It’s of anything at any time, anywhere.  But somehow, an effective photograph will make that time or place significant.  I still don’t know exactly how that’s possible.  It’s for this reason, though, that so many are attracted to the medium- it’s deceivingly simple, the results unexpected.  Occasionally, they are powerful and lasting.  People make photographs because they want to remember and they want to elaborate.  Maybe, in the moment when the camera does its part in the snap of the shutter, they just don’t know it yet.

Photographs change so many of the ways I see and remember things.  About two years ago, I started a Project 365, where I took a photo a day for an entire year.  Photography, as it happens, is not easy.  I can look back today and pick the photos that I think are effective and memorable for other people, but they all affect me.  Each day, through these photographs, I remember so acutely events in my day and attached feelings.  They are abstract and hard to describe, but they are clear.  A whole year boiled down into 365 photographs, and every single one contains its own complex nets of emotions, events, and settings.  I think that’s really powerful.

It is through photographs that we are able to catch fleeting moments, on the off chance that they might mean something more.  In my opinion, a properly made photograph won’t rely on time or place- it will instead elaborate on a mood.  In other words, the setting won’t seem important compared to the feeling that is evoked.  It shouldn’t be surprising that this can be incredibly difficult.

Most times, photographs rely heavily on reality.  Seemingly simple, taking a closer look at a beautifully made photograph reveals the intricacies and layers of a setting or a time.  It reveals emotion.  But, most importantly, that emotion in an effective photo transfers over to wandering eyes and feeds wandering minds.  No other medium captures change so well.  

Photography fascinates me because anyone can do it, and virtually anyone can do it well.  It’s art- specific and universal simultaneously.  It is so stingingly realistic.  It freezes a moment and preserves it like no other medium can.  It captures change.  The feel in the air.  The lines in a person’s face.  The breath of a moment.  A good photograph needs no introduction.

Whenever your day is in need of something different, I suggest you move somehow.  Create a small adventure for yourself.  How you move and the place you go will depend on your situation, but, if chosen correctly, I guarantee you it will be effective.

If you feel like you need to get very far away, even for a short time, drive.  If you can.  Keep the window down, and let the air lap your face and throw your hair around at odd angles.  Drive and drive and drive.  Maybe, you’ll have nowhere in particular you want to go.  That’s fine. Keep going.  When you want to stop, stop.  

Walk.  There is no way to travel that is more direct.  Skip, jog, breathe deeply, and put your chin up to the sky.  Close your eyes, and open them again.  Knowing that you’re in a different spot every moment is comforting: you know you aren’t leaving anything, save a footprint, behind you.

What kind of setting are you looking for?  

Where those deep, leaning trees bear over the road, and you know that their roots curl beneath it.  Here, their branches are your shade.  Filtrations of light, if the day is sunny, fade and grow, constantly transitioning, on the road and on the surrounding bed of leaves and plants on the ground.  

Look for contrast.  If I lived in a city, I would wait until I reached a spot where road or path would take me to an expanse of some kind.  Proportional to a meadow or to a valley, this allows the mind and the body room to breathe properly.  Reaching a summit on a hill, or even a mountain, brings color to your face and perspective to your head.  Openness creates openness.

Don’t isolate yourself.  The best days are the ones where you can make a trip, and some of the best trips are the ones by yourself.  Around you, I’m sure there are spots worth your time.  Enjoy them, soak them in to face what your life requires of you.

You turned off the light, and silence follows the velvet blue darkness.  But it’s a silence that you can hear, and you’re still awake.  What’s there to do to pass the time, speeding up your journey into the unconscious?

Look out a window.  Choose a spot to look at, and analyze it.  How many lights do you see?  Depending on where you live, they can be stars or buildings.  Try to locate the moon.  If you can see it, locate the man.  Have a conversation with the moon.  It listens to everyone.

Consult a book.  For this purpose, have one close by so you don’t have to leave your area of refuge.  You can’t fall asleep, but that doesn’t mean you want to get up.  Keep something, preferably boring, on the table.  Or, challenge yourself.  Keep a good book tucked somewhere close, but be warned that memory lapse of the read may follow in the morning.  

Think about chores of any kind you have to do the next day.  This will probably make you drowsy from worry and/or unhappiness.  If you’ve heard that working out will tire you into sleep, you’re right.  But to be safe in your chosen area of rest, do a mental workout.  Visualize those dumbbells in the blackness, and lift.

