William Fried

photography

poetry

and

other

creative writing

William

Fried

“elevation”

“388”

This shot of a rectangle cropped by my view finder from one end of a dumpster, is an abstract expressionist painting. Its title derives from the number 388, in mostly white, and some light rust, probably stenciled on, originally, but weathered and faded into an integral element of the composition. One vertical and one horizontal structural member of the dumpster are the primary organizers of this composition. At the top end of the vertical one is a square patch that titillates the eye to choose between a flat or modeled surface. The darker rust at the bottom left of the vertical has a similar effect. It is set off by a vigorous meander of blue from the left edge, expanding its way to the bottom.

Robert Rauschenberg would have been delighted to find it, though he might, afterward, have over- embellished it, as was his wont. I love the power of this work, and am deeply pleased by having collaborated with its originators in selecting a part of their materials to make it a painting.

“a different perspective”

This title plays with the endless debate/discussion among painters and critics, regarding how something that has volume can be represented on a flat surface. It goes all the way back to the origins of perspective in ancient Greece, China, and, notably, forth to Renaissance Italy; and onward from there, to Cezanne, the Cubists, so-called abstract painting, Hans Hofmann, Mondrian, and teachers like Will Barnet.

My photograph was taken in Iceland. I don’t recall whether I ever knew anything about the yellow building with the pinkish roof, except that I really liked the way it was only a little less flat than the wall behind it. Also, it jutted perfectly into the darker pink/almost light red swath of wall. The two blue flags and their poles are as if painted by a “primitive” artist, so divergent do they appear from a photographic rendering, so flat, and with such blithe disregard for verisimilitude. Note the faintly limned cut-off circle in the upper left corner, and how the only really modeled thing in the picture is the little chimney. Some printed letters in the lower left might pass for the artist’s signature but is probably only that of a graffitist. How thoughtful of her (him) to remain squarely within the palette of the picture!

The gray-green wall area is boxed in by the top rail and spindles of my dark, Shaker, wooden chairs, the black frame of the painting, above, and the white vertical window molding to the right. That there is a slight curvature to the upper edge of the rails rescues the picture from absolute rectitude, as does the unidentifiable object on the lower right. What can be seen of the painting in the black frame on the upper right corner is a set of colors that diverge from those of the room and its furniture, yet work well with them.

As the title suggests, there is something not unpleasantly claustral about work. It shares this, to some extent, with several of the horizontally and vertically defined spaces in the paintings of Pieter DeHooch, absent the figures

“all boxed in”

“almost as good as feininger”

Okay, not almost as good, but Feininger liked these colors and enjoyed the geometrical dissection of water, sky, and other uncontainable things. Among those who could be counted Cubists, he was the most architectural and seemed to use a lot of straight edges in his drawing.

The reflections here could be sails and buildings, both beloved subjects for Feininger. He is never included in discussions of Cubists, perhaps because he was friends with Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, the German Expressionists, and the Blue Rider groups. In his works you can see the conflict between architectonics and emotion.

Parenthetically, he was an avid photographer. I don’t know how I made this picture but it does have the appearance of one of those lucky accidents that sometimes occur when you trip the shutter while inadvertently panning across something of intrinsic interest.

The bus from Marco Polo Airport on the mainland to the Piazzale Roma in Venice, crosses the Lagoon on some sort of bridge or causeway. Sitting at the window, I looked at the green water as we sped along. Suddenly, I saw these nets, attached to posts. Apparently it’s still possible to catch fish in the Lagoon.

But I didn’t think of fishing, at all when I saw the nets; their configuration, half submerged and strung from post to post, was nothing if not musical. And I remembered that Vivaldi was a Venetian, as were Monteverdi and Gabrieli, among others. I had to hurry to focus and shoot, and felt very lucky to get the picture you see. Check out the dark blur in the distance, beyond the alternating bands of darker and lighter water. If you can magnify the image, you’ll see that they, too, are fishing nets strung on posts: the visible music of Venice.

“catch as catch can”

“bdwy. & c.p.w.”

My friend, Rhonda was getting married for the first time. She was 78 years-old. She and Charlie, her groom, chose Robert, the restaurant on the 9th Floor of the Museum of Art and Design building overlooking Columbus Circle with views all the way to the vanishing points of Broadway and Central Park West, as their wedding venue. Talk about perspective: WOW!

I got there early enough to take this shot before the ceremony began. So here’s Christopher Columbus, of recently questioned reputation, atop a pedestal, surveying a domain he could not have begun to imagine. He, and everything else in the picture are dwarfed by the dark mass that rises at the vertex where the two great avenues meet. It is called The Trump International Hotel and Tower, the western iteration of the two that disgrace our City. In the competition for the tallest phallus, Donald triumphs, easily, over Christopher. The black tower looms over everything like some monolithic Darth Vader.

In the Hollywood version of the story evoked by this photograph, on the day that Trump loses the 2024 presidential election to Kamala Harris, both the east and west side towers simultaneously crumble to dust, clouds of which circle the globe several times, a la Krakatoa, before settling to earth over Mar a Lago, Florida.

Also found and shot on the way to Venice from the airport, this is quite similar to, but very different from All Boxed In, principally because it is not boxed in, despite the hard edging of everything in it. This may be due to the strong diagonal that leads the eye into and out of the picture. Also, the various tones of blue evoke imagery of sky and water, expansive rather than restrictive domains.

The top half of the frame contains as neat a collection of rectangles as might satisfy the requirements of a Josef Albers. Had he seen this, he might even have offered me a teaching position at Black Mountain College.

