Damn!

The previous posts that might have been were consumed by my actually WRITING my proposal the last couple of days and by yesterday I was approaching cloud nine, sort of. And, this morning . . . !@#$!@#$!%*.

I woke up with a totally new idea. All along I've been wrestling with contrast, a tool I feel is among the most powerful that photographers have. The proposal that I just trashed doesn't cut it on that score; it just wimped around the edges of it.

With contrast it is possible, as was once said of the job of a diplomat, to hit you over the head and also make you like being hit over the head.

I know this: I don't want to get to just the people who normally look at art and visit galleries. I want to include images that might just appeal to those to whom an art gallery is a foreign country. (My relatives are mostly in the latter group, so I know what I'm talking about!).

I grew up in a small New York town on the St. Lawrence River. When I was 9 or 10, I was yelled at by my teacher for being late for school. The same day I was yelled at by my mother for being late coming home. Between me and the school was a steam shovel digging up the earth for a cellar. I couldn't tear myself away from it. The sound, the rhythmic swinging of its arm, the cascading earth as it fell from the shovel. It was blue and huge and it ate things. And, no one ever made a cute, squishey Barney out of that dinosaur.