Illusions: What you see is not what you get by Gary Dwyer

Illusions What you see is not what you get.

GARY DWYER

Illusions

GARY DWYER

Illusions What you see is not what you get.

Photographs and Text By

GARY DWYER

Published by Ångstrom Unit Works Copyright © 2019 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved. No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. • Every attempt has been made to give credit to all writers quoted in this book. All Photographs and writings not annotated © 2019 Gary Dwyer. ISBN 978-0-9979054-9-6 Cover Photo: Violinist, Prague Back Cover Photo: The History of Spain, Gary Dwyer Photography http://www.garydwyerphotography.com http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/478911 http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dwyergc https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/gary-dwyer/id265388372?mt=11

Other books By Gary Dwyer are available on amazon, blurb, and peecho

Introduction Getting what we wanted has never been the point. It has always been about where we direct our attention and why. Often it is because something is missing. Missing from our lives, missing in our imaginations, missing as in lost. So we keep on looking. Over-looking too. We do this thing called ‘wishful thinking’ where we imagine (in our mind’s eye) where something is that has been misplaced. We can see it perfectly, but it is not there. If you want an example, just go looking for your car keys, right now. How about your birth certificate or your passport? We have visions, we make mirages. We look straight at something and we see something else. We can look at a person’s face and, without any provocation, watch it morph into someone else. Our eyes are partly responsible for this, but it is mostly our hearts and minds. On the other hand, we know when we are being tricked. We know television cartoons are not reality any more than hyper-realistic video games. Even if we watch and participate with them as though they were real, we understand them to be concocted fabrications. Today, contemporary technology makes it easy to produce a mash-up of various images. Some of these can be very successful because they cause us to pause and to question what it is that we are seeing. The images in this book are very different from composited images because they are images of things that were actually seen. It might be better to say that these images were recorded because they were noticed rather than fabricated. The images in this book have as much to do with the way we think as they do with the way we see. It has to do with an attempt to understand what it means to look deeply. Imagination can craft illusions. It can also craft dreams.

To leave a mark. Isn’t that what all the arts are about? To press up against a surface

and leave an impression. That surface can be just about anything. Printers speak of letterpress when the metal type presses into the surface of the paper and along with the mark of the ink, the type leaves a dent. You can feel what has been printed. Long before the European painters of the nineteenth century were given the name “impressionists,” artists had been making impressions. Sculptors had been making impressions in clay and stone, painters had been making impressions on walls and panels, poets, singers and dancers had been making impressions on peoples hearts. So it would seem all artists are impressionists of a sort. Many of the great artists have been able to make their marks directly. Those who strove for absolute realism may have been telling their understanding of a story, but they were trying to do it directly. However, most artists make their marks indirectly and consequently their impressions are interpreted in many and various ways. We look at the works of artists who have gone before and make interpretations that may have nothing to do with what the artist intended, but the work speaks to us in new and different ways. All of this has to do with imagination. Looking at one thing and seeing something else. Symbols, metaphors and allegories are occasionally presented in the most direct fashion possible and yet, we consistently see something different than what is directly in front of us. The Christian cross is, in fact, a murder weapon, and yet many people wear small crosses like this around their neck as jewelry. I once named a company “Fox Fire Enterprises” it was an appropriate name because I had a vision of what the enterprise was, but as it turns out, it was a mirage. Fox Fire is an English appropriation of the Latin - ignis fatuus. Literally, “foolish fire”. It is defined as a flickering, glowing, mysterious light that you see at night, chiefly over marshy ground and it is due to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. It is also understood as a deceptive goal or hope. It is an illusion. Photographs are only paper or film or pixels. They allude to something. Photographs are illusions. Photographers often suggest, we hint, but we are not always so direct. Illusions are unreal, they are mirages. And often they exist because the stories we tell ourselves are as astounding as what really happened. The text that accompanies the images in this book are not expanded captions. They are the stories I have told myself about the images. Some of them are as absolutely true and correct as I can possibly make them. Others are impressions. They are things the image has said to me and may have little or nothing to do with whatever the observer of these images may take away. So it is suggested that when you open this book to any facing pages that you look first at the image, then give it a moment to sink in, to get your own impression, and then look at the page on the left to see what I had to say about it. It might be odd to say about a book of photographs, but I want you to

read

this book.

If you just look at the pictures and see the captions you will miss the point. You will have your own impression. I will have mine. We are all impressionists.

hese images simply told me to take them. They are unreasonable. They found me. I had nothing to do with the process. Perhaps that is why they have endured.

hesitated to walk under the archways that were still standing. Like walking under a ladder, you don’t want to press your luck. Besides there was no one else around. There were no signs, no warnings, no fences or gates. No nothing. It was as though there wasn’t anyone left who cared about the castle ruins and you were on your own when you went inside.

