Archives for August 2016

I like the light in this first image on account of it was fading fast and felt magical to me. Not a special image, or a flashy image for that matter It just felt like bein’ safe at home on the edge of a summer storm when I took it.

In the next image, I had just finished a workout on my deck and noticed that the sun had dropped behind the house. It was suddenly a bit chilly, despite the sweat I had worked up and the heavy breathing that had overtaken me. I leaned on the railing to catch my breath and to stop the flood of thoughts: that exercising to recover my health had brought on the END TIMES for me. And I was also thinking, not for the first time, that 911 was my new favorite number. The chill inside a summer day is a theme in my life and has been for years; as a kid at summer camp knowing too soon that the fun and games would likely end before I got that first kiss from the red haired girl in cabin three; that school was starting and that meant all the pressure around getting into college to avoid the draft for Vietnam was already building up; that the days of ease at the cottage on the big lake were drifting and real work in the city would take over with all the striving and scheming that made up my life in those days. It went further back than all that, to a time when my family ran a hotel in the Catskill mountains that would empty out completely on Labor Day morning, the vast lobby and dining room empty of all but a few stragglers. In my memory, every year clouds covered the noonday sun, as I felt the chill of fall as we packed up and headed home to the city.

Now, that is a lot of stuff for a brief instant on the railing of the deck. But even so, when I saw the image above, I knew that I was right on time and exactly where I belong, doing what I do.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“The camera sees what I, unconsciously, want to see, because it feels that way: a painting by Winslow Homer, a Matisse blue, a quiet, surreal mind scape where all is possible, where everything is in its proper place; a reflection of my childhood’s memory of a far- off place occupied by happy elephants and talking monkeys, a place long gone but apparently still with me.”

This paragraph is part of a piece i wrote in 2010 about a image of a boat.(http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/photography/minnesota-sunrise/). it was one my first attempts to write about both the process and results of my photography work. I changed the tense in the paragraph because it is still the case that photography for me is about the relationships of light and memory in the frozen instant of the shutter click; and the end result is still and forever what it is, more so than what was intended or found accidentally, despite the skill and technology if faithfully applied to the end product. And now that I am SEVENTY years old I am claiming a Senior Dispensation.

The photograph that follows is called “Old Man in a Hat.” I don’t see any happy elephants there or talking monkeys but I know them and they are part of how I do what it is that I do to stay engaged and productive. This is not so easy given the health challenges that are now part of who I am in the world. I am a writer, a photographer, Grandpa Michael, a recovering addict and all the rest of it. When asked how I am I generally say fine, this despite a medical file the size a Volkswagen Beetle circa 1967.

So why are there three images of boats in black and white in this piece? Mostly because I like them; they are among my favorite images, they capture my long lived sense of ghosts in the aftermath of activity – the moment when a favorite place is out of season. Where all the guests go home. When the fall chill inhabits the last breeze off the lake and the summer is over. When the chill is inside your bones and sometimes inside your heart and you shudder quickly and do not know why, and all is lost for awhile. You come to know that it is time to hunker down, draw the family close, shutter the windows, chop and stack the fire wood; time to get ready to ride out the winter winds of another trip around the Sun.

Turning seventy on Sunday last had that feeling for me. Recognizable and familiar. I wanted to embrace that world inside the poet’s phrase: “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” Hell, I will say it again just like he does: “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” Want to ain’t enough. Now is my time, older boy of summer that I am, and winter is comin’ in.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.