jeremygreenphoto

This Kool Kat does not belong to us, but we take care of him sometimes. Unfortunately he likes to launch himself up onto a shelf and break things. Some of my very favorite people in this world love him, so acceptance is the answer. Love & tolerance is my code.

The morning sun was still low, glistening on the grasses. My friends in Savannah took me along on their neighborhood walk. Over the last two and a half weeks I have been on the backroads visiting friends in various states in the Southeast. It has been a sweet, love-filled trip, and this was a beautiful moment.

En route to the men’s lounge at a posh, old-world dining establishment in the once great city of Cincinnati OH, one passes under an ornate and (dare I say) gaudy chandelier. By “old world” I mean that this place seemed to be out of a bygone era. There was a dress code. Older suited businessmen escorted much younger, scantily clad lasses on their arms. A piano player on an elevated platform near the bar provided elevator music. Waitresses wore bow ties, black tights, and suit jackets. I had the feeling that the next stop for many patrons here might be a nightcap at ye olde Playboy Club, maybe located on a floor somewhere above this chandelier. The food was great, and the price was high; but you couldn’t beat the entertainment.

In Ojinaga, a town on the south side of the border with West Texas, some patron of an old bar came to happy hour on horseback. Light was falling fast and the sky was plum. The exposure was too long to capture a living, breathing subject sharply, so I used a pop-up flash to good effect. Patina, color palette, and subject matter combine in such beautifully slapdash ways in the borderlands.

The sky is so rich with stars and planets on dark nights in the Big Bend of Texas. I’m out in it again, this time for Condé Nast instead of just for myself. There is so much nothingness that everything takes on significance. Last time I was here a few months past, there was no moon unlike tonight’s bright moonlit sky, and this longhorn icon had a blanket of the Milky Way behind it. I wanted to get it all in, but the only way to do that in a single photographic frame was to shoot a grid with a very wide lens and stitch it together. In this way I got just what it looked like.

There are no short drives across southwest Texas. Maps indicate mostly featureless terrain between distant dots of civilization. I love the nothingness out there. The space between. At a sizable dot called Del Rio I found an AirBnB, which turned out to be furnished as sparsely as the landscape. Not a single picture on any wall, no pots or pans, no armchair or couch, nor rugs on the floor. Morning did come, as illustrated here. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”

The spare architectural aesthetic of a hotel lobby’s skylit interior was counterbalanced by this colorfully outrageous round light fixture suspended from the ceiling. The fixture was transfixing. Intuition made light of it.

“The stars at night//Are big and bright//Deep in the heart of Texas.” During my trip last week to Big Bend Texas, by chance I met and befriended an older gentleman “photo enthusiast” who was mostly interested in shooting bolts of lightning and the Milky Way. He wanted me to go out to an old movie set with him and shoot there at night. I got my gear and accompanied him, mostly to make sure he got back in one piece. I didn’t have much interest in what we were there to do, but I found a place to make a photograph. While we were out there, he taught me a thing or two about how to create and render hundreds of frames into one snazzy-jazzy looking night sky “star trails” landscape image. I liked the resultant composite image OK for its novelty; but I decided that rather than include all 100+ frames, I’d edit my image to include only the frames in which some unique or significant element was apparent, like when a car went by on the road in the distant background, and the single frame where my friend’s red flashlight spilled into my shot from where he was shooting. The final result was a serendipitous mixture of points of starlight, streaked stars, and other things. I’m remaining teachable and experimental.

Miami’s clear blue morning, the bright red shirt of this man on the beach, and his brown shaved head were all compelling me to put the elements together in a picture. I got some frames with his friendly face looking into my lens and some others that are pleasing compositions, but to me this frame alludes to a story. Is he looking ahead, is he returning, or is he maybe turning around to take one last look? A play on words dictated the title.

This is what intuition brought to my game today. It’s a vertical stitch of 3 horizontal images that I shot a couple of weeks ago. Today I put them together as intended. It is about the space between earth and sky, light and shadow, logic and feeling. Seems to be where I mostly live.