photography

Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he__ place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them.

When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.

In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich.

I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment.In its own way it__ easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they__e guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere.Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera.

When you're taking photographs of people, creating the __erfect scenery_ is always secondary. It's much more important to capture the emotions. Especially when there's true love.

They were all highly respectable in their professions and, together, practically unstoppable. But most importantly, they were on her side. She couldn't feel more blessed....or anxious. She sighed. *in italics* Forgive me, Lord, for being so antsy. For worrying, I know it adds nothing to my life or any help to the situation at hand, but it's my friend's disappearance that we're investigating, and I don't know where to start. I don't want to choose the wrong lead. Please direct our investigation and help me to bring Skylar home. I'm the reason she is the way she is. Please don't let it be too late. *end italics*

Photographers don't take pictures. They create images.

I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery.

A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order.

If it can happen in your mind, it can happen in your camera

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches _ and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person__ (or thing__) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time__ relentless melt.

The best thing about photography: it changes your point of view.