“blue staircase”

“bridge out of the fog”

On a recent visit to Japan, I saw a lot of paintings in which fog and mist are prominent elements. This is consistent with the Japanese preference for understatement and suggestion in their arts. I made this photograph long before my trip to Japan, but it was nevertheless influenced by all the Japanese art I’ve looked at over the years.

Having lived in an apartment with a close, and direct view of the Henry Hudson Bridge for more than 20 years, I have shot innumerable photographs of it in all weathers, extremes of light and darkness, different seasons, and many conditions of repair and disrepair. Its color in this shot has not been manipulated; this is the way it really looked, bluish, greenish, grayish, emerging from the fog, backed by a sloping ridge. Nearest to the fog, it is indistinct, but gradually attains an etching-like clarity closer to the apex of its arch. Color, light, and the the occlusive fog combine to lend the bridge an entirely fanciful delicacy. If many of my photographs aspire to the status of drawings, and paintings, this one seems to have succeeded.

Venice has contributed more to the inspiration for my pictures than most other places I have traveled. “Catch As Catch Can,” and “Blue Staircase” are not stereotypic Venice. I doubt you would identify them as Venetian images if I hadn’t. But this shot is unmistakably so, with gondolas and colorful reflections on the surface of the canal. Yet, I think it evades cliche owing to particular combinations of elements.

Though the gondola is idle, without passengers, and the gondolier seated, looking at his cell phone, she (the vessel) remains a beautiful lady, her sensuous curves and damask drapery unspoiled by the bare, utilitarian building next to which she is moored. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, “Age cannot whither, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

Behind, and to the left of her, the sun reaches into the largely shaded niche of canal where the Lady takes her ease. Its glare in yellow and white shows what it can do if given the chance, but this is not its picture; it belongs to the gondola in repose.

“canal opus”

“cycloned fence”

If you look carefully at the title of this photo, you will see that I have added the letter ‘d’ to the end of the first of its two words, thereby transforming it from a fence that is strong enough to resist cyclones and other brisk winds, to one that has succumbed to just such a force. Maybe not, however. Maybe someone pushed the post hard enough to uproot it and buckle the mesh. I think it was Frost who said “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and expatiated further on all the pressures that might be exerted on one by a variety of agents, human, natural, and animal.

If the thing that caused the fence to give way had not happened, however,

It would not have been worthy of a photograph. As it stands (or leans) the image could be an etching, or drawing, the work of a very compulsive draftsman, but because it is a photograph, it can’t be used as evidence of that kind of psychopathology. The white background is snow. It is a color photograph.

These are only clouds, not sooty smoke from cotton or grain mills, nor the outpouring of sooty doctrine from Church of England pulpits. And yet the way they streak the sky with darkness, and blacken the Hudson River shore line, is distinctly sinister. The pink edges of the bottom-most cloud can easily conjure putrefaction, evidence of an infectious process at work beneath the clouds. This would be an apt image for the Covid pandemic.

But there is also something quite different here: the sun’s rays create a line of demarcation, illuminating the left sides of the lower and middle clouds, and becoming continuous with the latter’s dark edge, all the way to the right frame of the picture. It forms an expanding vertex towards the viewer. What softens the menace of the skies is that the entire picture resembles a watercolor.

“dark satanic clouds”

A picture of valves that some engineer arranged according to their aesthetic of orderliness. The top set has larger diameters except for the mysterious attachments that look like sidewise drums, where the top one is smaller. I like the way the two small levers that depend from what seem to be spigots pointing right, slant left. The play of shadows on the central white pilaster is a lyrical ghost of the mechanical forms that cast it. The lower shadow is a diagonal that joins the light ledge supporting the strong black stripe that anchors the entire composition.

My fanciful title juxtaposes mechanical with biological plumbing in the mind’s eye. Unlike today’s tendency to make machines in the image of humans, (especially the analogizing of computers with human brains), inorganic plumbing had to have been conceived before anyone knew what the inside of a body looked like. I’d bet that the pipes and valves in this picture are at least as old as they look, and their design predates the human study of human anatomy.

“diastolic and systolic”

“The Soul that rises with us,,. cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

But trailing clouds of glory

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;”

-William Wordsworth

These two quotations from Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood” were what the image I’ve named “Cloud Tails” made me think of. The clouds look like a bunch of comets, each with a nucleus and a tail. They seem to be moving as a phalanx down the river.

It’s a highly unusual cloud array. The first of the two quotes broaches the theme of immortality in typical Wordsworthian cockeyed optimism. The second, because it is about mortality, focus’s on how the eye turns sunsets sober, a decidedly subjective sentiment that is also typical of Wordsworth. Of the two, I prefer the second, but I am deeply ambivalent about Wordsworth, as witness this short poem I wrote many years ago:

Neo Pastoral

What did you, Wordsworth, really know

Of solitude?

You dreamed your fervent dreams

Of sterile pleasures and Utopic virtues

Little heeding the cricket

That gnashed its crooked file

To darker rhythms

Than your sylvan brain could fashion:

Golgothan daffodils

Undulate in unison

To the breath of drunken generals:

The wheeze of lungs become necrotic

With yellow gases,

The glow of mushroom clouds

Trailing leaden linings—

Intimations of subhumanity

Spreading shockwaves

On a populace

Grown stupid

In your pap of green.

“cloud tails”

But there they are, anyway, rushing headlong down the Hudson maybe to turn Miss Liberty (pardon the pronoun), gold for one magic moment.

