The question that haunts such romantic leaps, of course, is whether they are readable (understandable) by a general public. And there is no rule. Perhaps art resides – uncomfortably – somewhere between incomprehensibility and cliche.
I’ve got a lot going on these, a number or projects and ambitions keeping me busy. But I am still making new pictures, however, really focusing on photographs I’ve been making in Denver.
In Denver’s vacant lots one can still find, no matter how numerous the food wrappers and pieces of styrofoam, an old, tough green – Spanish bayonet, cactus, and sage. Perhaps most reassuring of all, there remain cottonwoods, those commercially useless trees that are habitat for birds and children.
Whether I was photographing these accidental sanctuaries, however, or bare new tracts, I tried to keep in mind a phase from a novel by Kawabata: “My life, a fragment of a landscape.”
I pleased with how it all keeps progressing, but I still have high ambitions for what to do with these pictures.
The quoted passages are from Robert Adams, a photographer I’ve admired my entire career. The first is from a letter he recently wrote to me, the second from his book denver.
Slowly but surely, I keep putting the pieces together.
So it goes…
