Tag: photography

Categories
Cuba Photography Street Photography

Havana, In Deep

Dangling Conversation - Havana - 2013

There is a box between them with a screen in it, and to this day I do not know what it is for. It could be for sifting. It could be for rolling. It sat on the table in that Havana market like a piece of furniture too tired to explain itself, and the man rested his forearm on it the way men rest their forearms on things that have been useful to them for a long time, without needing to look at it. A couple of guys a few steps off were selling meat, and somewhere a radio was losing a slow fight with distance.

He was asking her something. You could see it before you could hear it, if you could have heard it at all, which I could not, standing twenty feet away with a camera and no Spanish worth the name. His eyebrows were doing the work. His mouth was doing the work. The cigarette in the corner of his lips had gone unlit and forgotten, a prop in a scene that had moved past needing it.

She had not expected the question. That was the whole of it, the thing the photograph is actually about. Above and behind them the light came down through warehouse glass gone frosted with age, softened, the hard edges sanded off. It had been falling on that table for years before either of them sat down at it. A woman’s face has a setting it returns to between thoughts, and hers had been somewhere else — the work, the heat, the cigarette she’d just lit, which she now held between two fingers like a held breath, smoke rising into that same light, catching it, going from invisible to visible to invisible again. Then he spoke, and the setting changed. Her eyes came around to him sideways, the way eyes do when the rest of the head hasn’t decided yet whether to follow. Caught. Not afraid — caught, the way you’re caught remembering something mid-sentence, or caught by a question that arrives at an angle you didn’t see coming.

They had stepped away from whatever the work was — the particular slackness of people on a break, elbows down, shoulders forward, the posture of two people who have stopped doing the thing they get paid to do and have not yet decided to start talking about anything in particular, except that he just had.

Neither of them knew I was there, and I have never quite settled how I feel about that. I took something from two people who never agreed to give it. I have made my peace with it the way photographers do, which is imperfectly, but I have not stopped thinking about it. This is the only kind of photograph worth making all the same, the kind where you are not in the room, not really, where the camera has gone as invisible as the screen on that box, recording a question and an answer that the two of them will forget by the end of the day and that I will keep for the rest of my life, lit by a window neither of them ever turned around to notice.

What they were talking about, I will never know. I have looked at this photograph for thirteen years now and I still want to know.

Categories
Monochrome Photography New York City Photography Photography - Black & White

Bookends

Bookends - New York City - 2010

The tile is the first thing, and it should be. Count the squares if you want — institutional cream, grouted in a pattern nobody alive remembers choosing, the kind of tile that has been absorbing the heat and noise of trains since before anyone on this bench was born. This line has been running since 1904. The platform across from it, the old City Hall stop, closed in 1945 and now exists only as a rumor riders pass through without seeing, a loop the express makes for no reason except that turning around takes track. Everything in this photograph is standing on top of something that used to be a destination and is now just a curve in the dark.

Seven people are sitting on a bench that has nothing to do with any of that history, and everything to do with it.

Start with the one who’s still here. T-shirt, checkerboard skull, gym bag held against his ankle the way you hold something you can’t afford to lose track of. His hands are clasped between his knees, not relaxed, not nervous — occupied. Everyone else on this bench has gone somewhere else. He hasn’t. He’s looking off toward the tunnel mouth with the specific stillness of a man doing arithmetic about how late he already is, and the bag at his feet is doing exactly what gym bags do at that hour, which is stand in for whatever he’s actually carrying.

To his left, a woman reads a paperback — Wilde, from the spine, which is its own small joke on a subway platform, a story about a man who doesn’t age sitting in the lap of a woman waiting on a train that’s already late. Her purse, gold, sits on her knees like a paperweight holding her place. Next to her, a woman in a cream jacket has wired herself into something private through a pair of earbuds, hands folded over a small plaid pouch she’s guarding like it’s worth more than its size suggests. Two men at the far end have given up on consciousness altogether — one with his chin dropped into the posture every commuter eventually perfects, the other with his head against a fist and a phone somewhere near his ear, gone in whatever direction that call is taking him.