The adjacent museum had no other visitors that day and I could inspect this heraldry, this crest, this seal and noticed how many little symbols there were inside. I kind of expected to see a rampant lion or two, but crenelated turrets and eagles and keys and crowns, let me know there was a whole host of characters who were part of this supposed ownership, this somehow royalty, to whom the rest of the population was to pay tithe. The castle next door is in ruins. It has some parts of rounded arches and that tells the Romans had a hand in it, but there are pointy arches too and it is really hard to tell if they are Gothic or Moorish. The ivy is the only thing holding any of it together at the moment. Everywhere was ruled by someone before whoever is in charge now. It may have been Sam Harris who said something like, ‘At some point, all religions are about real estate.’ In this case there was, of course, the Romans, but let us not forget the Merovingians and the Hapsburg’s and the because of the Venetians, it was Italian, sort of, at least until 1955. But, ah yes, the Venetians. They were here for a very long time, as were all the cities up and down this coast. Everything belonged to that great lion of Venice. For a while the guilds and merchants and dukes of Venice ran just about everything in this region. What you can know for certain is that no mater what period of time, some group is in charge. And they are always willing to exert their power to show all the peasantry how they will be protected once the get their castle built. The peasant will even volunteer to be in the army to defend the castle. All the while, those with the crests and the seals will run the show and live like, well, royalty.

Porec, Croatia

am on the left in this picture. The one with the chalice. I am seeking favor, but because the restoration is incomplete, it is unclear as to whom I am seeking favor from? Is it the woman in the background who appears mildly disinterested, but who may, indeed control the purse strings and the real power? Is it the man with the beard and what appears to be a partial halo? If so, is it wine in the goblet or is that a mortar and pestle. The ample bosom and elaborate dress so prominently displayed is of course the real subject but her gaze refuses to greet anyone, unless it is the artist, who quite likely is off to the side. No matter, her eyes are disconcerting. She is concentrating, but not on anything that is near at hand. Perhaps it is the future she is looking toward, but equally she may be lost in something deep in her past. Whatever it is, even when the restoration is finished she is not going to let us know.

I am bound to my mother by her arm and my attire.

I am also the young boy in the foreground. I am creeping up on adolescence, but not quite there yet. I am bound to my mother by her arm and my attire. My necklace indicates power and has nothing to do with decoration. It is to let you know that one day I will be in charge of whatever is in front of me. My position in this picture gives me the power to look straight out at the audience. My mother and I are Europeans. We are not from here. We don’t belong here. What are we doing wearing all this regalia and why are we important enough to have our portrait painted? Above my left shoulder are some pink shapes that could be houses, but they could be other structures. None of this answers the question of why am I here. The reason I am here is that I am Spanish and the diseases my countrymen brought with them nearly erased the native population. Just enough natives survived so we could teach them a new religion and they would treat us like royalty because we didn’t die. I would like to have a discussion with whoever is doing the restoration of my family (?) portrait. What are the dashed lines about? Why didn’t they start in one corner and work their way from there. This isn’t a photograph of a painting, it is a picture of the layers of time, and a picture of a painting looking at us. Photographs have never had the power of painted portraits. 1/125th of a second is never the same as a series of long sittings and trying to stay still. Being painted was (is) a recognition of power. Often of great power, especially wealth and fame. Today that power might be having ten million people on your Instagram feed but that is much more ephemeral than a painting.

Mural undergoing restoration. Cusco, Peru

e had been driving all over New England and the Maritime Provinces, chasing the brightest and best colors of autumn foliage. I had always been told that no matter what anyone else says, the third week in October is always the best color. Well, not always and it depends which part of North America you are talking about.

One would expect the further North you went, because it was normally colder, the change in the tree colors would come sooner. In case no one noticed, these are not normal times and nearly everything about the weather is just a tad harder to predict. A long and delightful loop around beginning and ending in southern Maine where a friend served us much more lobster than was necessary. That route is accurate of course if you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bolt on Boston and New York on the way back home to California. (The place with no weather and no seasons and certainly no fall color.) And then New Hampshire where the colors were doing their riotous best. The bugs were dead from an early frost, the tourists were gone and the water was still warm enough to be enjoyed. Not terribly far from prep school towns - Tilton, Kimball Union, Exeter, and Holderness, all of which I had briefly considered attending and now muse about how different my life would have been had I chosen that route. Maybe forty miles away as the crow flies from Great East Lake where I spent two delightful summers as a youth. Seventy miles south of where my first daughter was born. This trip was not about nostalgia but it came creeping in anyway. Autumn is the season of memory and memory is often place names. In Western civilization, if we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a name for a place it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really exist. The naming of things implies ownership and leads to an awful lot of conflict. Claim stakes, meets and bounds, surveys and courts. This is mine and that is yours. But a place name can unlock time in a way that few other things can. The name provides an emotional image. Something non-pictorial, acting as a time guide. There is nothing specific about it. I recall the scent of New Hampshire apples when I was driving a truck through an orchard but I have no way to describe or even understand that scent. This is not Mr. Proust with his Madelaine. It is bumpy dirt road in an old truck on the way to the dump. It smells of burnt motor oil and yet the apples come through the window. There is no place name for that experience, only a notion.

My feet, Newfound Lake, New Hampshire

eading for disaster, this man is. He’s a pilgrim. You can tell from the length of his long stride. He’s in a hurry, for what we don’t know. Redemption? What the hell is that? Redemption for what? Being alive?