Of course, Mondrian would no more acknowledge an affinity with this image than I would the “Mona Lisa.” It is the corrugated side of some industrial building fronted by a structure of horizontal steel beams that have either been painted or rusted red. Some Spaniard with a wonderful eye for color, and the authority to use it, created an unlikely harmony that was ripe for my plucking as our sleek boat slipped along the river on our way back to the Ocean from a visit to the Alhambra.

Everything works in this composition; it is a marvel of proportion and chromatic relation. Though my earlier associations to the Ebro consist of how George Watt and John Gates had swum it to safety after the Battle of Gandesa (here is a short account of that exploit researched, written, and posted on the internet by a woman named Theodora Williams who graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 2020) my more recent ones derive entirely from my own solo circumnavigation of Spain in September of 1987.

“ebro mondrian”

“During the Battle Of Gandesa (1938), the Lincoln battalion and its British counterpart defended a hilltop against the Nationalists. They were surrounded, and communication had gone silent. Countless died. A few, Watt included, escaped by swimming, naked except for berets with their ID cards hidden in them, down the frigid, rapid, and rocky Ebro river. Six drowned, but eight survived. They briefly met Ernest Hemingway and Herbert Mathews, before rejoining the rest of their brigade.”

Theodora Williams

“enigmatic 100b”

This was taken in Reykjavik, on or near the location of the Icelandic Phallological Museum to which it bears no relation. It is composed of a lot of verticals against a variably green wall. The red stripe on the right is arresting in more ways than one. It comes close to being alizarin crimson and occupies a light green background of its own, one that differs from the other green areas by being painted over, in places, by graffiti and a dab of white. The section it occupies may be a turned corner, or merely the continuation of the wall it adjoins.

To see that the address is 100 B, you’d have to magnify the little plaque over the door. There is a mail slot and an electronic intercom that create important design elements. Icelanders are wonderful colorists, as witness the dark red trim around the oblong windows of the blue door, and how it faintly echos the bold stripe of alizarin crimson. White is repeated from the dabs on the right, the post and lintel of the door, the utility pipe, and, finally, the curtain that drops two-thirds of the way down the window.

All of that is 100 B, but what about it is enigmatic? My guess is that it’s a basement apartment occupied by one person, only, who may bear some resemblance to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. That would not be incongruous if the apartment were located in middle Europe, but this is Iceland, an anti-morbid society, where you would not expect to find malcontents fulminating in dark basement flats. Nor would such an occupant be consistent with the colors, the loud red, piercing blue, and purple. He would be surrounded by blacks, grays, and browns. Maybe the B in the address recalls Sherlock Holmes’ on Baker Street, but that’s where the resemblance diverges. I can’t specify what’s enigmatic about this image, yet I insist it is.

Another picture from Iceland is this one that would feature the famous Icelandic Horse if it were the primary focus. Instead, it is barely visible at the distant end of a rambunctious white fence that captures the eye and leads it there. On the way, it passes a scattering of yellow flowers that provide relief from the unrelenting dull greens and earth colors that fill the rest of the space. The white building with red roof seems one with the fence. Here is a case where perspective is the subject. If Christina were standing next to the nearest white post, how different her world would have been!

“eye to the horse”

The sky screams with fiery clouds. They make a low, and dangerous ceiling over the river where a boat’s trajectory traced in water suggests it is turning back, seeking safety downstream. Look at the sky in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” and tell me if it isn’t kin to this one. The lavender river is doing its best to resist reflecting the red of the clouds, but the black, ruin of a shore gives no solace, not one tiny detail, only a pitiless Stygian void.

“fire sky”

When I had an office on. 64th Street between Broadway and Central Park West, I used to park my car across the street in the garage at 20 West 64th. I had a fairly sweet deal with the management that allowed me to park 7 days per week, at any time, so long as I left before midnight and never stayed overnight. The fee was not low, but the convenience it gave me was worth it. One decided inconvenience was having to wait for my car to be brought up from the lower depths by an attendant. This, however, turned out to be what an older generation used to refer to as “a blessing in disguise,” for, while I waited with nothing else to do, my eye scanned the premises rather idly before I began to recognize that it fixed on various segments or constituent entities that could be arranged into exciting compositions. Having my camera with me, I was often able to capture one or a couple of them.

The “Garage Collage” belongs to that group, as does “Diastolic and Systolic.” Likely, the collage was made when someone ripped from the wall whatever was being held on by the horizontal and vertical strips of paste. Probably unintentionally, the black surface was also ripped away in places, leaving this succinct statement about the crucial effects of difference between things that are fundamentally alike. We see this in the figures, grounds, and fractaled edges, as well as in the white supports that are just enough to hold things together, ironically made of glue.

“garage collage”

“sloppy bandage”

“naked plumbing”

Here are some more of the garage shots. The one called “Naked Plumbing” is what the pipes and valves look like before they get bound in the mummy cloth of heat insulation. In fact these may be the very pipes that are covered by the white bandages in “Diastolic and Systolic.” Next, (“Sloppy Bandage”) we see a pipe partially clad in torn, disheveled insulation that makes it appear crippled and damaged. At first, it is grotesque, but the delicate gradations of pink on the plastered wall behind it have a curious beauty and are in no way alien to the carelessly constructed and soiled black ledge and gray floor. The yellow pillar almost shocks but soon, it, too, finds its voice in the dissonant chord. Parking does have its privileges.

“hudson turner”

Turner, I am told, had a flat from which he could see the Thames. I have an apartment from which I can see the Hudson. I am sure that I have the better view. I am equally sure that Turner made the better pictures. But, if Turner had lived in my apartment, and had a pretty good digital camera, he would certainly have snapped off a few of these atmospheric masterpieces, either as mere photographs, or models for his paintings.

