There is a resignation in the cone of a white pine,
dropped by its mother onto a clump of dried mown grass,
which I arrange among my collection of spent things,
white sap coating my fingers in resinous gratitude.
Impossible to photograph the entire length of a tree’s tallness in a Redwood Forest. There is no vantage point from which to take in the details of each tree’s skin, branches, fingers, moods.
The palpable energy of the forest, yet quiet and serene, still almost, the silence interrupted only by hushed voices of visitors and the sound of their shoes on the dusty trail.
I moved to New York City from San Francisco to run CBS Records’ Customer Merchandising department, a heady job for a young woman barely two years out of college, producing graphic and photographic merchandising visuals at the recording label that was home to so many musical artists I had loved in my young life.
…I like to take long walks through the villages and cities I visit, taking pictures of street scenes and landscapes as I go. But mostly, I like to take pictures of people, stopping them to ask if they would mind. If they don’t mind, interesting things can happen.
An Asphalt Shadow Self-Portrait remembrance of The Great American Eclipse.
I spent the last two months driving back and forth between New York City and photographer Cheryl Machat Dorskind’s home in Westhampton, New York, shooting her in her studio and in her backyard, accompanying her on professional portrait shoots, a photography boat safari, and random photography walks in the inland wetlands and on the beaches and marsh landscape of Eastern Long Island.
E.B. White’s Here is New York has long been my favorite book about the city in which I live. Published in 1949,Here is New York is thought of as more of an essay because of its short length, a mere 56 pages, into which White packed such timeless observations about the island of Manhattan that this ‘essay book’ has a permanent place on my desk.
In the Summer of 2006, the day before I returned to New York after using my entire year’s vacation to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Siena, Italy, I took an early bus to Arezzo and spent the morning roaming the city taking pictures. After the cool early hours had morphed into lunchtime, I found a little trattoria on a small piazza where I could have a salad and a cold glass of Prosecco to ward off the heat that had begun to rise from the cobbled vicolos.
Arriving, I remember everything exactly as it was – the sights, sounds and smells of a place I have often visited in my memory these past 37 years. White Calla Lilies tucked among the wild grasses alongside Stinson Beach in winter, hawks kiting into the wind, wings outstretched, suspended above the surf. Fog, guardian of seaside mysteries, shroud for molting Eucalyptus, billowing a warning to stay off the winding mountain road, yet beckoning one onward. Sunglasses lightly misting over with sea spray, ears cooled by the coastal wind, dry lips salted and licked. Sea foam and kelp bulbs, children giggling and dogs digging, and cold wet sand rising up through painted red toes.