1. The Augustinian Theory. This is also called the Theory of Adam’s Natural Headship and the Realistic Theory. This theory was formulated by Augustine in the fifth century A.D. The Augustinian Theory affirms that, by virtue of organic unity, the whole human race existed in Adam at the time of his transgression. It says that Adam’s will was the will of the species, so that in Adam’s free act, the will of the race revolted against God, and the nature of the race corrupted itself. All men existed as one moral person in Adam, so that in Adam’s sin we sinned, we corrupted ourselves, and we brought guilt and merited condemnation upon ourselves. What rubbish. Thanks for nothing Mr. Augustine. I have some Nepalese friends and they don’t believe in sin, original or otherwise. They believe in ‘favor’. If you do something good in this life then it will be favorable to you in your next incarnation. I find it a much more acceptable doctrine. But enough of that, back to our long-striding pilgrim. What I do wish for him is that when he is in the Cathedral of St. Peter he is able to witness the miracle of art. The miracle of creativity and energy. The miracles of engineering and craft. Just jump over all those religious trappings for a while and see what we humans are capable of when we put our minds and hands to great tasks.

Walking toward the Vatican. Rome

ravel is a study in discontinuity. In fact, you could say it is an invitation for things to screw-up. The real guarantee is when you place too many variables in the same trip. I was once working on a project near Minneapolis.. I had to make the trip twelve times to complete the project and because the project was a great success I didn’t mind all the hopping around from one airport to another. Simple. One person, one carry-on bag.

Now, add into this equation, checked bags, the dreaded TSA, expanded airports, cheaper air travel, intentional over-booking, and another person and you have just upped the ante through the roof. The stress level is now past the stratosphere and heading for the ionosphere. Stir in multiple agendas for multiple stops, rental cars and visits with relatives and you have a recipe for a level of anxiety that is known only by lion hunters, swat teams and astronauts. The operative problem is trying to make everyone happy about everything all the time. This, of course, includes me, who is somehow supposed to keep all of these other things in my head and phone as I am the idiot who suggested this trip in the first place. Oh, I forgot nostalgia. add just a sprinkle of that too because the second stop on this elaborate loop around two countries is Denver. It is the city where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, my family home still stands as well as all my old schools and the flood of memories that go along with all those early years. Upon our night time arrival in Denver, the Denver I remembered is miles away and has developed the character of a poor mans’ Los Angeles and as we drive toward the house my parents had built for them for $11,000 I realize things have changed since I was here last. The Rockies are still visible to the West, but that is one of about three or four things I recognize. My old home, my old schools, a few civic buildings, but the mood is different. Some of the architectural projects I helped design have been torn down. The pace is different. Frantic is the new form of movement and has replaced what my father called, “A moss-backed cow-town that will never amount to anything.” It was about 300,000 when I left in 1973 and today it is 2.8 million. So Much for Nostalgia. Disappointment aside, my wife and I had other agendas for this trip, so after being treated like royalty at one of my former schools because of the sculpture garden I had designed for their campus, we made a far too quick stop in Boulder and Rocky Mountain National Park, then back to the airport out on the Eastern Plains and on to Chicago, Seattle, Bozeman, Butte, Calgary, Bamff, Western Alberta, Yellowstone, and before continuing on to the Islands of the Puget Sound, Seattle again, and finally back to California, and, by chance, we stopped for a single night in Missoula Montana. The surprise was like that of Boulder and Bozeman. Little university towns that forty years ago amounted to nothing had now become sophisticated, trendy and cowboy-chic. Toss in great skiing and the affluent out-of-state students with fluid capital and not high enough SAT’s for the Ivy Schools and they arrive in droves. And along with them come their big city tastes. Two blocks off Las Ramblas in Barcelona is a Tapas joint good enough to be filled with locals. Three hundred meters South of the ‘Parasol’ in Seville, there is an outdoor cafe´ whose specialty is snails, but whose tapas are also world class. The third one in that list of great places to graze is in Montana. If you want to find out the name of this place you are going to have to go looking for it because I’m not going to tell you. Just remember this picture when you walk down the main street of Missoula. You will stumble upon it, like other great things - when you are open to discontinuity.

The third best tapas bar on the planet. Missoula, Montana

aiting might be the most important skill. It is the one where I am the least adept. You would think I would be better at it by now. I have certainly had enough opportunity. Instead, impatience has been my strong suit. Any grace I might have had is always overruled by gusto. It can’t just be me. It could be my gene pool, but I have a hard time blaming it on anyone else.

