Essentially the Only One

From the garden of Joe's Cafe (site of Rose's wake).

The giant head, that you can climb into, is real. So is the cigarette, but the burning end and the smoke - well, that's a little playing...

In February of this year, we attended a book signing party at Joe's Cafe to celebrate our friend Rose Shapiro's recently published book of translated poems, Poemas Escogidos : Selected Poems, 1958-2006 of Carlos Germán Belli.

This afternoon we returned, but without Rose. She died this autumn after a long battle with cancer. A chance for some personal eulogies by those who knew her well.

A sad contrast then, to see black and white portrait posters of Rose instead the woman herself. Although an intensely enigmatic individual, she touched the lives of many of those around her in a positive way. This was reflected in heartfelt remembrances from a number of speakers.

The mood of the gathering was sombre but not overwhelmingly so and it gave several of us the chance to reconnect with old friends after some years apart.

Yesterday's road trip that gave me this picture took me along the Bluff Road in the American Bottom floodplain across the Mississippi in Illinois.

The fields were active with harvesters collecting the remains of last corn crop, clipping the dead plants close to the earth. The result was an beautiful expansion of this already wide landscape.

The colors now are predominately browns. But so many browns. I felt I had never really seen so many browns.I drove up a cemetery road onto the bluffs near Fults, Illinois and found a lovely overlook down on to this tiny, sometimes flood-ravaged, town.

Then back home as the sky opened up and took all the light from the land.

The Mississippi is in flood, unusual for November. I took the train downtown after work to catch these images.

There's a scene in Ridley Scott's science fiction film, Bladerunnner, where one of the renegade androids tells of his failure to recover his small set of personal photographs. One of these prints, found and analyzed by the hero, will move the plot forward, but, beyond that, the scene is particularly poignant for dfferent reasons.

Bladerunner, like all truly fine future-based science-fiction stories, mixes together the past, present and the future. A film print appears to be anachronism in this setting, but it serves the vital role of humanizing the genetically-engineered replicants. At the time this film was made, the early 1980s, snapshots and film prints were still by far the most prevalent form of photography. Now film is practically dead and an explosion of digital images has replaced it. The unique and tangible artifact, the print, has been replaced by infinitely reproducible images displayable on a pantheon of different devices.

I like this. Still, I feel little doubt that digitization has changed the nature of photography irrevocably, somewhat analogous to the way that the first photographs changed the nature of portrait painting. It has made the infrequent common-place and in doing so has altered the weight of the art. These days it is not uncommon for me to go out and shoot well over 100 photographs in a single day, and I will find a small subset of those to be particularly pleasing, but no more can I reproduce the particular sense of uniqueness that I associate with those solitary snapshots taken when I was much younger.

This is a loss. Even if I have much better equipment, and a considerably better knowledge of photography to compensate.

These thoughts came to me as I regarded a scan of a very old photographic print this evening. The photograph was taken sometime in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It's faded and the color-balance is off. It was taken with a cheap camera and developed by a commercial machine. None of the skills I have learned in the years since went into taking the shot. It's fairly anonymous - there is no particular resonance in the scene with some particularly significant location or event. It's just a path coming out of Chantry Wood near Guildford, Surrey, where I grew up. I walked those woods dozens of times.

Yet, for some reason, I felt drawn to the wooden seat you see in the photograph above. I blew it up, reminding myself in the process of how the grain of analog film differs from the pixels of digital images (despite the fact that what you see is a digitized version). It's fuzzy yet despite the indistinct appearance, I find myself mentally drawn to that seat. I want to sit in it and smell the fragrance of those blurred red flowers all around it. At one time, I might have actually done so - I simply don't remember. But I was there once, looking at that scene with better eyes than I have now.

A single moment in time. One of countless other moments, most of which pass by without any real engagement at all. But this moment was caught, carelessly or not so carelessly - again I simply don't recall. And here it is, a faded print from a box scanned into a computer file. It is not only a window into another time, it is also a window into another window, a different way of seeing. One I hope I do not lose.

Joe Page Bridge.

When something, however off-beat, interests me, I tend to keep tabs on it. Today I returned to my favorite sluice valve with most satisfactory results. To be precise, my visit solved the nagging issue as to how the sluice valve was actually operated.

This had puzzled me ever since I first came across it. How nice it was then to find this elegant solution - a mobile diesel engine and belt drive.I was the only person here by the Mississippi on this gorgeous evening (apart from a Conservation Policeman checking to see if I was fishing on the sly). A lovely evening marred only by the fact that I dropped and damaged one of my older cameras. It still works, but I broke the auto-exposure somehow. Not an absolutely essential feature, fortunately, as long as I shoot using manual settings and I often do that anyway.

A drive through the American Bottom floodplain this afternoon.

This is a view of the Mississippi River bluff from below.



A steep walk up Salt Lick Trail led me to this overlook of the plain. Such beautiful brown fields. The setting sun magnified the autumnal red and gold.Another magical day.

Ever since my son and I watched 'Blink', a spectacularly scary Dr. Who episode, I've been on a look-out for weeping angel statues.

At last I found one. In Calvary Cemetery this afternoon. I was sure to keep a close eye on it while taking these photographs.

What is this plant?

I found it growing in a field on Chouteau Island this afternoon. Looks like some sort of bean to me, but just which one I do not know.

Any suggestions?

Thanks to Linda and Sanshan, I am now sure it is sorghum. Amazingly, I have never noticed it before.