This photograph may have proved a dilemma for him because it so resembles a painting. Come to think of it, most of my photographs carry the same encumbrance: I try, and mostly succeed, to make them look like paintings. That is, I choose subjects that I somehow know will do that. Maybe it is facilitated by my lifelong habit of looking at, and loving paintings.

I have often attributed my enthusiasm for making photographs to my paucity of the patience to make paintings, especially as I grew older. “Hudson Turner” looks, to me, like a welcome, like the sun and clouds collaborating to spread their arms over the river, perhaps to embrace the oncoming night. You can see that the time is twilight. Both shores are already dark. The lights of the cars moving north on the Henry Hudson Bridge form a necklace around the headland. Limned at the horizon is the East tower of the George Washington Bridge. The river blends the variegated reds, pinks, mauves, whites, and blues of the sky into a flatter, more monochromatic plane that has the aspect of a rosy glacier. I would ask Turner whether this image cries out for a sound track, an elaborate fanfare by a brass ensemble. He might be appalled.

“orange light balls”

This is the same park, and almost the same view that yielded “Snow Etching,” and although it may have the aura of nightfall on a spring day, it was actually shot in January, very early in the morning, before the street lights were extinguished. The orange surrounding the white bulbs are not translucent globes but nimbuses, or nimbi—both acceptable plurals of nimbus—serendipitously created by the lights. Lots of artists have painted such nimbi with variable results. Ones that come immediately to mind are Van Gough’s “Night Cafe,” Monet’s “Street Lights in Paris,” and Pissaro’s “The Boulevard Montmartre at Night.” The distinct dendritic pattern of the trunks and lower branches diffuse into areas of mottled color at the higher reaches, as if expanding upward from whole notes to Demisemihemidemisemiquavers and passing through everything in between.

If “Snow Etching” conjures Vivaldi’s “Winter,” the music evoked by this image is more akin to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ.” Consistent with the churchly theme, if you look closely at an area about a third of the way down, and a little to the right of center, you will see an arboreal version of a rose window formed by a happy convergence of branches. Also, some of the larger boughs make arches that provide a subtle touch of the Gothic that would make Bach feel right at home.

Speaking of which, the two shots of this park were taken from the living room of my home, directly across the street from what is named “Henry Hudson Park.” And, in case you might harbor doubts as to whose park it is, the sixteen foot, full length statue of Hudson, explorer of these parts, situated at the top of a one hundred foot Doric column at the northern end of the park, should convince you. From that impressive height, he surveys all that he discovered with some slight consternation at the ways it has changed in the course of some four hundred years.

“a glimpse of serenity”

The title says the first thing I want to about this image. It requires no further exposition, so I’ll digress. It is a stone bridge in a Japanese park. The part framed by the arch is outlined in moss of the most radiant chartreuse that follows the clean lines and contour of the ledge on which it rests. But its reflection in the water is sketchy, variable, and more painterly.

Relations between the structure and its image in the water are hard to specify. They are elusive. Looking at them, I am tempted to abandon the inclination to understand in favor of the sheer pleasure of perceiving. There is something delicious about the whole picture: the myriad variations of green in the water, the pink-clad legs that break the plane of the walkway into two unequal stretches, the fir tree peeking in from the left, and a deciduous one from the right. It was taken in the early morning of a very hot day, a place of refuge from the sun’s relentless glare.

Here s what Andrew Marvel said of such places in a poem called The Garden

“The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.”

Perhaps the pink wrapped legs of the figure crossing the bridge are those of his coy mistress

What this shares with de Chirico is the radical perspective by which the building is quickly reduced from a claustrophobically close foreground, to a small, white vertical at almost the horizon; beyond it lies a beach and the figure of a man whose pose is stylized, like most of de Chirico’s figures, as he strides parallel to the beach, carrying a featureless white object. An incidental similarity is the colonnade-like extension atop the white structure that seems a second story to the furthermost building.

“if de Chirico were less melancholy...”

Sunlight discloses the uneven plastering of the near wall, but also puts each of the three utility poles into high relief, their successively smaller sizes abetting the dramatic perspective. Two terra cotta colored objects, a distant bench, and a closer ceramic vessel arrest the gaze and retain it on the composition as a whole.

de Chirico’s vision rendered his subjects disquieting, melancholy, and mysterious. While mine includes enough of those qualities to stir the imagination, it is basically pleasurable in this picture because my palette exploits light and air, opening things up rather than closing them down. But, many years ago, I wrote a poem about de Chirico in which the comparison is quite different.

My Office Window

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, de Chirico,

Was your discovery:

The disquieting inclination of planes,

Your deserted vans and ghostly children

Rolling hoops frictionlessly; shadows described

By a bleak geometry of longing.

Mine are more technologically haunted

By cars glittering under artificial daylight

From lamps that hover high above the reach of vandals

To discourage shadows where crimes can be held.

But the inclination is the same:

The presumption of paving,

The pointless convergence of stone and asphalt

Which accustoms the eye to reach for

Always and forever,

With the houses stations:

A window brooding or blank

To furnish dreams for the passage.

In my 30’s, when I wrote the poem, I was pleased to find myself similar to de Chirico. At 90, I’m not so sure.

This picture of a church in a remote part of Iceland is both impressive and unique. The church is flat, yet vivid before the pale and exquisitely fine variations of blue, violet, mauve and green of the background, and the stark, penetrating green of the foreground grass. Yet, you never doubt that they belong together. One reason is that the boards of the roof and steeple are weathered by moisture and wind to a pale hue that matches those of the background slope. And, despite its stark contrast with every other color in the photo, the white trim of the windows is also acceptable to the eye.

