We had some unusual weather for the US southeast coast last week. The first thing I noticed, after the snow, was the quiet.

Partly it was a muffling benefit from the snow, but it was mainly no traffic. No large (or small) delivery trucks, no buses, no touring trolleys or horses and carriages, no cars, no jackasses with their intentionally loud exhaust racing down Broughton Street compensating for some personal shortcoming, no open dune buggys blaring music at top volume (when did deliberate aural assaults on the rest of the world become OK?); just people walking in the streets, photographing the ice-encased Tritons in Forsyth fountain, adapting boogie boards, wading pools and other warm-weather instruments into sleds, making snow angels, and building (mostly small) snowmen. For one day, downtown belonged to the people who live here.

About 30 years ago I was doing outdoor winter photography work with some workshops in places like Yellowstone and the Tetons. I bought some appropriate clothing–long parka, long underwear, gloves and glove liners, wool socks and sock liners, knit caps, knit dickeys, ear muffs, etc. I haven’t needed any of that for some time, but pulled it out and it was all in great shape. Unfortunately, I have not maintained myself that well.

It was beautiful. Then it was dangerous. Then it was just inconvenient, messy, and ugly, the “circle of life” for snow, I suppose.

For more of Bill’s photographs go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

This photograph caused a little bit of a fuss. For the record, Mitchell has long pants on, and any bare skin of Michelle’s was accomplished by minimal disrobing under the covers. (I am also completely dressed.) You’d see more skin poolside.

The picture was set up to use for the cover of “The Impression,” the UGA student literary magazine issue themed “Sex at Georgia,” which, granted, was probably intended at least partly to tweak some sensibilities. Isn’t that what college is for?

In the early years of my career there were conversations that people needed to be educated in “visual literacy,” to understand when/how they were being massaged by images to sell a product or point of view. In today’s world of deep fakes, easily accomplished, and even easier and more realistic as AI develops, a healthy dose of skepticism is important in “reading” any image or video.

For me there are three kinds of images: 1) documentary/journalistic–just the facts; 2) illustration–to help visualize text content with no requirement to be truthful; and 3) advocacy–advertising and propaganda. A fourth might be fine art/personal expression.

For me this was an assignment to create an illustration. For the editors of a magazine, the cover is considered advertising. There is no case made for this to be documentation, but the implication of illicit sex set some folks off, including one faculty member who sat on the board that supervised student publications, and chastised me saying he would bet I would not use that photo in a portfolio.

At that point, I was in my late 20’s, an Army veteran who’d had enough BS, married, divorced, back in school on the GI Bill, feeling reckless and even more anti-authoritarian than normal. It disturbed his world view that I was not intimidated.

Looking back, I think the thing he and others should have been more concerned about in the photo was the amount of student drinking rather than the possibility that 18 year olds (legal adults) were getting lucky.

As it happens, the old guy was right; the photo never made it into a portfolio, but not for moral reasons. It just never rose to the point of being useful in a showing of work examples, like 100’s of thousands of other photographs I’ve made.

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind” Bob Dylan

Ghosts are real. For this old man, they often take the form of fractured memories.

I know I saw Peter, Paul, and Mary in concert, and have photographs to prove it. I have always remembered it was while I was stationed in DC, and that the event was at DAR Constitution Hall.

That would stick out to some of us of a certain generation. PP&M could not have been a favored act of the DAR, and them performing there seemed such a contradiction. It was a confusing time with lots of contradictions. I was a budding hippie peacenik who was starting to forgo haircuts, but enlisted in the Army in 1967.

“How many roads must a man walk down….”

I looked online to confirm they had actually been at the Hall, and they had, in 1967, according to the World Wide Web. I was not in DC in 1967, but I have photos? Fractured memories.

They were a big part of the soundtrack of my coming of age journey. When “The Times They are a Changing” was playing the other night while Barbara was making dinner, I made the melancholy observation that we had believed it then. Barbara said, dismissively, “They always are.” Which is true.

RIP Peter Yarrow.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

I can’t remember if it was in middle school (we called it Junior High way back then), or high school when we were introduced to the idea of “figures of speech.” Thinking about this recently, it seemed like it was a list of 10 or something like that. Apparently the adults simplified things trying to not stress us with TMI. I searched for the list and got back options for a list of 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 50.

Remembering the difference between Simile and Metaphor took a little practice; I’ve come to see some photographs as Metaphors. Hyperbole was cool; you could tell your parents your sibling was being “hyperbolic.” Onomatopoeia got special attention because of the odd spelling, and the easy illustration, “Buzzing like a bee,” which is also Simile and Alliteration, but we were not encouraged to think about this multi-dimensionally, as I recall.

In the several years I’ve been doing this blog I’ve discovered I have a natural affinity for Alliteration, to the point where I police my use in an effort to not over do. A college writing instructor gave me Oxymoron, which turns out to be a lot more useful than I would have expected.

But it was becoming a newspaper photographer/street photographer, and beginning to pay attention to the ordinary, everyday things around me, that taught me about Irony.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index