Here’s my mom looking at a Cy Twombly at the National Gallery in DC, confused, possibly thinking it sucks.
Earth Day
I didn’t anthropomorphize much as a kid, but the first time I saw another planet through a telescope (Saturn), I started crying because I was worried about “him” being too lonely.
Today I was wandering through Central Park trying to tune out my anger about something when I stumbled upon these ballet dancers practicing. They almost didn’t seem real. It kind of made my day/week/year.
René Magritte, La Tempête (The Storm), 1927
I was in a horrible mood and aimlessly wandered into The Morgan on my lunch break. There is currently an exhibition of Surrealist drawings, and drawings exclusively. (You won’t see any of the famous dorm room posters.) I came across this funny drawing and left feeling a tiny bit lighter.
(They also have some of Proust’s original notebooks and manuscripts on display right now, but I can’t read French. Also: his handwriting was terrible.)
Yesterday I finally got to meet my oldest friend Anne’s son, Eli. Not only does he have a smile that will instantly liquify your heart, but he also has the handshake of a president. I’m so happy she captured our first political discussion.
1) Being photographed by a stranger (intentionally) or 2) ending up in the photograph of a stranger (accidentally): I was always preoccupied with these ideas as a child while on family vacations. I’d fixate on where the photograph would end up geographically and usually imagined it in a box in a basement in some Midwestern town. I’d think about if anyone would wonder who I was in the background. Probably not, but that was the point.
This kind of wonder isn’t anything new or interesting. But I realized that it’s unconsciously operative when I take photographs of strangers (who are all women, apparently). I was just looking at this photograph I took of some girl on an escalator in Stockholm. I wonder who she is, how she’s doing.
I think this fascination is less about the people I’ll never know and more about the truths I’ll never know. The information, the knowledge, the Truth with a capital T that is out there but is unattainable to me. Like when the only evidence in a murder trial is destroyed, or when a missing person is never found. The data is floating around somewhere but we no longer have access to it. No longer having access to something that could have been known: I think that’s why I took this photo.