“stark and faint”

I shot this church from many different angles and, after much deliberation, found this the most satisfying. The grass in the foreground is similar to the reeds that front Mount Fuji in another photograph included here. Both images are enhanced by the the stalks against a strip of black. It was an especially raw day, when the wind bit sharply into exposed parts of my body, and I could imagine members of the Icelandic faithful leaning hard against it to get in under that dark roof and petition their God.

“the limits of transparency”

Very rarely, I sleep in a room that is neither my own nor in a hotel. On March 18, 2011, I did. It was one of the guest rooms in the summer house of my friends Jane and Richard in upstate, New York. Whenever I’d visit them, I would drink one of the tasty but powerful Martinis that Richard mixes. I was 77 years old at the time, an age when hard liquor had long since begun to affect me in deleterious ways. At about midnight, after having drunk the potion, I staggered my way up to the room, prepared haphazardly for bed, lay down, and tried to fight off vertigo that seemed to have the tip of its funnel in my solar plexus. Each successful wrench out of that vortex requires a superhuman exertion of will and results in a sensation of having paid exorbitantly for the narrowest possible escape from death.

Improbably, I performed this feat a few times before falling into the stupor that drunkenness substitutes for sleep. On awakening, much earlier than anyone else, the first thing I saw was this randomly creased diaphanous curtain over the window frame that provided a few structural elements to the composition. The less defined window locks added some additional complexity. Though there was enough light to engrave all of the creases, it was not yet dawn. The conditions were perfect for making this image, my camera was waiting on a chair, and I seemed, miraculously, not to be hung over.

I’ve taken the liberty of naming the photograph with reference to a phenomenon that had not yet attained its vogue in 2011: I dislike the concept of transparency and its contemporary applications. Calling attention to its limits pleases me much.

Downtown Santa Fe had a very pleasant vibe. The air seemed unusually clean, the sky a radiant blue, and the people friendly, with a slight edge. As a visitor walking down the main street I felt alert and energetic. I saw this guy a short distance away, which gave me enough time to decide whether to engage or pass him by. I had my camera and there was something arresting about his face that I wanted to capture. I could tell by his expression that he wanted me to stop and talk. We exchanged a few words before I asked whether I could take his picture. He was willing, but only if I paid him. I asked whether $20 was enough. He accepted the money and kept talking. There was not much content, just some disjointed phrases.

In my viewfinder, his face was ravaged and seemed about to erupt into a fit of keening. To see him, nevertheless, retain his composure was excruciating. His eyes, above the premature wrinkles of his cheeks, conveyed unfathomable desolation. The thin, patchy hair on his upper lip droops over his mouth where it meets unruly wisps protruding upward. Together, they appear to be stitching his mouth shut. Their yellowish color may be the only remaining evidence that he was once blond or, more likely, smokes heavily. Even if I had not photographed him, I would never forget him.

“very sad”

Of all the images I have shot of the river, bridges, and surround, this is the most atypical. There isn’t so much as a hint of a bridge in it, and only a limited swath of river. The muted sun and its equally muted reflection provide just enough light to stir intimations of the kind of romanticism you might find in 19th-century landscape painting. But for all the haze and blur of the sky and bank of clouds above the distant shore, the foreground is illuminated with an almost preternatural clarity. A dusting of snow on the limbs of the trees highlights their complex entanglement; not even the slightest twig is left untraced and the almost horizontal adjacent area of pure, flat, white, presents a dramatic contrast.

The dark building near the shore has enough excrescences on its roof to resemble any of the myriad castles that occupy the banks of European rivers. The time of year is winter, the time of day is dusk, the absence of anything warm or cozy is somewhat baleful. If this picture had a musical accompaniment, it would have to be a dirge. “If winter comes,” however, “can spring be far behind?”

“weak sun”

two transients

You will, of course recognize one of the “transients” as Mount Fuji. The other is this plant, several stalks of which show to great advantage against the black lake shore. To the left, five of them have attained a sufficiently prodigious height to be seen “blowin in the wind” before the slope of the mountain. My title compares a very long transience with a very short one. A test of concept formation would ask, “In what way are a huge volcano and a fragile plant alike?” The answer would be that both have a time-limited existence. Such a question would never have made it to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence scale due to the excessive breadth of the similarity. You could as well say that the commonality between any two live beings is that they will both die, and you’d always be right, (at least until that little problem is solved by our enterprising scientists).

Nevertheless, I liked the idea of finding the parallel between two such apparently disparate things because the comparison makes sense sub specie aeternitatis, and may also amuse those of us who find such things amusing. Another contribution to the department of grim hilarity is that global warming will almost certainly melt the “eternal” snow that slides in delicate glaciations from the summit. Like Shakespeare, however, I am certain that my beautiful photograph will survive longer than its subjects.

You met me first in an elevator, an entirely casual encounter that doesn’t really count as a formal introduction. And while I’m not so sure this one does, either, it will have to suffice. I do a lot of self portraits. The vast majority, will not be seen by anyone but me because they are a collection of muggings in which I try to look as gnarled, mangled, deformed, monstrous, and bizarre as I can, to discover whether I can live up to my worst versions of myself and convey, by my demeanor, an accurate correlate of the greatest evil of which I may be capable. I always fail at this, and reflect that I could not possibly have been successful as a movie or theatrical villain. It is somewhat disappointing.