Where is that moment between falling closing your eyes and falling asleep?  It happens every night, but it’s too slippery to catch, even more elusive than memories of dreams.  There’s a switch in everyone at this moment, just like a light.  And the instant your mind flips it, darkness, or else lightness, follows.  Your mind is going through a tunnel.

Hey! You’re waking up now! That means you fell asleep, good work.

I love places.  And as a result of all the places I’ve seen, I want to see more.

Seeing Paris was completely different.  And to be honest, I don’t think my eleven-year-old self had many expectations, except for Le Tour Eiffel.  I knew when I turned a corner that I would see it, and I built the moment up in my head, in the intake of my breath.  Now, I still remember the precise moment.  But I also remember other places-places within places-and moments layered into those buried places.  On a bench near the canal, a man staggering up to us and asking for a piece of our baguette.  Crossing the canal, a dog I fussed over because it was chained up with seemingly no owner.  Saying goodbye to the manager of our hotel and his dog, who were beginning their own vacation.  The blur of my feet up the stairs of the hotel, racing my parents and sister in the elevator.  The view of those golden spiral stairs which wound several floors up.  I’m the only one that can picture these moments precisely in my head, and i enjoy the singularity of it.  We each contain our separate multitudes.  

Sometimes, my memory alone is strong enough to hold these places in the empty spaces in my head.  Do you ever have those moments where you realize you’ll never forget the image in that moment?  A quick, focused picture.  Sometimes significant, but mostly unexpected and seemingly petty.  Later, I think, we all love those little flashes of memory.

In the city of Prague, looking from above, the city is an assortment of orange tiled roofs, converging and then spreading as the city widens, like flickers of a flame.  The outlook is expansive- the river through the city snakes along, separating the buildings, and the castle overlooks the city from the west side.  At night, multi-colored spotlights hit the castle, subdued in the ripples of the water, making the surrounding skyline glow.  The bridge connecting these two sides is also hit by the light, and stands with strong lines, contrasting the organic ones of the surrounding banks and water.

            In New York, the buildings bounce up and down in no particular pattern, and the gray and silver windows reflect light from building to building.  Everything is angular.  The blocks. The grates that blow hot air from the subway below.  The windows.  Overwhelmingly, there’s the sense that nothing is permanent here.  The movement of the cars, the subway, and the strangers on the street all give me this impression.  Back in the Old Town of Prague, the Jewish quarter’s cemetery lays undisturbed, the headstones warped and overturned solely by age.

            But here, on the rattling car that’s not unlike those in San Francisco, I notice that I’m am being stared at.  Not glared at, not in any serious danger- just stared at.  It makes me slightly uneasy.  I grab tighter onto the cold metal pole. 

            Between the streets in New York again, the wind funnels through the buildings and whips at my face, and people stare, but not unnaturally.  The concrete is stained and unyielding.  But I can’t deny that this is home.

There’s the usual mix, but I gravitate towards pencil.  I think it’s where I feel most comfortable.  Like an extension of my own hand, as they say.  Occasionally it will catch me off guard- the pressure of my hand on the paper will betray that extremely dark line that appears.  But otherwise, the solidity, the value of the medium is my respite.  This is what I would go to first.  The pencil can change direction at my slightest guidance, which is both good and bad, but it will never surprise me with color or texture.

Paint, that mysterious creature.  In oils, it slips into the notches of the canvas and melts into added colors.  In acrylics, it dries with permanent stillness.  I still feel a disconnect with my arm and the paints, like there’s a blockage somehow.  The bristles brush the wrong way, and they stick, like hair to the face on a humid day, to the canvas.  The brush, on impact of the canvas, sometimes makes most of the paint disappear.  Worse, after twenty minutes of mixing, my supply shrivels and cracks on the waxy paper of the palette!  Unlike pencil, there is color to account for.  A decision of palette.  A decision of gouache, watercolor, acrylic, or oil.  If oil, there’s the addition of turpentine.  If watercolor, the variations of added water.    There are so many options in paint- this is both some artists’ downfall and some others’ greatest asset.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t enjoy painting.  The potential of the medium is both the strongest deterrent and the strongest determination.  And I know that my opinion of it will change- just as my opinion of pencil has.  What is at first sometimes frustration and disappointment, later comes at least some progress.  All artists are working towards a joy of art.  I can only hope that I will find the joy in painting that I know exists.  A joy of color, like I see already in my classmate.  An overall joy of the process.  Experimenting and practicing can’t hurt.  I drool over the precision of Andrew Wyeth, and the living, breathing, purposeful strokes of Vincent Van Gogh as proof.  I know that a balance of mediums, not just of pencil or paint but of the entire range available, will be a balance of my hand with the instruments that know only the boundaries of the canvas.  But for now, I like my pencil.  I’ll go from there.

