Known and Strange Things

FEW THINGS ARE more mysterious than someone else’s favorite film. To hear it named is to be puzzled. You appreciate its merits but not how it can be preferable to all others. Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible

Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.

An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it.

Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly.

I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out on the kitchen table. I played on them, without a sound. Neighbors came by to listen. —from “Grief Gondola #2”

ekphrastic

Proust once wrote in a letter, “We think we no longer love the dead because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”

In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice.

“You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”