gas. This material has been a gift to mankind as great as Prometheus'. But it is turning to a curse - climate change as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

Earth

Earth is a big territory, but harder to photograph than air or water. It includes things like rocks, but mostly it is the medium of growth for plants, thus these photos largely examine plants as an extension of the earth. A favorite theme is the plant in relation to human structures. They seek out impossible places to grow, where there is a tiny bit of earth, and then somehow prosper.

Air

I am an amateur photographer. I lack the editing and printing technique that could make me a professional. I do have, however, an eye and a point of view. Perhaps that makes me more than an amateur. There are many out there with technique and really great equipment who don't have any eye. Generally I have been posting these photos to Facebook, which is a venue much more informal. Also, Facebook allows me to create and add to albums, so that it is an ongoing project. A blog post is finite.

This album is Air. I have long loved the simplicity of the Aristotelian elements: air, earth, fire, water. They are, of course, technically antique, but they are still conceptually vibrant. These photos look at the elements from a number of points of view. Sometimes just reveling in how beautiful they are. Others look at the interaction with the human. The elements are a way of exploring our relationship with nature.

Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko
Some of his works are really haunting. The time lapse is just fast enough to register moving people, but slow enough that they appear as ghosts, captured in perhaps a momentary hang in their movement through spaces. Meanwhile, the surrounding buildings are fixed monuments, indifferent to our presence.

Michelle Hagewood

Michelle Hagewood
I love these images. They are detailed and nuanced. They are also fun, made up of the recognizable pieces of our modern built environment. They work at once as a purely formal experiment and as comment.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

It is 99 years from the fictional start of the book. Francie Nolan's family were intensely poor. There is no glamor in how they lived. But there was an intense economy and gratefulness for those things they had. I would not welcome that level of privation. But I would welcome, as a society, that level of thrift, and a focusing of resources on those things that are important.





"The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked a like a lot of green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts."
-Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn