naivete in art is like the digit zero in math; its value depends on what it’s attached to.

borrow again from Wendell Berry. Affection isn’t just watered-down love, or flagging passion, at least not in the way Berry uses the term and I understand it. As Berry describes it, affection is more far-reaching and durable, encompassing mercy, forbearance, respect, authentic hope, and sympathy. It is not ecstasy, which almost by definition is

The difference between tenacity and stubbornness, or genius and crackpot, is the difference between success and failure. I was stubborn until I became a success. Then I became tenacious.”

then, I have come to believe that the relationship between subject and photographer, while it can be strictly transactional, can also be mutually rewarding,

the past thrummed inside me like a tuning fork touching an unsheathed nerve.

Back when I was a child, violence, while possibly just as prevalent, was not as visually ubiquitous as it is now that we have so many forms of dissemination available to us—we see the lives lost to guns, open carry in the grocery store, the nightmare phenomenon of school shootings, war on multiple fronts, and video games in which murder for

accomplished by taking a handful of psychotropic drugs. But even without them, those of us blessed—or cursed—with Eliot-level sensitivity find ourselves vibrating with sensations and perceptions that ineluctably tie the past and present together.

When one end of that long chain is disturbed, the other trembles, like a spider’s web at the distant, tentative touch of her prey.

when making art, a tolerance for uncertainty is almost essential.