I was visiting some friends at their Vermont summer house in late July, and they very graciously included me in their busy social calendar. It’s an area with a lot of summer performing arts showcases, and my friends were active supporters. There was an up and coming young tenor they were helping host and I was invited along to a garden dinner party for him.
There has been something of a vagabond character to much of my life which has led to such a wonderful variety of experiences like this scene, and memories of brief, luminous moments, separate from anything before or after, eternal in their perfect stillness.
Almost all of these folks are my neighbors, and of the few who aren’t, most of them did live in the neighborhood at some point. The reason we are almost all in PJs and bathrobes is, like most stories in Savannah, based on a past event.
Barbara and I have lived on Saint Julian Street now for going on 35 years. That longevity makes us the longest term residents in Washington Ward, going back to when we had different, and fewer neighbors. One of those was a restaurateur named Frankie (male, knowing this will become important), who lived in the building right behind this group photo. Frankie would work late, but also had to manage restaurant needs early. Using a cordless phone (no cells back then) he would do business most mornings sitting on the bench that’s buried under this crowd, wearing nothing but his bathrobe. Frankie’s way of expansively crossing his legs often left no doubt of his “commando” style. That became a conversation which became the impetus for a party. This is Savannah and we will find any reason for a party to help fill the ten months when we are not doing St. Patrick’s Day.
So a small group of neighbors got together on one of those just perfect, languid southern Sunday mornings (think Tennessee Williams) and set up a lush potluck brunch in the square, seated around a table with white linen tablecloth and candelabra, lots of mimosas. The theme, though, required everyone to come in a bathrobe, a la Frankie. To the best of my knowledge, Barbara (of course) was the only attendee who actually followed the letter of the plan.
We did it a couple of times, and then, life moves on. Frankie died a few years later and the neighborhood makeup changed continuously over the 25-30 intervening years. A few years ago I mentioned the story of Frankie and the brunch to someone, and it became a party excuse all over again, now as an annual Bathrobe Brunch, another potluck gathering, but one too populous for seating, except for this photo.
The Galapagos islands are about 550 miles west of the mainland of Ecuador, hugging the southern side of the equator. The European discovery of the islands was in 1535, by a Spanish bishop on the way to Peru who drifted there when caught in The Doldrums. I’m not sure why the bishop gets credit for the “discovery” since there would have been officers and crew of the ship, and maybe other passengers, but I suspect it has something to do with who can write things down.
They were included on maps by the late 1500s.
The first known human “settlement” in the Galapagos was a marooned sailor in 1807. All the years in between, the uninhabited islands were a safe haven for pirates, and used as whaling stations, where the giant tortoises were almost wiped out, hunted for their fat and meat.
When I saw this photograph, before I made it, I thought about a 17th or 18th century sailor who might have been weeks seeing only sea and sky, merging into an endless horizon. And what kind of joy might he have felt seeing a shore bird floating high in the sky, and then a tiny dark pimple of land breaking the seam of that infinite line, standing in its own spotlight?
“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” — Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Every sunrise offers a promise for a new day, a fresh start. In the coarse roughness of the Galapagos land and seascapes, freighted with the weight of evolution, each sunrise feels like a genesis.
“…You can’t write a poem for a city that is poetry.” From “Paris for Resident Aliens,” a poem by Gaël Faye.
As Cyrano might say, “Follow your nose.” On our first day in the apartment in Paris, Barbara and I wanted some fresh croissants for the next morning’s breakfast, but places nearby were closed by the time we looked. I was up early the next morning and checked to see what boulangerie was close, expecting to wait until they opened at 8, as I had seen online earlier, but there was one, not too far, already open, starting at 5 AM. That’s a baker who takes his work seriously. GPS map (how did we ever travel without GPS?) showed me the route, through ancient narrow cobblestone streets. Walking in the chilly pre-dawn dark, few people on the streets, feeling completely safe, soon all I had to do was sniff the air. A couple of Euros got me two big fluffy croissants beurre. (Not the croissants naturel, made with margarine!) Whatever you think of Paula Deen, or the French, they are both right about butter.
Another Paris “must stop by” place for me is Shakespeare & Company. Years ago, traveling in France, no matter how many books I brought along, I would finish them with days left in the trip. This was a great place to restock with English language titles, and lots of choices. With an e-reader and an internet connection today I can access almost all the books in publication, but I had to buy something on principle (Shakespeare and Descartes). It’s important to support the people who were there for you. Besides, how often do you get to hang out in a place with scores of others who love books? People who will stand and wait to crowd into a rabbit warren of cubbyholes, stacked floor to ceiling with books, just to breathe it in? Imagine, a bookstore with a doorman and a rope line, to safely manage traffic.
