The farthest place you can go

Look don’t get me wrong, the penguins were cute. Unbelievably, irrepressibly cute. 

But I wasn’t there to photograph them. 

I was there to photograph glaciers. Ice falls. Million year old formations that continually shift and creak, but just might be gone altogether in five more years. I had been inspired by the work of John Paul Caponigro and hoped to capture some of the beauty he had found. 

As it turns out, once you do make the extraordinary effort to get down there, the beauty is not hard to find and it’s not hard to photograph. It’s surrounds you. It engulfs you. The light itself is purer, undisturbed. No architect could possible come up with the twisted, melted, re-frozen structures to be seen everywhere. 

And the only way to re-create and share even a fraction of its grandeur and glory is to print it on as large a canvas as possible.

I’m not a bucket list kind of guy. If there’s something worth seeing in my lifetime, I’ll probably want to go back again and find/explore more than I found the first time. So hopefully I’ll get the chance to go back and find more than I witnessed the first time.

If/when I do, I still won’t be taking pictures of the penguins. There’s lots of penguin pictures out there. Try Thomas Mangelson, for one. If I’m going to show you a penguin picture, it’ll be because I was lucky enough to see them doing something no one else has ever been able to capture before.

OK. Fine. One penguin picture.

A word is worth 1,000 pictures

A poem can contain the kind of simplicity and truth that it opens the way to a multitude of images.

I’ve got a multitude of images saved on my hard drive. When I go out shooting, I take lots and lots of shots of whatever it is that has caught my eye. Sometimes, it takes the right song lyric or overheard thought to help me complete developing the image I’ve shot. And when that happens… it’s a new work to share with the world.

At the end of the movie JoJo Rabbit is a short poem by Reiner Maria Rilke:

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

I don’t remember if I took the pictures before or after reading this, but this completed the feeling I had when walking through the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas. It’s a street fair with performers, tourists, children, hustlers, couples about to be married, people at the end of their rope, the entire pageant. From over 100 years ago, Rilke’s words called this collage out from me.

On Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Cemeteries - anthologies of bygone lives, galleries of the most gifted stonemasons - are waaay cool hangs.

Here for your consideration are a few examples from the cemetery known as Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland. It first was set aside as a graveyard in 1561 for 'eschewing of the savour and inconvenientis that may follow thairupoun in the heit of somer,' which translates to 'taking into consideration the smell and inconvenience in the heat of summer' and you can bet that was a consideration for picking a spot for any other number of mortuaries worldwide.

The Bone Minder

The Surgeon’s Grave

These are portions of the tombstone of surgeon James Borthwick (d.1676), and you can be forgiven for imagining that Mr. Borthwick (for centuries surgeons ferociously distinguished themselves from mere doctors as having received a thoroughly different training) himself must have presented a fearsome personage in the flesh. What did his beloved surviving friends and family tell the headstone carver they wanted that came up with this? Yikes!

Memorial for a Child

Greyfriars has a fascination filled history, soaked in blood and mystery but also the pride of national heroes, medical, surgical and scientific pioneers and even modern inspiration: one may find here tombstones of at least eight characters and families from the Harry Potter story.

Greyfriar's Bobby

And Bobby. One of Edinburgh's two memorials to a dog is Greyfriars Bobby, the loyal terrier who guarded his master's grave for 14 years.

Non omnis Moriar* indeed.

*Not all of me will die

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Ask an artist why they made something and you get half an answer: “it was bursting to come out from me.” But there’s another, equally important part rarely acknowledged: they wanted it to be seen

Art needs to be seen, these pictures are of art being seen and experienced.

A few great thoughts to chew on: Talent hits a target nobody else can reach, genius hits a target nobody else can see

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.