This is what a downtown platform in lower Manhattan does to seven strangers at whatever hour this was: financial district behind them, City Hall and the courthouses above, the bridge somewhere overhead carrying its own century of foot traffic — and none of it matters to the bench. The bench doesn’t know what borough it’s in. It just holds people until the train comes and takes the holding away.

The photograph is called Bookends, for the two men slumped at either end, and that’s the obvious read. But look again at who’s in the middle — the reader with her book, held between two men who have shut the world off completely. She’s the only one inside a story while sitting inside someone else’s. That’s the trick of the title. It sounds like geometry. It’s actually about who, on a bench like this, is still willing to be somewhere other than gone.

The train would come. It always does, eventually, on a line that’s been doing this since 1904, two minutes or eight minutes late, and it would take all seven of them in whatever direction they were waiting for, and none of them would know they’d spent four minutes on a bench old enough to have held this exact scene ten thousand times before — six people who’d left, and one who, for reasons of his own, hadn’t gone anywhere yet.

Categories
Creativity Photographers Photography Serendipity Writing

He Taught Us How to See

Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.

Continue reading “He Taught Us How to See”
Categories
Aging Living

Life Is Wide Open. And Then It’s a Pinhole.

The world is shrinking. Or so we’ve come to appreciate. Jet travel has made it possible to get almost anywhere on the planet in less than a day. And yet.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve become increasingly reluctant to do the kinds of things I wouldn’t have hesitated to do as a younger man. Travel. Driving in busy traffic. Walking the streets in a sketchy urban neighborhood. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary texture of a life lived outward, which turns out to require a kind of low-level willingness I don’t always find in myself anymore.

I’ve been trying to understand this.

When I turned 60 I did something I’d never done before. I looked up my life expectancy on a CDC table. The number that came back was 22. I sat with that for a moment. Twenty-two years. I had been alive for 60 and I had 22 more in the actuarial average, which meant I was already three-quarters of the way home. Nobody had told me this was coming. Not the number exactly, but the feeling the number produced — the sudden rearrangement of the geometry, the sense that the horizon had quietly moved while I wasn’t watching.

I’ve been watching it since.

The metaphor I keep returning to is a camera lens. When you’re young the aperture is wide open. You travel. You navigate. You walk into unfamiliar neighborhoods without thinking about it because the lens is just doing what lenses do — starving for light, taking it all in, indiscriminate in the way that only the young can afford to be indiscriminate.

Then it starts to stop down.

Not all at once. There is no morning when you wake up and find the aperture closed. It happens gradually, a slow tightening over years, and you don’t notice because you’re still inside the frame, still moving through the world. Until one day you notice you’re thinking about the trip before you book it. Weighing it. The weighing itself is new.

What I didn’t expect is that the closing doesn’t feel linear. It feels exponential. The rate accelerating in ways that keep outrunning my revised estimates. You recalibrate. Then you recalibrate again. The next recalibration comes sooner than the last.

A friend saw Paul Simon in concert last night. That sent me back to Kodachrome, one of his early hits, a young man’s song about color and vividness and the wide-open lens of youth. Everything looks worse in black and white, he sang at 31. Something about that lyric now, from this side of the aperture, makes it more true than it probably was when he wrote it.

He just thought he was writing about being young.

As a young family with two kids we toured southern England staying at farmhouse B&B’s. One of those vacation memories that linger. We visited the Cotswolds. A place where the stone is the color of late afternoon even at nine in the morning. The thing that catches you there isn’t the famous honey-colored villages but the little creeks running through them — water moving in ways you didn’t expect, off to the side of what you came to see.

I won’t go back. Not because I’ve decided not to. Simply because the aperture has moved and the Cotswolds is on the other side of it now. Still lit. Still there. The creeks still running through in their surprising way.

This is not tragedy.

It is just true.