Walking the streets of Paris is a special kind of pleasure/torture for a photographer, at least this photographer. A pleasure because at least half the women (Parisienne, French, or Other) sitting in cafes, and strolling the boulevards look like they are just on a short break from an Avedon shoot. A multicultural, multi-ethnic smorgasbord of beauty and style, haute and not, in uncountable permutations of hair, makeup, dress makes me wonder if it’s something in the air or water. Maybe the wine? It is an endlessly fascinating promenade, accomplished with great effect and seemingly little effort. A calculated casual.
OOPS! I screwed up. Most of the years Barbara and I have been together, more than 40, we have tried to take a trip in September, to celebrate both of our birthdays, and, after a while, our anniversary too, which is the same date as my birthday, September 9th (77 and doing OK for an out of shape old man, although someone pointed out that round is a shape too); 31 years this year.
I’ve been good at remembering to bring along birthday and anniversary cards to give at the right time. For example, when her 40th was coming up, Barbara said she didn’t care where we went as long as we were gone and she wouldn’t have to put up with the inevitable “40” jokes from friends. So we went to Santorini, in the Greek islands. She didn’t quite escape the harassment though. Throughout the long flight there I periodically “found” a card addressed to her, with greetings such as “What do you call a 40 year old on a date? The chaperone.”
It must not have bothered her too much because she started looking in jewelry stores, unusual for her, and I took it as a hint she might be considering a proposal I had made years earlier.
But this year I just spaced on it and forgot a card. Mea culpa. This is my effort at rehabilitation.
So, Barbara, whenever I hear Bette Midler sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” I think of you. We’ve spent more than half our lives together and whether it’s traveling the world, helping create a beautiful home, or holding public office, I could not, would not have done it without your help, support, and encouragement. Like Jack Nicholson said to Helen Hunt in “As Good As It Gets,” “You make me want to be a better man.”
It’s been a wonderful, and wonder-filled, adventure all the way. “Happy Anniversary” Barbara. I love you. Thank you for saying “Yes” even if it did take you 12 years. Maybe that made it even better.
A photograph is first and foremost (almost) always about the light. By definition. It’s in the etymology, from the Greek words “phos” (light) and “graphê” (writing or drawing), to mean “drawing with light.” The only exception I can think of is if the content is so important or essential (breaking news of a disaster for instance) that it easily outweighs other deficiencies.
I was helping a friend do a small group photo trip in Savannah earlier this year, trying to show more of the city’s variety than just the old city where the tourism industry focuses. We went to Skidaway Island State Park to see something of the barrier island/estuary/marsh ecosystem, but heavy rains had closed trails and we could not get far into the wildness. Standing there deciding how to proceed, this patch of light and silhouetted tree spoke to me, yelled at me might be more accurate.
One lesson from my early photojournalism career was that there is always at least one usable, publishable picture, and it’s my job to find it. One does not tell an editor there’s no photo because you weren’t “feeling it.” Not more than once, anyway.
“Drawing with light” was an inevitable idea. For centuries artists had been using the camera obscura and camera lucida as drawing tools. Years ago, a friend on a Fullbright Scholarship was doing research in the Vatican Library and came across a reference to the camera obscura in 16th century Arabic literature. She also was frustrated doing research there because she had to go through a thorough security protocol to get in in the morning (this was in the 70’s), then was required to leave during a long lunch break (it is Italy), and then had to repeat the security gauntlet again for the afternoon.
A variation on the camera obscura might be a modified carriage one could drive into the countryside with a darkened interior and a small aperture on one side. The pastoral scene outside the opening would be projected onto the opposite interior wall and he or she could sit in the dark and trace the outlines. Or in a shoebox-sized container, an aperture would direct an exterior view into a dark chamber where a mirror positioned at an angle redirected the light up to a glass surface where the likeness could be traced, drawn, or painted. The camera lucida is the granddaddy of what we today call an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera.
Much of human endeavor is an effort to make tasks simpler, easier, and it’s a natural evolution in creating pictures to start asking, “How about some paper that will react to the light and draw itself, once I have the image projected?” Or something like that. And so, after 185 years and much science, along with some imaginative thinking, we can make high resolution photos with our phone, edit them, archive them in a cloud database, send them almost anywhere in the world instantly, actually make video phone calls in real time (Dick Tracy stuff of my childhood), and access most of the information in the Vatican Digital Library, all with one device smaller than our hand.
In the Venn Diagrams of real life, I sometimes have overlapping assignments or projects that allow me some increased efficiency, or, in the vernacular, to kill two birds with one stone.