I always heard that waiting went along with the hackneyed phrase, ‘It gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect.’ None of that ever made any sense to me. I might be the only one who never waited. Pause? What? Why would you ever pause? Aren’t you supposed to be getting on with things, with your life? It might sound like I am the person who is very easily bored. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t recall ever having been bored. I wouldn’t know what it is like. Does it mean you shut down all your senses. Is it an anechoic chamber or nirvana? If so, I’m not interested. MY switch is turned to ‘ON’. and I hope to keep it that way. Perhaps it is the ‘pause’ part of that phrase I have trouble with because the ‘reflect’ part is very much connected to how I have come to function in the world. It might sound like I am the person who is very easily bored. It wasn’t always that way. When I was younger I only saw what was straight in front of me. I don’t think I had much peripheral vision at all, just a narrow little cone of bright light and color. I was a visual child all the way into adulthood. ‘Vai sempre dritto’ might just as well have been engraved on my forehead. It might also be one of the characteristics that kept hunter-gatherers alive. No musing about how the grass grows, go kill the deer. Skiing is the sport I grew up with and one of the things I now realize I appreciate about skiing is that it comes with a sense of direction. Looking back over your shoulder is not ordinarily a part of the game. Pausing? Perhaps, but usually after exhaustion, and even then, until the skis come off you are still pointed a direction, and it is always forward. For the most part, reflection means seeing two things at once. This is not mere multi-tasking, it is asking your eyes to do things they cannot do and that is to focus on the surface causing the reflection and the real thing itself. Bragging about having a narrow aperture and great depth-of-field still won’t get you there. You can have everything in an image in focus like Andrew Wyeth did, but you can only look at one part of the image at a time. A reflection is an enigma. And until we get rewired, it will probably stay that way. It is not a tool to avoid waiting, nor is it a pause. Noticing reflections is a way of discovering how much there is to see in the world.

Floor, Tourist Office, Dubrovnik, Croatia

shot this image in 1989 and it would be a longer time still before I heard Lyle Lovett singing the last refrain of ‘This Old Porch’. And it would be even longer before I understood how thin the ice really was underneath that diving board.

“This old porch is just a long time Of waiting and forgetting And remembering the coming back And not crying about the leaving And remembering the falling down And the laughter of the curse of luck From all of those sons-of-bitches Who said we’d never get back up.” It was Bob Dylan who said Alan Ginsberg was out of date because poetry alone didn’t make it [sense]any more because people got their emotional connection to words through music and songs. I probably do agree with Dylan, but Robert Frost said, “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” I guess both poems and songs use words to say what can’t be said. ••• I don’t know how long it took us to get here but we had come from someplace in the desert. I remember her posing, standing at the edge of the diving board, looking elegant with vague thoughts about a life she would never share with anyone, even herself. Looking back now, I’m not convinced she was even there. Just as easily I could have been on another expedition, by myself. Another springtime exile, wandering, probably in the desert, but at least somewhere where I could see the stars better and soften to the noise inside my head. Isn’t that what we mean when we say we want to, ‘Get away for a while’? We don’t really want to get away from anything as much as we want to get away from ourselves. To get away from that constant racket that hammers us when we are half asleep, strangled by the fragments of dreams and how they tangle with the upcoming tasks of the day. They say dreams are imaginings. If they are, my images are often two different movies projected on the same screen at the same time. The sound track is only from one of those movies, but it is often difficult to tell which one. The light in my dreams is often grainy and yet somewhat like what the Venetians call ‘pellucid’. It is a kind of light I always mistakenly thought was limpid, vague and misty. So many misunderstandings. How is it we have a single thought that is clear, much less transferable to another. I must have been trying to untangle the racket going on inside my head. Music was out of the question when all I could hear was the sound of trip hammers, grinding wheels and electric arc splatter. I needed stars and dark and I didn’t try to think about it. It was not even an idea. I packed my tent and camping gear, opened the garage door and drove away. I needed a refuge. Does the word refuge come from the word refusal? That ice was, oh, so very thin.

Lake Tahoe, California

rench Sailors were fond of this fabric because it was tough enough to put up with the rigors of working at sea. They called it “Serge de Nimes” after the port where they found it in the South of France and de Nimes became denim. Dunga is a district of what was called Bombay where they used indigo dye for the same fabric. The weave made it dark blue on the outside and lighter on the inside. Portuguese sailors brought it to the French in Genoa and instead of calling the pants made from indigo blue dyed Dungarees they ended up calling them after the port and Genoa became ‘Genes’ and finally Jeans. Then of course Mr. Levi and his miners, and his rivets and San Francisco.

Because the “Levis” on the mannequin in the window had been ‘stone washed’, what ever that is, the fabric became distressed and the color mottled. The pants had been partially wrecked in order to look older and whoever bought these jeans / Levis paid a premium price to have her pants partially destroyed. Ah, the winds of fashion. Ah, the winds of fashion. Around the bend in her knee is the balcony of a house designed by Antonio Gaudi. Even if you have to look hard to see it, the difference from the houses reflected in the adjoining panels is astounding. Time and expense have done some of this differentiation, but most of it is due to Mr. Gaudi not paying attention to anything except his own internal sensibility. Antonio Gaudi spent the last twelve years of his life living in a tiny corner in the basement of the Cathedral of La Sagrada Familia dedicating all his time and effort to the construction of the Cathedral. Demonstrating a level of dedication as far removed from the winds of fashion as ‘stone washed’ is from carved stone and yet, today they exist on the same street. Not the mere smear of history, but testimony to the enduring beauty and elegance of the ordinary workers clothes and the stone of an iconoclast who not only dared to be different but was able to convince everyone else he was designing enduring beauty like no one else.

Storefront reflection, Barcelona, Spain

ir travel has made distance meaningless. The only question that gets asked at the end of a flight is, “Did you get any sleep?” There are times when I feel like I am the only one who takes the trouble to look out the window. The temperatures, (-60 F) the speeds and the distances make all of it incomprehensible so most travelers simply choose to ignore it. I have experienced -55 F on the ground and might be the only person on any given plane who has. I sit in amazement, thinking of the aluminum skin of the plane and wonder how it does not simply crack and crumble apart at that low temperature, much less at close to the speed of sound. The plane is a miracle we put out of our minds as we watch a video or try to sleep in spaces best suited to four year old children.