A stopped-down lens has a property that took me a while to appreciate. The depth of field becomes enormous. Everything in the frame holds with equal sharpness — the near thing and the far thing, the room you’re sitting in and the long accumulated past the room contains. You lose the beautiful blur. You lose the selective mercy of a wide aperture that lets the background go soft and permits you to choose, by implication, what matters.

Now the background insists.

Nothing escapes attention. The specific quality of a morning. The thought that arrives before anything is being asked of you. The idea carried for years, worked through carefully, finally put into words.

Hermann Hesse understood something about this. The deepest lesson of Siddhartha isn’t something the protagonist learns from a teacher. It’s something he has to live until he knows it. Wisdom of this kind cannot pass from one person to another. It has to be earned on the inside, in real time.

Which is another way of saying it cannot be taught at all.

I can describe the aperture. I can hand you the metaphor. But you will only know what I mean when you are standing inside it yourself.

I couldn’t have written any of this at 60. Couldn’t have written it at 70. The aperture had to close this far before whatever this is came into focus — the particular clarity that arrives not despite the narrowing but because of it.

Nobody told me that was coming either.

That’s what I wanted to say.

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs Living Menlo Park

The Foothills

It was later in his illness. Someone had set up a folding table in the garage and Chris was sitting at it in a folding chair, working through a stack of photographs. Signing them, one by one, telling me the story inside each one as it came up — where he’d been, what was happening just outside the frame, what he’d seen in the viewfinder that made him press the shutter at that exact moment and not a half second later. The garage was quiet. Outside, Menlo Park was doing whatever Menlo Park does on an ordinary afternoon. In here, a man was accounting for his life in pictures and I was standing there holding a camera, not quite sure what I was witnessing.

I made a photograph of him.

It’s at the top of his Wikipedia entry now. That’s how the world knows his face — a picture I made of him making sense of his pictures, in a folding chair, near the end. I don’t know what to do with that except carry it.

Chris Gulker had been a photographer long before he was anything else. Staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer. Published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. He had the eye first. Everything else — the virtual newsrooms, the blogrolls, the hacked-together color systems that dragged newspapers into the digital age — all of it came from the same instinct: look carefully, see what’s actually there, build toward what you see.

When I first met him he had just gotten a Leica M8. He talked about it the way he talked about everything he loved, which is to say with specificity and without apology.

He had driven an Audi TT. He had a Leica M8. He was not a man who made concessions to the ordinary.

He had glioblastoma. Diagnosed in 2006. Surgery, radiation, the whole negotiation with a disease that doesn’t actually negotiate. He knew the terms and he kept going — kept shooting, kept writing at gulker.com, kept thinking out loud about what was coming next, as if the tumor were an inconvenience and the future were the point.

He walked when he could walk. He talked when he could talk.

He died in October 2010. He was fifty-nine.

Twice a week in those last two years I’d put Lily in the car and drive over to his house. Lily was small and opinionated and she understood the trip as hers. We’d pick Chris up after breakfast, when the morning was still cool, and do the loop — one mile, flat, because flat was what worked. Then we’d come back to find Linda moving through the house, Chris’s wife of nearly thirty years, the still point of everything that was happening to them. Sometimes she’d join us and the conversation would open into something more alive, the kind of talk where someone says something offhand and suddenly everyone is leaning forward.

One of those mornings the three of us decided to start a local blog for Menlo Park. Linda would write and edit. Chris would shoot. We called it InMenlo.com.

When Linda wrote Chris’s obituary, that’s where she published it.

People talk about spending time with the dying as a kind of grace extended downward. It wasn’t like that. Those mornings were a gift — the ideas, the talk, the way Chris described what was coming as if he could already see it clearly from wherever he was standing. I left those visits more alive than I arrived. That’s the debt I carry. Not grief exactly, though there’s grief. More like an obligation to keep paying attention to the future he spent his life building toward.

Last month a man named Demis Hassabis closed a two-hour technology showcase in Mountain View — twenty minutes from where Chris and I used to walk — and said seven words I haven’t been able to put down since: We are at the foothills of the singularity. The audience applauded. Then everyone went home.

