LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: My Photography
Dear Li Bo, Brother of Clouds and Dragons
Li Bo, how could you keep your heart from loneliness, calling always to the moon?
The Body, Mortal and Immortal, as a Camera
Yes, the word “camera” is italicized in the original text of this passage from “The God of the Living” by George MacDonald. The word opens an entrance into these thoughts as a revelation of what photography, at least great photography, in its essential, not its merely “definitional” nature, is and aims and serves to […]
Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me
On the front page of The New York Times for Saturday, April 21, 2018, there was an article titled “Over 700 Children Taken from Parents at Border.” It began: On Feb 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through […]
Prominence
I’ve titled this image “Prominence.” Every word has an infinite number of meanings that depend, in part, on the context of its usage and the capacities of the one who receives it. “Prominence,” for instance, has a physical, spatial meaning. It has a societal meaning. And it can, more uncommonly, relate to comparative importance or […]
Windows and Doors and Waves and the Well
“[The] notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would […]
WISHING YOU PEACE AND JOY FOR CHRISTMAS
Lo, in the silent night A child to God is born And all is brought again That ere was lost or lorn. Could but thy soul, O man, Become a silent night! God would be born in thee And set all things aright. – 15th Century
Suspicious Minds: My Farewell and Regrets, for President Obama
With President Obama’s imminent departure from office in mind, I thought of a photograph that I’d taken back in 2003, before I’d ever heard the name “Barack”: “Mr. Lincoln’s Sympathy Viewed with Suspicion.” If I’ve ever captured what Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment” (when “one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart [join] on the same […]
Who Really Made That Photograph? – Part 2 of 2
I drove by the site late one day and took a few photos for my final-stretch planning. After dinner, when I looked at the photos on my computer, I did a troubled double-take. In the few days since I got the property owner’s consent, the very tree whose “pose” I intended my wife to imitate […]
Who Really Made That Photograph? – Part 1 of 2
There is a virtually-unkillable part of us that, when anything we’ve touched is considered successful, wants to proclaim to everyone in earshot (even if that’s only us), “Mine!,” “I did that!” Especially when we’re feeling shaky about it, we stake such claims in order to argue, “I am valuable,” I am special.” Almost invariably, that […]
At Home in the Secret
Photographers, or artists of any kind, are probably more aware than most people are of fortuitous coincidings, of happy or regrettable appearances and disappearances: “I could kick myself for not having shot that scene the first time I saw it, and now it’s gone!” Or: “I sure am glad I photographed that building with the […]