Traveling in a car is much better suited to putting us in touch with time and distance. Even if we are bored witless by flat and seemingly endless stretches of road we feel compelled to look out the window. Even if it is only the fear that the driver might be falling asleep, we keep our eyes peeled. But even with all that looking, we never really internalize the place we are moving through. We are still inside this bubble moving fast enough for only glimpses. We never see much of anything from a car. Those insane enough to ride motorcycles get a much better understanding of where they are and one step further are those on bicycles. Along with sailors, they might be the people who actually understand a force we often ignore and it is the wind. The walker is the one who gets the truth. It comes at them from all directions. The angle of the sun, the exact velocity of the wind and what it means to what they do next. The sound of feet on the ground is amazingly delicate and precise information but it requires quiet in order to be understood and that quiet has to come from inside as well as out. The walker understands the relation of light to distance no other form of movement provides. It speaks of hunger,fatigue and fear all at once and makes a composite that tells the walker how to behave and this composite is updated constantly. Without thinking, it is the only thing the walker thinks about.

The walker is the one who gets the truth. I am now on route. A clever phrase we use to say we are not really anywhere yet, rather simply in the process of moving around. This time I am on a smooth road some where between Murrmbateman and Jugiong. I could have gone to Mount Kosciuszko with some friends, but instead I am heading South toward the Rural City of Wangaratta and on South from there. The front of the bus has a cage of Rue bars around it to protect both the bus and us travelers as we roll through what is mostly barren Outback interspersed with Eucalyptus forest. We make our understanding of ourselves by way-finding and placenaming. Without those names I would not know that I am in Australia on my way from Canberra to Melbourne. ‘Roo Bars’ are steel pipes on the front to protect the bus when it hits a Kangaroo, and the term Outback refers to everything outside the cities. It is one of the most appropriate terms in the whole of the English language. If you go ‘Walkabout’ in the Outback, if you don’t know the names of things and places it might be the last walk you ever take. Melbourne and Sydney are two of the most civil and sophisticated places I can think of and yet twenty-five miles outside of either of them you might think you were on Mars. I am terribly glad the man driving this bus knows where he is going and even more important is that he knows how to get there. I used to ride my bicycle through the bush, (a known, often contained form of the Outback) to get to work. The path was a mixture of Acacia and Eucalyptus and I thought I knew the trail well until one day I had a flat tire and had to walk my bike several miles through the bush. When I was walking I started to understand a little more something of where I was.

View from the bus. New South Wales, Australia

ount Shasta in Northern California is not a major mountain, but it was one that defeated me. Everything I did in preparation for that climb seemed reasonable and correct. I had the proper clothing, gear, food and experience to spend two nights on the mountain. One on the way up and one on the way down.

It was summer and the snow fields from the upper glacier started abut half way up from the base. It was a steep, sweaty and hard slog getting to the snow from the base so I was happy to take a break to put on my crampons and take a moment to enjoy the view. Soon enough it was back to the assent. Solo this time, when I knew there should have been at least three for safety. Solo because I knew the route and this was an easy climb not requiring any technical expertise. I had a rope and an ice axe just in case. Solo this time because it was a thinking climb, not a climbing climb. A thinking climb is something you should never do because you are distracted. You are never with the mountain and it is dangerous because you are not aware enough. Suncups are in the snow now as I am on a south facing slope and the sun is on my back, but it has drifted westward and the light is getting flatter. Before I can get to the glacier proper, the light is fading to a degree that tells me it is time to find somewhere to pitch my tent. By the time my tent is up and my gear arrayed, it is twilight, but on the edge of dusk and there are dark gray clouds coming in from the west. In only a few moments I am inside intermittent clouds and it is starting to rain. I am camped in a tiny flat spot at one edge of a trough filled with snow. Each side of the trough is a ridge of sharp stone. To get out of the rain I sit inside my tent and look westward into the clouds and fading light. There is about three hundred feet of snowfield between me and the stone ridge on the other side. Just as the swirling clouds part for a moment a thunderclap and a flash of light happen simultaneously. It is lightning close enough so there is no distance in time between the sound of thunder and the flash of light. Immediately I gather my crampons, ice axe, and as many metal things as I have brought with me and move them as far away from the tent as possible. Aluminum tent pegs and frame too as I fold the tent around me like a bivy sac. In the next instant there is a stripe of light on the opposite ridge. It came from higher up on the mountain and raced down the opposite ridge. The sound of the passing light made my ears ring like someone had slapped me with a waffle iron. It was the first time in my life I saw light that had thickness. Not like the flash from an arc welder or even an electric furnace, it had mass. Yellow pulsing light three feet thick. It brought me a new message: Move. Even now, many years and many mountains later, every time I see an image of a climber I am wondering if his mind is wandering or if he is really with the mountain.

