It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
~Mary Oliver From the Asylum Series, a photographic journey into an abandoned Massachusetts insane asylum built in 1854.
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I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don’t matter anymore.
~Kurt Vonnegut (From The Cellist Series, a photographic journey into the musicianship of a cellist.) "We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic."
~Daphne du Maurier #covid19 Senior Portrait and musician photography is usually a fun shoot and Matt Padula’s was no exception!
(with cameo appearances by a few belly dancers.) With the world upside down these days with the Corvid19 situation, booking your session is possible but we all have to play it by ear on when that is safe to do. If you would like to plan for future shoots, please contact me and we can begin a banter on ideas and concepts. info@davidleeblack.com . . . . #musicianphotography #seniorportrait #bellydancer #cameoappearance #Temple #saxplayer #jazzmusician #blackandwhitemood Zoom
When the pandemic hit, we began gathering around the hearths of our screens, for news, or in solidarity with friends and family, for the cold solace of a cocktail-hour booze-Zoom, even for preschool, the grid of domestic scenes and small, hopeful faces meant to relieve us of our isolation, somehow only succeeding in reinforcing it. (Even those of us who tend naturally toward solitary endeavors find ourselves running low on interiority these days.) We don’t know yet what life will look like after we emerge from our Zoom grids, but surely this time has already changed us in all kinds of ways we can’t see yet. The Rona is anything but distant and selective: None of us really has the luxury of opting out, of just not thinking about it. The 2020 pandemic will change the way we see art forever, too, and artists and writers have already begun doing the work of illuminating new shifts and losses, documenting the small kindnesses and cruelties, the large failures of leadership, technology and society. Under normal circumstances, illness is a largely private event; even a common disease is suffered individually. But a pandemic isolates us collectively, as the grid illustrates almost too perfectly; we aren’t alone in our loneliness. When we Zoom, we “connect” along our metaphoric edges. We’ve existed in such grids for a while without really acknowledging it, one might argue, imprisoned in our small geometries of perspective. Grid life seems all too easy a metaphor for a society stripped bare, exposed for what it has become. But that’s the thing about the grid; live with it long enough and one forgets it’s there, until the next catastrophe. Thank you M.OGrady
We seem to be looking at our hands more these days, usually while washing them. Feeling the water running over them is a personal act of purification, cleanliness and not too long ago....innocence. The hand is the most frequently symbolized part of the human body. It gives blessing, it is expressive. According to Aristotle, the hand is the "tool of tools." In general it is strength, power and protection. However, it can just as easily mean generosity, hospitality and stability; "lend a hand". It is used in gestures of greeting and friendship. The right and left have different symbols related to each: right - the rational, conscious and logical, as well as aggressive and anxiousness, left - opposite of the right, weakness, decay, death. However, the two can be juxtaposed to symbolize balance and the middle. Hand gestures are part of our human expression… laying hands on something - blessing, consecration, transference of guilt, healing; raising one's hand - to swear, honesty; hand on heart - love, adoration, salutation; two hands clasped - peace, alliance, friendship; hands at side - negligence, arrogance (on hips). "The hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, shame?” ~Quintilian "But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man"
~Albert Camus “We love to see a child lost in the dance and not performing for an audience. To be happy and know that you are happy is really the overflowing cup of life. To dance as if there was no audience.”
~Alan Watts |
April 2024
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