LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: My Photography
No, No, “Arcane” Doesn’t Mean Anything Like “Archaic”!
I’ve already written and published on this blog, on October 19, 2014, a post about the portfolio that includes this image — shortly after I self-published a book of the photos in that series: . . . What is kinda funny to me is that after naming that book with what was then the name of the series, “The Arcane Machine,” I felt forced to change the portfolio’s name, because I could tell from people’s responses that many of them mistakenly thought that “arcane” meant something like “archaic.”
A Christmas Surprise (and My Antagonism towards Categories)
Recently, I was out walking with my camera, as I often do, like the bear in the nursery rhyme who went over the mountain “to see what he could see.” Passing through the local railroad station, I saw a handwritten paper note taped to one of the train passenger shelters. . . .
Romancing the Stone (and the Sun and the River and. . . .)
. . . Zen classics say that the world after satori is, in some ways, just the same as the world before satori — and yet, everything’s different. My connection to the Devon Bridge is positive and intimate, but people, including artists, aren’t taught to recognize that relationship, or what to call it. It goes beyond common education and beyond the terms and habits of photographic society.
Visionary “Correspondences”
. . . That is what opens up, in immersive fashion, in mystical experience: a sense that one is experiencing not some kind of glorious hyper-illusion, but rather the universe as it really is, when the doors of our perception are opened. And it’s that manner of vision that the greatest artists to try to evoke or manifest by their art, in works such as “Pepper No. 30” or Wynn Bullock’s “galactic” “Tidepool, Point Lobos” or Olivier Messiaen’s Lightning over the Beyond or Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it’s central to what I pursue in my own art, in photos like “The Window Is at Your Feet,” “Ritual,” “Grass of the Midnight Sea,” “The Tree of Unsleeping Surveillance,” “Uprooted,” the “Marion” images, most of the works throughout my portfolios.
Blessings and Bridges for New Year’s Transport
As many of us know too well, New Year’s can bring us dejection as we review, unkindly, all that we have and haven’t done to date. Having been hard on myself lately almost to the point of cruelty, the passages from Rumi below, which I wrote out for myself just yesterday, seemed blessings. And, of course, Rumi intended them to be blessings for me – and for you, and for anyone else who might come to read them at any point on the space-time continuum.
Happy October 31! with Skeletons and John Keats
Just last week, I passed by a place, a remarkable display, that became the subject for a portfolio that you can see now on my photo website: “The Mansion at 13 Skeleton Drive.” https://lawrenceruss.com/index/G0000cX1diIbKkuA
To Be (Seen) or Not to Be (Seen) – Part 1
This photograph currently appears in “The Portrait 2022” issue of the online journal, F-Stop Magazine. Let me tell you its story.
On April 25, 2019, just before noon, I was walking in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut with a Canon 5D Mark III and the old “nifty fifty” (50mm f/1.8) lens. At McLevy Green, next to the Bridgeport Town Hall, a couple of people were playing chess at one of the concrete tables on the edge of the Green. . . .
A Surprise Communion across Continents, Classes, Centuries, and Cultures
. . .In dejection from all the awful and discouraging news about reactionary political victories, rampant viral sub-variants, catastrophic droughts, and increasing violence (as well as, for me, unhappy views about my own self), I found myself doing something that I’ve done on occasion over the years, especially under stress: I was hand-writing, long past midnight, a list of my favorite artists and mystical writers. That exercise can calm and comfort me. not just as an obsessive-compulsive ritual, but as a reminder of real treasures that I’ve been given, for inspiration and illumination.
The Self behind the Self – Juan Ramon Jimenez and Jim Carrey (yes, That Jim Carrey)
In certain of these posts, I’ve put together two stories or quotes that go at one thing from different directions, or whose common ground isn’t obvious on the surface, aiming to spark for you some realization that can’t just be given or explained. This time, the two sets of words that I’ve joined come from two seemingly-almost-comically-different sources. The first is a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, the Spanish poet who won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature and was a leading figure in what is sometimes called (with good reasons, like the writing of his kinsmen Antonio Machado and Lorca). The second set of words is from a speech by the American comic actor Jim Carrey. Jimenez may not have had the same kind of extremely zany humor that Carrey has shown in his movie and TV career, but Jimenez was anything but a stiff. One of his most wonderful books is a work of prose, Platero y Yo (Platero and I). Platero was his donkey.