The North Face store and its alley. San Francisco, California

nce you practice and eventually master some rather demanding technical skills, the process of taking a picture is rather simple. The first of a great series of difficulties comes when the photographer looks through the viewfinder or looks at the screen and then tries to decide what to include in the image and what to leave out. In what has become a gigantic collection, I can usually identify when and where I took an image. I brag about having a good visual memory. What I don’t brag about is what I have forgotten. What was outside the frame. What was really going on as opposed to what the casual or even intent observer sees inside the frame.

Forget comes to us from the German meaning ‘to lose.’ In the case of the photographer it more than likely means to disregard. It is where peripheral vision evaporates and looses meaning and is one of the reasons so many people have died taking self portraits. We find ourselves so fascinating while taking our own picture we fall over the rim of the grand canyon. We forget where we are. It would appear that forgetting is an essential skill. It keeps our memory banks from becoming cluttered with information we have no use for. However it is odd that we remember things very painful to us that I can’t find any use for either. Are they reminders of what not to let happen again? If they are, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. In photography, the real work is in the editing. I am always angry when movie credits roll and the editors get such small recognition. Deciding what to put in a movie and what to leave out is the hardest work of all. The same is true for still photographers. With digital being so inexpensive, thousands of images are taken for a single image in a magazine. Then the editor, but first the photographer, has to decide which ones to forget. Often this process is visceral, irrational. It happens with emotions and reason that are so compressed and so fast we even have an expression for it - ‘Trust your gut’. Dis-regarding and forgetting are harder for me than remembering and I don’t know why. Perhaps because what is inside the image is only the beginning for me. It is certainly the most important in the scene or I would not have found and captured it, but also it expands. It helps me remember the context, the surroundings, the other people involved, the time of day, the temperature. We speak of memories that come flooding back as though they were an unavoidable tidal wave and it is because they are. The image is only the key that unlocks the door. The observer gets to choose what is on the other side. There are a couple of choices here. Depending on who sees this image. It is either a Bastille day celebration fireworks on an island in the Seine River in France or it is a firefight on the Han River outside of Da Nang, Vietnam. The observer gets to choose how to do the edit. What to disregard, what to forget.

Location and date unknown.

ost fine art painters in the past were content to attempt precise depiction. The invention of perspective improved that and made images more engaging. A few decided to take perception even farther than perspective and used a technique called Anamorphosis. It is a tecnique using distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point to see the image properly.

This mural by d’Emmanuel Maignan (1601-1676) is over twenty meters long and when you walk down the corridor you get the impression of a long tree with a smeary landscape. Fair enough. As if precise depiction was not hard enough, the mural, viewed from the corridor on the other side, describes a tower and houses of a port town behind where Saint François de Paule supposedly walks on water and at the same time is being carried across the Straits of Messina on a boat made out of the folds of his coat. Really? Maybe Dali and the rest of the surrealists were just using a form of an old idea. Saint François de Paule supposedly walks on water. Distortion or seeing the same thing from several vantage points at the same time is something the cubists try to take credit for. Given the date of this mural Picasso and Braque only came up with a later version of the same idea. When I first saw this mural, I had no idea what it was about or even what I was looking at. Perhaps it piqued my curiosity in the same way other imagery I was attracted to because I wanted to understand it better. Early on, I didn’t (don’t) understand much of it at all. Sometimes it is okay to just be amazed.

Upstairs corridor, Saint TrinitĂ dei Monti, Rome

ow this is a useless picture. Well, not quite. At first glance it appears to be useless because you (the reader) are not me. It is not an image one would ordinarily associate with nostalgia because there are no people, there is no time reference other than peeling plaster. It could be almost anywhere by the sea in the sub-tropics. But that is because you are not me.

What I see is not a reflection of a time but a reminder of both a time and a place. It is a town that fulfills my expectations about how an ideal town should look. It lives up to my preconceptions. A pre-concept is one before a concept and is one that has been taught or absorbed previously. I can even identify the physical qualities that cause the town to seem idyllic to me. • It is the right size to have made a modest living from the sea for centuries. (Population 28,000. • The buildings and houses respect each other in materials and style of construction. It is both harmonious and unified. • The church and attendant plaza are large, but not ostentatious. They are also a little off-center, nothing radiating power, instead gathering and community. • The cemetery is on the hill above the town. (You should have the best view when you are dead.) • The shoreline is accessible to everyone. Yes, some houses have a better view of the sea than others, but that is inevitable. • Longevity and durability are visible qualities. It is rooted. It belongs to this place. I did neglect to mention that it is so small that everyone knows everyone else’s business. And that I have only seen it off-season, when it wasn’t swamped with tourists taking selfies, making an outrageous amount of noise, and generally being obnoxious and turning the town into a rather unpleasant experience. It is a bad sign that there are yachts in the harbor as well as fishing boats. Maybe in the 30’s or even up through the 60’s it would have been an amazing place to rent a house offseason. Have a chance to get to know some of the locals and perhaps play a game or two of pétanque. Today, towns like this, and there are many, become ghost towns in the winter. Empty of all life and activity from November until June. Nothing, just sad and empty. For towns like this it is all or nothing. I’m just happy we were there in May.

Menton, France 2007 The only thing that has changed in almost ten years is that somebody finally decided to get to fixing that plaster wall.

