Tag: photography
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Macro San Miguel
I’ve always found something simultaneously appealing and off-putting about California missions. The architecture nestles with organic seamlessness into the surrounding environment (aesthetic intent as necessity, perhaps, since at the time local building materials were likely the only viable option, but still). On the other hand there’s the way they were built and maintained: typically with indigenous laborers who, even if they came…
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Subject and Object
On the first day of my first metaphysics class, the professor asked a student to count the objects in the room. She confidently totted up the people, the desks, and had started working on the whiteboards and pens when he interrupted her. “What about the chair legs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Or the screws…
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Lessons Learned at the Aquarium
A weekend in Monterey and 683 photos later, I have made certain discoveries. Photography lessons learned: Social lessons learned: Monterey Aquarium California, March 2014 (for higher resolution versions see SmugMug gallery)
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Spring
I’ve lived in Atascadero for seventeen years and towards the end of every winter I become a fretful Demeter waiting for Persephone: unconvinced that thistime the decimated, disconsolate yard will emerge from Hades. It always seems to, mostly. The fragile, fragrant white apricot blossoms peek out first, their temerity usually rewarded by a crushing late…
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Faces of Monterey
Monterey always catches me a little off guard when I visit. Growing up in Southern California I was accustomed to beach grunge chic: wind and salt and the scouring sands made a pristine exterior out of reach for even the most dedicated (and wealthy) residents and merchants. Beachside buildings were always a little bit dirty,…
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Being Candid
Sometimes I wish I enjoyed photographing landscapes more. They’re so blessedly…stationary. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of children and wildlife during even my short tenure behind a camera, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to capture them in their natural state. One tends to run towards you, the other away. I…
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New Camoldoli Hermitage
I had been looking forward to a few days alone at New Camaldoli with unseemly eagerness. When August arrived I had a broken elbow, a dodgy lower back, and a fretful elderly mother who thought I was going specifically so I’d be out of her cell phone range. I spent the week restless and preoccupied.…
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Atascadero Lake
Atascadero is a town of about 30,000 inhabitants nestled between more well-regarded siblings San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles. It was founded in the early 1900s as a utopian colony by an entrepreneur who was indicted several times for mail fraud and who perhaps didn’t realize that his beloved community’s name, loosely translated from the…
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Epistemological Exercise
A branch of philosophy that investigates the methods, limits, and origin of human knowledge. A visual document of a moment in time: a cloudy eighth of May at approximately nine a.m. in Sand City, California when a singular number of crab husks littered the beach. What can be said about it? * * * These…
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