Known and Strange Things

“Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in Ulysses,

The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction.

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

“The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s about transformation.” The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, color (or its absence), time of day, season.

ostinato?

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

We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

The term “at home” describes both a location and a state of being. You can stay at home or feel at home, and often those two notions coincide. But what about when they don’t?

Fernweh is a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places. Fernweh is similar to wanderlust but, like heimweh, has a sickish, melancholy tinge.