For several weeks I’ve been going through all my digital and film files (since the early 70’s) looking for photographs of the Savannah riverfront and changes to it over time, initially for material a friend could use in a presentation on the history of that area, and, consequently, a personal photographic exhibition, “The Persistence of Change.” The show will be hanging in the Rotunda of Savannah City Hall from August 28 until the end of the year.
My biggest takeaway from all that research is that I wish I had done a better job of recording times, dates, places, details to go with the images. I’ll be 77 in a couple of weeks and I’m beginning to wonder if relying on memory to provide that information was the best approach.
The second project was for my Rotary (Rotary Club of Savannah). I provide some photographs of club activity for our social media and I noticed recently that our Facebook cover photo was in poor shape, bad definition, like a JPEG file that has been opened and re-saved 8-10 times. To add a cover photo on my personal FB page, I’ve always just dropped in the file and then moved it around to get the best cropping within the context of the image. I imagine most people do it that way, but it is a very specific format, 8.51 x 3.15. (There are some variations on this because of mobile applications.)
Using the pool of photographs from the riverfront, and a previous, broader Savannah area assortment, I looked for compositions that exploited that strong horizontal shape, cropping them to the specific proportions in editing rather than shoehorning in something that might have been a strong photograph, but which actually lost some impact or important information because of the odd cropping. The final result–I now have a folder of assorted “Savannah landmark” photos for Rotary to use and some pretty pictures I can easily drop into my personal FB cover, so maybe I’ll change them more frequently than I have in the past.
In Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory,” melting clocks suggest that no matter how hard and fixed something may seem in the moment, over time, everything changes. Live long enough, and you start to understand. I don’t mean that you understand the adage, “Change is the only constant.” I mean on a cellular level you recognize the steady, incessant, relentless drive of change, happening in every moment, everywhere. Seeing change is a little like Ernest Hemingway once described bankruptcy: it happens two ways; gradually, and then suddenly.
As I remember it, when I was in high school, in the early 60’s, Captain Sam had a boat named “The Waving Girl.” In addition to whatever other boating business he pursued, he offered picnic/swim-party day trips for groups to the beach over on Daufauski Island. That’s before there was “Conrack,” or a golf course. One’s biggest concern during those “lazy, hazy days of summer” (thank you Nat King Cole) was, depending on your motivation, to try to slip off into the bushes with a companion, or to try to prevent anyone from doing that.
A few weeks ago a friend asked if I had some photographs from the Savannah riverfront during some general time frames, for her to use in an upcoming presentation “A Walk Down River Street” (https://reg129.imperisoft.com/SeniorCitizens/ProgramDetail/3531393030/Registration.aspx). Pulling files for that has led to me doing an exhibition in the Rotunda of Savannah’s City Hall.
The exhibition “The Persistence of Change,” explores the continuing evolution of Savannah’s riverfront in a series of photographs spanning the past five decades, reminding us that we are on a change continuum that started long before each of us arrived and one that will continue long after each of us is gone. From August 28th through December 2024, the exhibit will be on display in the rotunda gallery of Savannah’s historic City Hall (open to the public Monday-Friday, 8:30am-5:00pm).
Artist Talk Details:
Program: Photographer Bill Durrence discusses his work on display in the exhibit “The Persistence of Change,” followed by an opportunity to view the exhibit with the artist
Where: 2nd Floor Media Room, Savannah City Hall, Bay Street at Bull Street
When: Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 3:30pm
Registration Required: This program is free and open to the public, but space is limited and registration required. Email [email protected] to reserve your space now.
My reason for being there was my Dad. Dad was a farm kid from deep in the country of southeast Georgia who never finished the 7th grade. In WW II he was in the US Army Air Corps, stationed in the Bengal area of Bangladesh and India (all of it India then), and it’s always seemed to me it would have been a huge culture shock for him. I regret he passed before I was curious enough to ask him about his feelings, details of his experience. One thing is, Dad was so low key, took everything with equanimity, at least on the surface, so no matter how much he might have been surprised, most people watching him would not register that. Mom used to say the only way she could tell if he was teasing her sometimes was a little twitch near the corner of his mouth.
I wanted, in some small way, to try to get a feel for what he might have seen, even all these years later.
During my visit, and now reviewing the images, it feels like a creative thread runs through every aspect of life there. Something being practical, utilitarian, doesn’t mean it can’t also be pretty or interesting visually, and the craftsmanship is sometimes spectacular. The gallery runs through a series from art found on the street to elaborate spiritual palaces. In September/October Kolkata celebrates the Durga Puja festival and for months beforehand extravagant straw and clay sculptures and altars are created to only be walked into a river and left to dissolve at the end.
In the countryside, ancient temples are covered with small tiles of bas-relief designs and characters, or groupings, each character uniquely individual.