I keep thinking Chris would have had something to say about that.

Not the singularity part, necessarily — that word carries a slightly rapturous charge, too certain of its own prophecy. But the foothills part. The careful humility of it. The acknowledgment that what we can see from here — AI systems autonomously building operating systems, models that predicted a hurricane’s landfall and saved lives — all of it is still just approach terrain. The mountain is what comes after.

Chris spent his whole career in the foothills of things. Slightly ahead of the moment, always building infrastructure for a future that hadn’t arrived yet, always explaining to people who weren’t sure they wanted to know. He pioneered the blogroll. Built one of the first online newspapers. Hacked color into the San Francisco Examiner with Macintoshes and ingenuity when the system said it couldn’t be done. He was the wrong man for the present tense. He belonged to the next sentence.

He had the photographer’s instinct underneath all of it — the knowledge that you have to look carefully, that the light is always changing, that if you wait too long the moment is gone. He put the Leica to his eye and he saw. He put his hands on a keyboard and he built what he saw toward.

Lily is gone now too. She outlasted Chris, which felt right — she was stubborn and she loved the route.

I still think about those mornings. The cool air, the flat mile, Lily pulling us both forward. The way the real conversation started when we got back. The way Linda might appear and the whole thing would open into something none of us had planned. The way Chris talked about what was coming — not as speculation but as something he could already see, the way a photographer sees the shot before he raises the camera.

He always knew something was coming. He had a gift for the future tense I’ve never quite encountered in anyone else — and a photographer’s understanding that the future, like light, doesn’t wait.

I wonder what he’d make of the foothills. I think he’d already have the Leica out. And I know we’d still be talking about it.

Categories
Technology

The Silence of Glass

There is a moment, right before surgery, when the anesthesiologist asks you to count backward from ten. You get to seven, maybe six, and then the world goes clean and white. Scientists have a word for the material responsible for that transition: borosilicate. The same compound in the syringe barrel is in the telescope mirror trained on the Andromeda galaxy, in the fiber strand carrying the surgeon’s consultation with a colleague three thousand miles away, in the smartphone screen the patient’s wife is staring at in the waiting room, hands shaking, refreshing nothing.

Glass is everywhere and we have made it invisible, which is the oldest trick civilization knows.

Vaclav Smil argues in Making the Modern World that the most consequential material of the last two centuries is not steel or silicon or oil. It is float glass — invented by Alastair Pilkington in 1959, when he watched dishwater spread across his kitchen sink and understood something that had eluded glassmakers for four hundred years. Pour molten glass onto a bath of molten tin and it finds its own level. It becomes, on its own, perfectly flat. Every window, phone screen, solar panel, and architectural facade descends from a man watching his wife do dishes.

What Smil doesn’t quite say — though you feel it accumulating across his pages — is that glass is the one material that consistently mediates between the inner and the outer. Not metaphorically. Literally. It stands at the boundary and says: you may look, but you may not touch.

The fiber optic cable looks like nothing. Pull back the orange jacket and you find strands thinner than a human hair, each one pure silica glass so precisely drawn that a photon launched into one end will emerge after sixty miles having lost less than five percent of its energy. That number seems impossible. It is a kind of miracle achieved through obsessive purity: any contaminant at the molecular level, any stress in the crystal lattice, any deviation in the core diameter, and the light scatters and dies. Underneath every ocean, through every mountain, connecting data centers in Virginia to servers in Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of kilometers of this material, laid in darkness, carrying light.

I think about that sometimes when I hit send. The electrons leave my keyboard, convert to photons at some local junction, and then travel — genuinely travel, as light through glass — to wherever they are going. There is something devotional about it, though I can’t quite say why. Maybe it’s the invisibility. Maybe it’s the faith required — that the thing you release will arrive, intact, somewhere it has never been.

Glass is in the MRI machine and the X-ray plate and the laboratory flask where the drug was first synthesized and the vial where it is stored and the syringe through which it enters the body. Glass does not react. It does not corrode. It does not leach. This chemical inertness, which seems like absence, is actually the whole point. Medicine needed a container that would hold the thing without becoming it.

