The simpler part of this post is the news that I’ve completed a long and complicated journey with a consultant t0 to the creation of a much better, customized website (and here you are, at the goal!). The problems with my former web host had become intolerable, especially when Google stopped finding my website. After years of appearing first in any search using the usual kinds of phrases, my site disappeared completely from Google search results based on typical terms like “Lawrence Russ photography” !!!
That critical problem and a number of others with my old photo and blog sites have now been solved. For instance, now you don’t need to use any “expand” icon to see my photos at full size, and to see their titles with them. The links to all portfolios now appear right on the Home Page with sample images and portfolio names. Clicking on one of those images takes you to thumbnails of all the portfolio’s images, and clicking on one of those thumbnails takes you to a full-size view of the image. With my previous site, readers couldn’t leave a like or a comment on one of my blog posts unless they were not only a blogger themselves, but a WordPress blogger at that!
Now, anyone, blogger or not, can leave a like or a comment on my blog post pages. And now my blog isn’t a separate site. All my posts, including past entries, are under a BLOG menu item on the new website Home Page. The URL of the new website is simply Lawrenceruss.com (no www needed), although www.lawrenceruss.com will still take you to it. And felicitous so-ons and so-ons.
“And now,” as Ed Sullivan used to say on his hit variety show, “on with the show!”
This April 27, through my television’s internet connection, I watched the PhotoShow of the International COLOR [Photography] Awards. It’s a live “show” patterned partly after the Oscars presentation, and it’s broadcast live to venues in major cities all around the world. The happy result for me was that I learned that I had won a “First Place – Outstanding Achievement” Award in the Americana category of the Amateur Division (meaning that I don’t make half of my living from photography), as well as an Honorable Mention in Still Life, and additional Prize Nominations in Abstract, Architecture, Americana, Fine Art (for two photos), Nature, Still Life, Street, and Wildlife. I was delighted by those results, and especially gratified by my first First Prize in global competition. So where do the mixed feelings that I mentioned come in?
Here is that First Place winner, called “Family Day”:
Most of the jurors were not Americans and almost all were from the art world. At any rate, I can’t help suspecting that their choice of my image stemmed at least a bit from a certain dim view of what’s happening in this country (and maybe also some of what’s been done in our past). And that isn’t something that makes me rejoice.
(Which isn’t to say that I intended the image to illustrate current events or a political position. It wasn’t made yesterday, but rather back in 2010; and it appears on my website in the portfolio called “The Perennial Society.” I hope that what it evokes reaches beyond any narrow political or even merely-societal “issues.”)
My beloved Hamlet remarked to his treasured travelling players that they should eliminate all over-acting, since it “is from [that is, counter to] the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Hamlet, Act III, Scene II, lines 20-24.
What such a mirror shows, and I hope that my photo is such a mirror, is sometimes disturbing, but we need to see it — and see it beyond mere surface views. In the biological realm, pain serves to alert us, to protect us from harm. Lepers suffer terrible damage and deformities not from leprosy itself, but because the disease prevents them from feeling pain’s warning signals.
My wife and I just celebrated our anniversary, which is always an anniversary weekend or even a week (really, it’s a year-round celebration). On the night after the Day, we watched Casablanca. Marion had seen it only once, many years ago. Watching it now, the romance was what it marvelously is, but the dreadful surrounding circumstances seemed more dreadfully immediate, given what seems to be coming to our country. And I thought, “What if this were happening here? What if America, too, had become just another inferno, not a place to which the persecuted, the powerless, the hunted people of conscience could escape?
In my next post, I’ll tell you more about the COLOR Awards and the photos of mine that were honored in them this year. And I’ll deal with that partly in relation to a vice from which we all suffer, including us photographers: the spell of the parental-figure complex. In the meantime, I’ll welcome your response to anything in this post. And I’ll wish you the best of all that’s good — LR