The picture you are looking at is at the opposite pole, not because I deliberately tried to appear that way but maybe unwittingly. I look a little bit, though not entirely, innocent, expectant, and hopeful. What I may have been hoping for, if anything, really, is gone from my memory, but I can tell you that the shot was made in the bathroom of my hotel suite in Macedonia, a stop on a tour of sites that featured Byzantine art. Though traveling with a group, I had single accommodations. The bathroom was equipped with an oval shaped shaving mirror with lights along its periphery. You can see them reflected in my eyes. In such situations, I always fantasize about brief, intensely exciting sexual adventures of the sort that never come to pass. Maybe that accounts for my hopeful expression.

The photo draws attention to the prominent epicanthal folds (there’s a mouthful) that probably impede peripheral vision in both my eyes, but that doesn’t seem to concern me. More favorably. I think I wear the 85 years I’d attained at the time, lightly and easily. I became, and still am, a young old man. And therefore I soared the skies to visit the the holy cities of Byzantium.

“me”

“if leger could be content with one tube”

The art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, named the work of Ferdinand Leger “Tubism,” because he often treated cylindrical shapes with the same enthusiasm as Picasso, Braque, Gris, and company, treated cubes. . No friend of the avant-garde, M. Vauxcelles was equally acerbic about all the artists who were making it new at the start of the 20th Century.

My picture contains only one tube, but it’s a dandy. Almost smack in the middle of the frame, not only is it the single shaded thing there, but the shading seems audaciously prominent, like an arrogant declaration. Yes, there are darker verticals recessing the window on the right and the door on the left, but their relative inconspicuousness all but disqualifies them as shading. It is the bold white and gray of this pole, the chutzpah of its foreground-most position, and the way it compels comparison with the merciless vividness of bright, uninflected color that gives the photo its visual excitement.

But it also contains a narrative excitement that derives primarily from the connotations of the word Prive on a door whose lavender color is cool, and muted in comparison to the two reds and the yellow strip. Further, there is a something suspicious about the window blinds that are light blue, then pink bisected by a darker pink strip on which a small white rectangle is affixed. The whole thing would serve well as a stage set representing an ill chosen place for an assignation, as though the playwright wanted to call attention to the characters’ wish to be caught in flagrante delicto (given the colors, I was somehow discouraged from saying “red handed.”

I took this shot at a rest stop along the road to the airport for the flight home from Morocco, in the area of the toilets. It was at that airport that I first developed symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as pericardial effusion, the excessive accumulation of fluid in the sac surrounding my heart, for which I had to be hospitalized so it could be drained. All that red! Hmmm…

A bunch of leeks, or maybe scallions, in a cobalt glass half filled with water on the window sill of Max and Raeanne’s country kitchen is the subject of this photograph. I preferred to think they were leeks because the great European still-life painters always included them in their pictures and titles. To be fair, however, I looked up the difference between leeks and scallions. What I found didn’t help me to identify the specific members of the lium family in my picture, but it did tell me the name of the family to which they belong, along with red onions, yellow onions, ramps, scallions, chives, and shallots. You may or may not be curious about ramps. I was curious enough to learn that they are a wild allium related to spring onions, and leeks, with a pungent, garlicky onion flavor. Now, in the process of researching ramps, I was also able to infer, incidentally, that the the aforementioned lium is probably a short version of allium, the preferred spelling of which is with two ‘l’s. If you are thinking that this is more than enough pedantry for one photograph, you are right, but only if you are not a fan of pedantry.

I like how everything crowds together in this picture, especially how the rim of the glass works with the descending blue and dark green of the bottle to establish the essential composition. The wicker object on the lower right intercepts that precipitous descent, its filigree reflected in the glass where refraction turns the leek/scallion bulbs a darker shade of cobalt. The photograph could well be a watercolor by a master like Sargent, or Demuth.

I’ve visited Max and Raeanne many times over many decades at their home in Columbia County. There seems always to be something memorable that I can photograph there, if not in the house or on the grounds, often in the nearby cities and towns. I love places that have retained and restored old architecture and artifacts. They are the best antidote against the heedless brutality of big city developers who demolish masterpieces to erect monstrosities.

“leeks in cobalt”

“marred purity”

The intersection of a couple of buildings across from the boat that carried me downriver in Spain was serendipitous enough to create this elegant and deceptively simple combination of shapes and colors. The intrusion of what appear to be two spotlights into the narrower extreme of the yellow patch successfully mars the purity of the whole but to its advantage. Remove the alien element, and the photograph becomes boring because it lacks a center. Now, when Pollack, De Kooning, or Schoenberg abolish a center, the slack is taken up by the entire rest of the work, but absent the center in a work that craves one, and you’d either have to sell the canvas for scrap or paint over it.

You have to look very closely at the gray and yellow areas that comprise most of the left side of the image to see that they are faintly criss-crossed by the lines of a grid. And these, too, almost subliminally, inhibit boredom. Also, notice what is perhaps most exciting about this picture, the way the colors engage with each other: whitish gray, yellow, lavender, and light blue, all absolutely flat. But take a look at the way the line of the slanted roof surrenders to a downward angle before reaching the edge of the frame, another powerful rejection of expectations. If Blue Staircase didn’t get me a job with Albers, this one definitely would.

Freud wrote a paper titled “On Negation,” in which he observed that the repudiation of a statement, idea, or fantasy is often a covert way of acknowledging its validity. Shakespeare illustrated this in the line “The Lady doth protest too much, methinks” in Hamlet. Therefore, you would be justified in finding just such a paradox in my choice of a title for this photograph. It is, indeed, not a Rothko, but rather an homage and challenge to the work of that estimable artist. It contains color fields, but also pipes, wires, the horizontal rods of a grating , some roof tiles, part of a metal gutter, and a couple of transformer boxes. To quote a relevant line I once wrote:

… it is consciousness of need,

Not of art, that compels

These materials to collaborate.