There is also glass in the eye reading the label on that vial. The human lens is, optically speaking, a soft glass. It focuses, ages, clouds — cataracts are the eye’s glass going milky — and the surgeon replaces it with an intraocular lens engineered to behave like glass. We have spent considerable effort making fake versions of something the body was already doing.

For most of human history, clear glass was expensive, fragile, and small. Window glass in medieval Europe admitted light hazily, like looking through ice. Clear vision was for churches, which is perhaps why we came to associate light with the sacred — it literally arrived, in those buildings, in a way it did not arrive anywhere else. Then Pilkington’s tin bath made clarity cheap, and the world changed in ways nobody fully catalogued because the change was so pervasive: big windows, watched experiments, extended growing seasons, telescopes reaching farther, microscopes going smaller. Each a story of glass making a distance crossable that was not crossable before.

The screen I am writing this on is glass. The Corning Gorilla Glass on this display is an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet, chemically strengthened through ion exchange, harder than most knives, clear enough that the pixels look like they are sitting on the surface rather than behind it. Apple spends considerable engineering effort making the glass seem like it isn’t there. The ideal phone screen is invisible. A window to computation.

And yet the glass is the thing you actually touch. All day. More than you touch almost anyone. The glass is warm from your hands. It has learned, in a way, the pressure of your thumbs.

Glass is the material of thresholds — it makes the threshold visible, makes it possible to stand at a door and see all the way through before you decide whether to enter. We built the internet through it. We see our loved ones through it. We study cancer through it. We watch the news through glass that traveled to us through glass captured by cameras with glass sensors launched on satellites with glass lenses through a sky that is itself, technically, a lens — bending and filtering the light from everything that has ever been.

In the hospital waiting room, the wife is still holding her phone. The screen has gone dark. She taps it. It lights up. She looks at her own reflection for a moment — the screen a mirror now — before the notification arrives and the glass goes transparent again, the way it always does, showing her something other than herself.

That is what glass does. It waits. It holds. And then, when there is something to show, it gets out of the way.

Categories
Authors Books Business

The Whetstone of the Box

Give a team an unlimited budget and no deadline, and you almost guarantee their project will never ship. We spend our careers fighting for more runway, more resources, and a completely clear calendar, convinced that absolute freedom is the prerequisite for great work. Yet, when the walls finally fall away, we usually just freeze.

David Epstein’s upcoming book, Inside the Box, circles this exact paradox. His premise, arriving in early May, is that constraints do not diminish our capabilities; they forge them. We spend so much of our lives trying to escape boundaries, failing to recognize that those very boundaries are what give our efforts shape.

I think about the early days of writing code. We were working with severe memory limits—kilobytes, not gigabytes. Every line had to justify its existence. There was no room for bloat, no excess capacity to mask sloppy logic. It felt restrictive at the time, like trying to build a ship inside a bottle.

But that unforgiving physical boundary forced a ruthless elegance. You had to understand exactly what you were trying to accomplish. The constraint wasn’t an obstacle to the work; it was the whetstone that sharpened the blade.

We see this everywhere, once we learn to look for it. A photographer framing a shot with a fixed prime lens cannot rely on a zoom ring to find the picture; they have to physically move their feet. The limitation forces engagement with the physical world. Without the walls of a canyon, a river is just a swamp. It is the restriction that creates the momentum.

Epstein’s focus on how constraints make us better feels like a necessary corrective right now. We live in an era of infinite leverage and boundless digital canvases. The friction has been removed from almost everything we do.

But friction is where the traction lives. When we strip away all our limits, we don’t gain wings; we just lose our footing. We need the edges of the box to know exactly where we stand.

Categories
Aging Living Paris Serendipity Street Photography

The Geometry of Choices: Life Beyond the Viewfinder

Every day, I walk past Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment resting quietly on my bookshelf. Its spine is a familiar friend, a silent anchor in the room.