Menton, France 1998

pend just one night in or near the town of Trim in the Republic of Ireland and you will probably see some fishermen going after Trout in the placid river Boyne. Both the river and the town are adjacent and the nearby castle was used as a set for the movie ‘Braveheart’.

When you are there, don’t dare mention the ‘Battle of the Boyne’, (1690) or you will enter into a firestorm of controversy about what constitutes Irish history and no sane person wants to enter those treacherous waters. My parents were protestant Irish, I have visited, and even lived for a time, in the Republic of Ireland (Catholic). The Break-away Province of Ulster, that still belongs to England, is half Protestant and half Catholic. I have been to many Catholic services and have been to a large range of Protestant services and aside from one being in Latin and the other in English, for the life of me, I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. OK, I get that the popes were not what they should have been in the fifteenth century and more, than just in that century, and I do understand that Henry the Eighth wanted a divorce, and that the pilgrims to America thought a little differently than the Lutherans or the Methodists, but please, just stop bickering over whose mythology is the greatest, OK?

Cemetery (Catholic, of course) near Trim, Ireland. ...When you’re dead, you’re dead..

pparently the most successful way to conquer a people is to build your new temple, in, near, or on top of their temple. The Spaniards seem to have had extraordinarily good luck with this tactic both in Europe and in the Americas.

Another tactic, surprising to both the Spanish and the locals was to accidentally have European diseases (notably smallpox) kill of an astonishing sixty to ninety percent of the indigenous people. Adding fuel to the argument that the Europeans were a superior power to any of the Inca gods and emperors. The Inca Empire was enormous and short lived. It extended from Cusco to present day Santiago, Chile. It had control of around ten million people, but only lasted a hundred years, until Francisco Pizarro and his gang took over. The Spaniards who built this convent were excellent masons (on top of an Inca palace) but the Inca who built many temple complexes far outstripped the Spaniards in both skill and technology. The temple on which this convent was built was the temple of the sun and was considered to be the center of the universe. Cultures always do this. Rome, Egypt, Berlin, Washington, Beijing. The lust for power being what it is will probably do us all in at some point as we ordinary folk seem to be unable to reign in our leaders.

I seem to spend a great deal of time looking at one thing and seeing something else.

The reason for the reflection here is the glass top of a display case showing what was here before the Spanish arrived but it is hard to see because the reflection of the Spanish Convent gets in the way, just as you might expect.

Convent of Santo Domingo - reflection, inside the Koricancha (Inca) temple complex. Cusco, Peru

ow many layers are there to our vision? There is the layer of focus: the place where we tell our eyes is the most important issue of the moment. There is the layer of memory: the place where our mind goes to hide and dig and to feel deeply, but without clarity and much confusion. There is the layer of wishfulness: the place where we look at something but our mind is telling an entirely different story. There is the layer of regret: The place where we block out almost any information, especially new information and our regretfulness thinks of the things we wish had happened instead of what did. It is where we have conversations with ourselves saying what we wish we had said. The layer of regret is the opposite of the layer of focus. There is the layer of imagination: where we see, or at least we think we see something other than what is there. It is this layer that can confuse us and delight us at the same time.

We are unsure how imagination works. We have some clues and a lot of research has been attempted on the topic. Imagination is thinking, but not all thinking is imagination. Thinking is a lot more like rumination or searching while imagining is more like putting the pieces together of something that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yet exist. Imagination is where different neural pathways in separate parts of our brains work together to create something that does not exist. Without imagination we would not have dreams. The image at the right exists in that layer of our vision where things are almost in focus. We have a notion that something is going on but we are not quite sure what it is. Our peripheral vision accomplishes this task for us all the time. Out-of-focus peripheral vision is like an alarms system, a distant early warning devise and it often saves our lives. Having a blurry image is like an impressionist painting. It engages the observer simply because it asks them to complete the details. The image at the right is not like a Monet painting because it is not idyllic and there is not enough information to know what is going on. What makes us interested is that we can recognize human forms and we always want to know what is going on with other people because we find people the most fascinating creatures. Many years ago, Kodak made a detailed study of the history of photography and discovered that 90 percent of all imagery ever produced photographically was that of people. Even when people are barely visible, one of the layers of our vision tries to find them.

Elevator shaft. Foz do Iguacu, Brazil

rchitects like to take credit for all sorts of design solutions that have been borrowed from other cultures and other times. I. M. Pei did not invent the pyramid, he just used it a s a brilliant metaphor plopped down in the Louvre to show the Napoleonic limit of the French Empire when it extended into Egypt. It is a symbolism that is lost on even most French people today, but none the less, a grand gesture.

Another French architect Le Corbusier had such a big ego he even invented a name for himself. (Le corbusier means ’the raven’ in French.) He designed two brilliant projects: The monastery at La Tourette and the complex at Ronchamp. (La coline Notre-Dame du Haut) Almost all rest of his work, with the exception of a few houses, is pure rubbish. His skills as a city planner and urban designer would have left us living in ‘Blade Runner’ sooner than we already have. However, the Ronchamp complex is pure genius. Most visitors and many architects focus purely on the Chapel. It is not the whole deal, but it is certainly the center piece. One of the things visitors find so striking about the chapel is the south facing stained glass windows, where, to quote Joni Mitchel, “And the sun poured in like butterscotch.” The reason the sunlight pours in this way is because the walls are constructed like the arrow slits of medieval battlements. The walls are made from rubble masonry and are thick enough (40-60 cm) so the windows openings are quite small but the opening on the inside is expanded considerably. The window at the right has a similar function in that in order to see out you must get up very close Just like the archers did when they were trying to see their enemy. Only this time, they want to let light in, but not so as to distract you from the art that is hanging on the walls. Well done. Hats off to Benthem Crouwel Architects. At least they didn’t need a special extra name.