But, if you can crop the available elements with your viewfinder, it may be possible to create something that looks familiarly like a certain artist’s work, is a legitimate variation on the theme of that work, and serves up a response that may include everything from genuine admiration to effective heckling. My color fields are of the smudge school but the differences between the orangey tones of the left panel and the pinkish ones of the right still say something significant about the power of small differences. The linearity and positioning of pipes and wires in concert with the evidence of endurance conveyed by the weathered and soiled surfaces, render this a remarkably strong composition.

The ideal of a quartered frame competes with the reality of what is merely available and loses to it. These proportions are kin to the conditions that obtain in the “middest,” that period between the beginning seen as a golden or perfect age when the visible followed a Euclidian order, and the end which ushers in a new, re-perfected age. The current age is flawed and decadent and like the materials in my photograph, both in need of and stubbornly resistant to repair. It asserts the necessity of its existence by abiding, not in spite but by virtue, of its flaws. If 20th Century painting can be epitomized by the painterly abandon of Abstract Expressionism, its manifesto would declare either that the middle is the sine qua non of the end, or an essential counterpoise to idealization that renders life livable. So please put my photograph next to one of Rothko’s most celebrated canvases, and think about what I have told you.

“no rothko, it”

“positive and negative”

So much depends on which shore you’re looking at, what’s near and what’s further away. Or, as Hirayama, the protagonist of the movie, Perfect Days, puts it,”Now is now; next time is next time.” In this photograph, the near shore is negative and the far one positive. These words carry connotations whether we intend them or not.

It used to be that you needed to make a negative before you could make a positive, by printing on an enlarger. Our digital age has changed all that: negatives are no longer necessary. We click positives into being with the least touch of a finger tip. We almost abolish all intermediate stages of process to arrive at the object of desire with barely a latency. That’s why this image is so important. It was made by a dusting of snow that whitened the ground and left the trees untouched on one side of Spuyten Duyvil, and whitened the trees but left the ground untouched on the other side, perhaps Nature’s way of revealing to us that the Mainland is the negative of the Island, that the Bronx is where Manhattan consigns all of its darkness.

What we can see of the Henry Hudson Bridge whose job is to link the positive with the negative, looks atypically rickety in this shot. Likewise, the mighty GW is blurry and misty, at least around its Jersey tower, as though preparing to fade altogether, like the Cheshire Cat whose only remnant was its leering grin. Thus, the message is elaborated: not only has Manhattan projected all of its disavowals into the Bronx and, incidentally, New Jersey, but now it is abolishing all ties with those benighted locales. And the inky waters of the creek in which heaven knows what creatures lurk, ooze silently between.

Without quite knowing what an aquatint is, I’m going out on a limb and likening this photograph to one. My assumption is based on the fact that most of the picture is monochromatic but there are many small areas of color scattered throughout as if by the hand of a watercolorist.

The title derives from a particular instance of something that often happens when I’m with a group of people who are taking photographs, as on this occasion. The 23 tourists with whom I traveled in Japan were loitering on the platform waiting for our Bullet Train. Almost everyone was looking at the tracks where trains were arriving and leaving, snapping pictures of them, their passengers, and crews. I was looking the other way, at the welter of intersecting lines made by electrical wires and devices; the diagonal braces of the signal tower; the calligraphy of the advertisements on the side of the gray building on the left; in general the details of a tableau that was dwarfed and reduced to insignificance by the imposing size of all the newly constructed, meretricious, high rise buildings, and the techno-glitz of the Bullet train, itself. I was intrigued by the little dabs of sparsely distributed color that rescued the image from drabness.

The larger and more prominent the city, the more seldom does it contain these souvenirs of an older, less socially climbing Japan. You will see deliberately preserved storefronts and aged temples to which tourists are brought, as on a ceremonial visit to a venerable ancestor, but not places that lay no claim to illustriousness and only continue to have an inconspicuous usefulness. I like the fringe of green around the base of the building, and the rushes along the track. The vaunted Japanese gardeners seem not to have regarded them as worthy of their attention.

“waiting for the bullet train”

“pm shadows”

My friend, Pauline, has a summer place on the Long Island shore. I’ve visited her there a few times. Neither of us has swum in the ocean during these visits. We sit on her terrace, talk, and watch the people poke holes in the breakers with their bodies. Late in the afternoon, when there is far less danger of burning or stroking, we take a long walk on the sand and wonder why all the shore birds seem to be flying in one direction.

The sun is so low in the sky and so many people have left the beach for a cocktail hour, that I was able to take this shot of Pauline’s shadow and mine, reaching almost to the water’s edge. She has her arms akimbo (haven’t you always yearned for an opportunity to use that word?), and where my shadow narrows beyond the convergence of my legs, you cant see my arms, because they are close to my body as I hold the camera to my eye.

This is an archetypal male and female couple of the kind that are now called non-binary, as might be limned by the shadows of two statues by Giacometti. Pauline and I, are exactly the same age. When I took this photograph, we were both 85. I love the way the shadows overcome every pitfall of the sand on their relentless progress to the sea.

“snow etching”

Just as the snow created a positive and negative in my eponymous picture, here it has created an etching. It has incised innumerable fine lines all over the page, so everything skitters and flutters with muted excitement. The awkward track of the paths violates expectations in exactly the right way to authenticate that this is the work of an artist, not an engineer or city planner. It’s a little like looking at how Klee deliberately deviates a line from its anticipated course to emulate the spontaneity of a child. The paths are not perpendicular to the trees; they slope by them at variable angles.

