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.