“If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
– Warren Buffett
Street Photography
Floods, a photograph
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Life, a photograph
“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” – Aldous Huxley
One’s entire life, a photograph
“How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Every day, a photograph
“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”
– Charles Dickens
Solitude, a photograph
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Good at heart, a photograph
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
― Anne Frank
Cheap medicine, a photograph
“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― George Gordon Byron
Guitar, a photograph
“The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven
Technological sublime, a photograph
“For thousands of years, it had been nature–and its supposed creator–that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs…. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Creative, a photograph of life
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck
Reds, a photograph of Rome
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
People, a photograph
“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart
Off the track, a photograph of Rome
“Remember that it’s only by going off the track that you get to know the country…And don’t let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.”
― E.M. Forster
I’m in Rome visiting my dear friend and editor while working on my book. Between writing and editing, I try to find some time each day to get out and about to both walk and photograph.
Strange contrasts, A photograph of Rome
“It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.”
― Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
Up ‘n down, A Photograph
Up ‘n down
Ferris wheel
Tell me how does it feel
To be so high…
Looking down here
Is it lonely?
-Norah Jones
Anybody, a photograph
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf
They are a-changin, A Photograph
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
– Bob Dylan
Bicycle bicycle bicycle, A Photograph
Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
-Queen
Most Agreeable, A Photograph
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I can generally be guilty of ignoring life.
Latency, A Photograph
“Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness”
― Italo Svevo
Bird of Space, A Photograph
“For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”
― Kahlil Gibran
Twin, A Photograph
“All who joy would win
Must share it — Happiness was born a twin.”
― George Gordon Byron, Don Juan
Maybe, A Photograph
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
– John Steinbeck
Howe Street Dog, A Photograph
“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”
– Charles de Gaulle
Sufferer, A Photograph
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
– Marcel Proust
Friends, A Photograph
“When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
– W. Somerset Maugham
Very Married, Photographs of Marriage
This past weekend I spent the day shooting my first ever wedding on the little island of Vashon. I’m not a wedding photographer by any means, although the couple wasn’t looking for a “wedding photographer.” They wanted a street photographer (like me) to do an alternative to the traditional “posed” wedding as they’re a contemporary metropolitan couple. Pretty much every shot I took, including the ones of the bride and groom, were candid. Who knows…maybe I’ll do it again.
“If I get married, I want to be very married.”
– Audrey Hepburn
To Decorate, A Photograph
“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”
– Frank Zappa
Complete with back-up singers…
Myth, A Photograph
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”
– John Lennon
One Street Shy 