"I responded, and the image was made."

   The photographer Roy DeCarava, in an interview many years after the fact, described a photograph he took of men coming out of a memorial service in Harlem for the children killed in a church in Birmingham, Alabama.  The “men were coming out of the church with faces so serious and so intense that I responded, and the image was made.”
   This is the answer, or at least a good part of the answer, to the person who thinks, of any particular shot, "Well, if I were there at that time, and I had that camera, I could have taken that picture.  I could have lifted the camera and pressed the button."  But you could not.  Unless you first saw what was there.  And you had it in you to respond.  Not just "take" the picture.  But respond.

Castello di Amore

Empire

   I’m reading The Rising Sun, John Tolland’s masterful account of the rise and fall of the Japanese empire.  My wife, who is Japanese, has no interest.  So I learn the history for both of us.  She need not do the same for me, there being - as yet - no history of the rise and fall of the Mennonite empire. 

A weakness for palm trees

  The Vermont photographer Richard Brown confessed a weakness for birch trees.  I seem to have one for palms.  Flipping through my pictures of Southern California, a good number of the better ones seem to have palm trees in them.

   On our last trip to Northridge, in the parking lot outside a mall, I get what seems to me a worthy shot of some tall palms in silhouette against the orange and blue sky of the rising sun.  An hour later, when my older brother sees it on Instagram, he notes that it looks like the album cover for the Eagles’ Hotel California.  And he is right.

   I wonder if I took the picture because it connected in some subliminal way with my memory of the album cover.  Something like the connection that I still have with 70s music – the music of my teens, the music that got stuck in my head before it got too full of adult things.  You leave your teens behind, but part of you is always stuck there, in the time where you first had music of your own, and learned to drive, and fell in love.  The time when you learned that you not only could, but you must, go your own way.