For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment was a photographic philosophy: the simultaneous recognition of the significance of an event, paired with the precise organization of forms that gives that event its proper expression. It is the fraction of a second where the head, the eye, and the heart perfectly align.

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

But as I caught sight of the book this morning, I realized how deeply this concept bleeds beyond the edges of a viewfinder. We tend to measure our lives in chapters and milestones—graduations, marriages, career shifts, relocations. We look at these grand events as the towering pillars of our personal history. Yet, if we look closer, the actual architecture of our lives is built on a series of fleeting, decisive moments.

Think about it. The true turning points rarely announce themselves with a booming voice or a dramatic swell of music. They are profoundly quiet.

It’s the split-second decision to take a different route home where you stumble upon a neighborhood you’ll eventually live in. It’s the pause before answering a question that completely changes the dynamic of a relationship. It’s the instant you decide to say “yes” to an unexpected invitation, opening a door to a career you hadn’t even imagined.

In these moments, just as in photography, there is a sudden geometry to our choices. The elements of our past experiences, our current desires, and our future trajectories suddenly arrange themselves into a perfect composition. We may not hear the click of a shutter, but the picture of our life is forever altered.

I run my finger over the dust jacket sometimes and think about the paths I didn’t take. The moments I hesitated just a second too long, and the composition dissolved into chaos. There is grace in those missed moments too, of course—they teach us how to hold our gaze steady for the next time.

The tragedy is that we often miss these fractions of a second entirely. We move too fast. We are too distracted by the noise of the future or the echoes of the past to recognize the composition forming right in front of us. We forget to keep our eyes open.

Cartier-Bresson roamed the streets of Paris with his Leica, intensely present, waiting for life to unfold. How often do we roam the streets of our own lives with that same level of presence?

To capture the decisive moments of our lives, we don’t need a camera. We need awareness. We need to cultivate a stillness that allows us to recognize when the head, the eye, and the heart are asking us to act.

It’s about trusting our intuition when the geometry feels right, even if we don’t fully understand the picture yet.

The next time you find yourself hesitating—caught in a quiet fraction of a second—pay attention. It might not be a milestone. It might just be an ordinary Tuesday. But it might also be the exact moment the elements of your life perfectly align.

Click.

Categories
Living Menlo Park

Waiting for the Rain

Waiting for the Rain
The sky hangs heavy, bruised and low,
A blanket pulled across the day,
While trees stand silent, row on row,
In muted greens and shades of gray.
The pond lies still, a mirror dulled,
Its surface taut with quiet dread,
As if the very air has lulled
The world to hold its breath instead.
A promise lingers in the clouds,
That gathering, expectant mass—
The earth below prepares its shrouds
Of thirsty soil and yellowed grass.
We wait, suspended in between
The what-has-been and what-will-be,
That precious pause where hope is seen
In every dark uncertainty.
For rain, when finally it comes,
Will break the tension of the sky,
Will beat its wild and ancient drums
And teach the dormant world to cry.
But now—this moment, tense and tight—
Before the first drops start to fall,
We stand beneath the fading light
And wait for rain to heal it all.

Categories
Living

Between Seasons

The water holds the sky like a promise—
pale rose bleeding into quiet blue,
while bare branches reach through winter’s last grip, their skeletal fingers softening in the haze.

Still the trees stand mostly dormant,
stripped of summer’s green excess,
yet something shifts in the quality of light,
the way it lingers, reluctant to depart.

Evergreens keep vigil at the water’s edge,
their spiky silhouettes mirrored in glass,
and though the ground wears autumn’s fallen coat, the air tastes different now—expectant.

This is the in-between time,
when cold and warmth wage their gentle war, when the earth prepares beneath our feet for the green explosion soon to come.

The pond knows first—collecting sunrise’s warmth, releasing morning mist like whispered secrets.

Watch the reflections carefully: they’re rehearsing for the leaves that aren’t here yet.

Pond mirrors pale waking sky

Mist lingers like dreams