Atlantic City

Originally Posted Monday, July 22, 2013

I just wrote for half an hour listing the kinds of people with whom I have made pictures.  In the end. . . I couldn't.  It will have to remain for the memoirs.  It just is not fitting, not here.  It was sort of a farewell, I think, to a project that must end before something else can begin.  I yearn for something else, something where I am not reliant on other people for what I shoot.  I make such a commitment to them. It is difficult.  I am loyal. 

I just get a thrill holding my little black and white film cameras.  They shoot color of course, but why?  Digital does that just fine.  But holding a Leica is a little like foreplay.  Don't make fun.  I like shooting in the studio, but it is a completely different experience.  The clean simplicity of those Leica images is enduring.  And soon there may be no film to put into them.  It is like everything else in life.  Nothing lasts. 

I watched a movie the other night (and I can't remember which one) in which the "profound" statement was that everything dies. No--it wasn't a movie! It was a Bruce Springsteen song!

"Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City."

Anyway, it got me thinking. Death, too, is perhaps a linguistic construct. I mean like illness is a metaphor. Death and all those connotations. We call it death when anything changes. Is the "death" of a dog really like the "death" of a human? Why haven't the deconstructionists taken this on. Inevitable change.


I am thinking about it because it is on my mother's mind. She has lived a long time and outlived all her immediate family. She talks about that now. She's outlived everyone. I try to get her to think about it in a different way, but I haven't developed those tools well enough. I must work on it.


Everything changes. So meet me tonight in Atlantic City (link).