At the bottom of my road, the Wickecheoke Creek sputters along, torrenting the day after storms, crowded by trees eager to join its flow.  They lean in like overbearing parents.  On the way down, we pop those black tar clusters that erupted by the sting of the sun.  Pointless rebellion, but my sister’s old enough and we can go without our parents now.  

         The place we always go is up only calling distance from the Covered Bridge, where there’s the occasional thud of car tires on the continually loosening beams and supports.  The water, here through the varying stages of summer, always challenges a route of rickety and algae-frosted rocks to cross to its island where the creek path splits.  In early summer, it’s the birds that conquer our ears and the trees.  But as the summer winds along, the cicadas joins them with an incessant harmony.  By now we tune them out.

If we want, there’s always the angular boulders that rip the current of the otherwise mellow water, separated by deeper pools.  A low, flat one I jump to is always the coveted vacation house.  My main house is scratchy, that ordinary beige color of man-made rock.  One side is scooped out into a ledge where I rest my back against the warm stone, my legs dangle, skimming the water.  Diluted by the thick air and the crescendo of sound, time echoes.

           It happens everywhere in the creative world. An idea is put out into the world and suddenly everyone wants it, craves it.  It’s an idea that makes every artist wonder why they didn’t conjure it first.  Or maybe they did-maybe some other mind just acted on it first.  Regardless, the same issue always arises: does the image so-and-so created remind us of another artist, or does it smother the sincerity of the idea in the first place?

On the online photography site Flickr, artists post their own photos and explore the others on the site.  Some members have their photos disabled for downloading; others just retain Flickr’s copyright.  In photo captions I don’t find it uncommon to see “inspired by…” linked under the photo to an image of another member’s work.  In this instance, most people consider this only flattery.  But take away the “inspired” tag and most artists would agree that their concept is being abused.

But was it explicit or subconscious? And how would you have any way of knowing?  The line between plagiarism and inspiration is changing and sometimes indistinguishable.
           French Director Jean-LucGodard said, “Images are made with other images in mind.”  It’s commonly said that imitation is a form of flattery.  Every thing you create is a combination of all the things you have ever seen.  But what is the line between what is flattering and what is an outright duplicate?

As she stepped into the sun, the girl swept on her jacket and kept up her pace.  She was out the door. She was past the gate, through the hole in the neighbor’s picket fence.  She was across their lawn, making careless marks in their saturated and sandy soil. The most curious bangle dangled from her thin wrist.

            Instead of looking at her feet like the rest of us here, she seemed to avoid them on purpose.  Her arms swung wildly around her, like the gulls would their wings, assuring themselves they were safe on the ground.  She rounded the corner, crashing onto the main street like her waves would.  Above her, the clouds were expectant.  But she continued to skip down the street- pausing, though, every few paces, to lift up to her ear to that odd bangle.

            “How do you do?” she asked, hurriedly curtsying to the pharmacist and then taking her seat at the window. 

            The pharmacist went to work on her ice cream cone.  The girl put her face in her hands - causing the shell to drop vertically from its ribbon off her wrist - and looked upwards.  It started to rain in that familiar way.

            The pharmacist rolled his eyes when the girl put one finger up to acknowledge he and the cone making their way over to her.  Her eyes looked far away as she focused on the sound tunneling into her ear from the shell tied to her wrist.  When she had gotten her fill, she signaled to the pharmacist and he delivered her cone. 

            If the day was clear the girl walked straight past the pharmacy, down the rest of that street as straight and salty as her hair.  She disappeared past the sand bluff, and she was on the beach.  I never saw her with anyone else.

            One day, late last February, it was not the usual skip, it was the deliberate walk, careful avoidance of the sidewalk cracks.  It was fair skies, but she stopped into the pharmacy for a cone.  Then she continued to her sea.  There, under the teeming blue sky, she clawed into the sand.  Once she was satisfied with its depth, she took out a pair of scissors and held her other hand out over the hole.  She cut the ribbon from her wrist. 

She was the girl who lost the sea, but will find another.