Another view of Lovejoy Fountain.

Despite the nice weather and a large lawn to mow I've been getting in a little darkroom time between yard work. 

Salmon Street Springs a downtown Portland Fountain.

William Shakespeare - Sonnet #18


"Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

Lovejoy Park

Recent Photographs taken around Portland

Pettygrove Park

Rose Festival Fleet Ship

This years entry in the Waterfront carnie festival or "fun center" as they like to call it where the City of Portland prostitutes a city park closing her off for a week and charging all citizens admission to enter her.  I always take a picture of the ferris wheel from the Morrison Bridge with city in background.

Here is a previous years entry, 2006, a bit more dramatic but back then I used to try harder.

And another, this done with a medium format 6x6 Mamiya camera.

Another from 2006 using Infrared film, from a different angle.  The Ferris Wheel gets moved around a bit sometimes being on the North side of the Bridge, sometimes on the South side.  Sometimes the Ferris wheel is in a North-South orientation and other times in an East-West.

 "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since-cancelled woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before."
Shakespeare

"...artists need a room with no view
a place where imagination can meet memory
in the dark."
Anne Dillard

This conjunction of imagination and memory has been on my mind a lot lately.  A symptom of age when so little lies ahead when compared with what we have left behind.  The perspective from this point in my life of my past.  I remember when I took this picture in June of 1970 and I was just 16. Near the beautiful old Library in Portland I was sitting on a stone bench resting in the shadow of these large elms and saw this lone figure walking slowly up the street about to emerge from the shadow and in to the light seemed to me at the time rich in symbolism.  I felt a connection to that person.  I still have the negative and I only made one print that was too large to put on my scanner so I think I have to revisit it. I look at it now and it's a little window with a view in to the past a negative is a physical manifestation of a memory that in the darkroom you can conjure up that moment in time that links the present to the distant past in a way that memory cannot.  I still take new pictures.  I even have a roll of film I need to develop but lately these old images are what I am drawn too. 
A couple of years ago I wrote in this blog about visiting a gallerist with a portfolio of my pictures to see if she might be interested in showing me.  She wasn't.  She was though one of the first people that I showed one of these old images too and I confessed that I found something very powerful about them.  She dismissed it as a bit of fun but that I should keep them to myself.  I was a bit hurt because I really felt there was something powerful and fresh in them that my current work lacked.



K-12. 18 years of my life have passed by in the blink of an eye.



"Remember the days of the old schoolyard
We used to laugh a lot, oh don't you
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
When we had imaginings and we had
All kinds of things and we laughed
And needed love... yes, I do
Oh and I remember you
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
We used to cry a lot, oh don't you
Remember the days of the old schoolyard
When we had simplicity and we had
Warm toast for tea and we laughed
And needed love.. yes, I do
Oh and I remember you"
Cat Stevens