Parts of the image look penciled. The whole is musical, like Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Four Seasons. Apropos of which, I have shot this park in all seasons and it never disappoints. One was made on a pre-dawn January morning before the street lamps were extinguished, another in November when only half of the trees were naked, the others still decked out in the gaudy colors of Autumn. But this one, “Snow Etching” bears some resemblance to De Kooning’s marvelous “Excavation” with its scratchy lines and organic shapes that nevertheless defy biology.

“support”

Although this is not really my kind of image, I hasten to own it because it is both cryptic and elegant. What seems, at first glance, monochromatic, is not. That this is a color photograph is attested by the light pink of the lower right rectangle, and the blue tinge to the left of the prominent dark form that, supported by the rest of the composition, gives the picture its name. It is tempting to see that same pink rectangle as the leading end of a partition on which the dark square with the black middle is resting. Except that it would require additional support on the left side to be stable. But the white area beneath it seems not to be a solid, rather something two dimensional.

Mysteriously supported despite its imposing bulk, the dark square is made of five component rectangles, or maybe more, All except the black ones are discolored, The middle square looks as though it might be a murky entrance to an even more murky interior but maybe only surface-painted to look that way. Then there is the gray area with the blue tinge that forms a vertical band from the top to the bottom of the frame, and over what seems to be a white door on the left. A counterpart to this “door” on the right of the picture is a black band from top to bottom with a mysterious tinge of blue where it passes the dark square, creating the impression of a black drape folded slightly away. Edged by a molding, the white door is nevertheless so featureless as to call its identity into question. In fact the picture appears to have been made precisely to raise unanswerable questions. Examining it as closely as I have, leads me to wonder how much of this enigmatic quality I contributed by choosing elements and composing them. Unfortunately, I have no memory of how I made this picture.

Thessaloniki is a thriving city in northern Greece. It has museums and other repositories where the art and artifacts of the Byzantine Empire can be viewed, and that’s what I was doing there, looking at these beautiful remnants of the 12th Century and earlier. The City is also a modern and post-modern metropolis with lots of recent construction. Parenthetically, it was the home of some 52,000 Sephardic Jews in 1940. By 1943, all but a handful had been deported to concentration camps where most of them died.

So there I was, with my tour group led by a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, browsing the archeology, taking pictures, and occasionally catching a few words of commentary and explanation from our guides. Mostly, I could choose subjects from among well preserved relics and well maintained high rise buildings, but on a short bus ride from one attraction to another, I was elated to see this moldering window sash. It was neither very old, nor very new, but qualified immediately for my attention by being a marvel of dilapidation, not only in and of itself, but as the foremost of several that were easily seen through and beyond it. The reflection of the bus window over the lower part of the picture yields an entire spectrum of very closely related tones that are less distinct than their upper counterparts. They are grayer, and appear more haunted, the lines waver from the true. Perhaps the whole configuration echoes something of the City’s troubled history.

“rotted sash”

My home town is Williamsburg, a community in Brooklyn, not the part that has become exceedingly fashionable, but the original habitat of Ultra-Orthodox Jews now known as South Williamsburg. The house in which I lived until I was five stood at the current junction of Bedford Avenue with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It was excised from Keap Street to make room for the Expressway. Having worked in Brooklyn for thirty-two years, and lived there for 19 years before that, I have avoided returning to it any more often than I absolutely must. There is something about Brooklyn to which I seem to have developed a psychogenic allergy.

This said, I am now able to explain its relevance to the picture I’ve titled “Various Verticals.” I was driving home from one of my very rare recent visits to Brooklyn: Casey and Bill, friends whom I don’t often see, invited me to lunch at their Park Slope home. It had been a delightful event, but now, in late afternoon, I was inching along in heavy Sunday traffic. Of a sudden, I passed a construction site that someone had imaginatively appointed with these vertical stripes of uncommon color, in front of which were silhouetted an old-fashioned lamppost, a tree, and the stolid pillar of a more modern street light. The ensemble was captivating, like a trio of musicians, the colors visual correlatives of their music. The trick was to get my phone out and focus its camera with enough alacrity to take the shot before the traffic started to move again. As you can see from the image, I managed to get it done. My gratitude to Brooklyn!

“various verticals”

This image is the record of an event that happened on February 4, 2014. It was sunny with a few clouds at noon when, suddenly, with scarcely any premonition, this heavy snow began to fall on the streets near my office. I was just returning from a quick bite of lunch when it happened. Someone had chained three bikes to one of those stands near the curb, little suspecting that they would soon become caked with enough snow to resemble rough-hewn marble statues. It was like a departure from one of those Greek myths in which someone is suddenly turned to stone, a flower, an animal, or even rain. Suddenly divested of their functions as vehicles of travel, they became vehicles of art.

“snowbound”

about the artist

The mysterious K preceding William, is my first initial. I don’t have a first name. My mother gave me this gift at birth, to honor her father whose first name began with a K, but was too foreign for an American baby. So, whenever the completion of a form requires a first name and middle initial, I am again reminded of my mother’s beneficence. It has been a nuisance all my life, but it’s also kind of cool. Not many people have no first names, and the majority of those who are known by their first initial and middle names do have a first name (for example, William Somerset Maugham; Julius Robert Oppenheimer; and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) but prefer to use its initial. For better or worse, I am K. William. Nobody can be on a first name basis with me.

But you can take a look at my photographs and read what I have to say about them, right here, on this web site. I’m a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, a fine art photographer, a writer of prose and poetry and a movie aficionado. From time to time, I’ll post something here that is representative of one or another of my lines of work. If the spirit moves you, please tell me what you think and feel about any of these posts.

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