Window, Rijksmuseum â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Museum of the Netherlands, Amsterdam

t must have been a hell of a job being Hadrian. Controlling the construction of walls everywhere, his own colossal villa, the Pantheon in Rome and trying to run the Empire at the same time. The job was certainly beyond the capacity for one man, but he did an awfully good job of holding the pieces together. On might expect Hadrian to have great projects in Spain because he was born there but so vast were his interest he even had cities named after him in Asia Minor and was very involved with Greece to the point where the Athenians erected an arch to him.

However it was Machiavelli, who named him one of his five “good” emperors and it was Scipio Africanus who was victorious at Alcalá del Rio near present day Seville and founded the city Italica and his army crushed the resistance of the native Iberians and soon transformed Andalucia into one of Rome’s richest and best organized colonies. No, I didn’t know all that, it came from a various group of sources on the web and I appropriated it, mostly because my skills at Roman Latin are rather limited and when I saw this contemporary memorial with no explanation nearby, in any language to understand, like everyone else, I went to the web. Still, there is not much very specific about this particular location. Being someone who continually seems to try to look at more than one thing at a time I was surprised to find a photo mural of a ruin physically installed into the Latin text so you could see both of them at the same time. This image is more of an exercise in seeing than one of historical understanding. They will probably get around to the translations plaque later.

Monument / Memorial to Roman constructions. Seville, Spain

ell, well, well, faith and begorrah. If it isn’t ‘tree tings’ at once. (At least many Irish would say it that way.) The street, the reflections of the showroom windows across the street, the photographer himself, and even the projection of an important government building as a video on the window. Or is that four at once, I loose track. No matter. This is just a simple single-frame still image. Like all the rest of the images in this book, the only Photoshop that has been used was for cropping and cleaning. No Layers, except those that confront us every day as we walk the streets. One of the great treats of being someone who walks around with a camera is that I can find the unnoticed, the unusual, and often very complicated.

... a little change in the point of view.

The same street with the same video projection on the window but a little change in the point of view.

Temple Bar. Dublin, Ireland

erhaps it was Via Guilia instead. When you don’t take advantage of all the date/time/GPS features of your camera/phone you become completely dependent on your journal and everyone who has ever written in or drawn in a journal knows how notoriously undependable all that information can be.

There is a chance we were on our way back from visiting the Museo dell’Ara Pacis - A short bus ride or a rather long walk back home to Trastevere. Rome is like that. At one moment it is all clear. Lucid is a better word, and then it all fades, becomes blurry and indistinct. As though the scrim from one of Puccini’s operas drops over your vision. Fatigue, perhaps. Stendalism, yes that too. Even for the most numb local or the oblivious tourist, at a certain point you no longer care what is famous that is whizzing by outside the bus window or whatever store you have walked past a hundred times. Okay. Is this my stop? Or the proxima? It doesn’t matter, I’ll just get off here and figure it out then. I glance sideways while walking and something catches my eye. Are those naked bodies doing something in an antique store window display. I stop, focus and press the shutter. Nothing more significant than that. Boom, done. Another day of looking. Looking as hard as I can.

Museo dell’Ara Pacis, The Altar of Augustinian Peace. 27BCE to 180 AD, Rome

Window display. Trastevere, Rome

small miracle is finding a parking space within two blocks of your hotel in the center of Paris. This time near La Place Sainte Catherine. It is small with none of the pretense of its neighbor to the north - Place des Voges, and almost none of the distractions. It is also where good memories spring into view. Walking distance from the Musée Carnavalet whose library is wonderful but made nearly inaccessible by the tangled mess of French bureaucracy. Walking distance from BHV where I got the key to Claude Monet’s house copied and near to 20 Rue Rambuteau where Edgar Degas bought his pastels and next door to 20 Rue Rambuteau was the former studio of a Mexican painter friend of mine who introduced me to most of his favorite haunts like ‘la Tartine’, a wine bar on Rue de Rivoli where Trotsky used to hang out, and eventually back to a café (long since disappeared) in La Place Sainte Catherine where a brusk matron would serve us wine until the wee hours of the morning. We would discuss painting and philosophy until we were all just drunk enough to stumble home to whatever and where ever we were calling home at the moment.

Realizing that night with Guillermo was decades ago and the rain on the roof of my rental car parked near La Place Sainte Catherine was when I was there recently with my wife. There must be a switch somewhere in our brains that uses images to time travel. Certainly our other senses do as well, but since the advent of photography we wallow in an ocean of time in a way that was never possible before.

... we wallow in an ocean of time in a way that was never possible before.

At Guillermo’s studio (with one of his terrible paintings) before we went somewhere, as he said, “To make some noise.”

Roof of a car after a rain. Paris, France.