fotos

This is a place to put my hobby photography.

most of it is taken on my phone (iPhone 13), and it's often heavily edited

2025-08-22

In George’s personal essay, which I did not read until this past fall, he addresses his unhappiness:

I had not a happy life. There were moments of happiness, but as a whole it was dull, unsatisfying, sad. I did not know exactly why. I think I know now. It isn’t too simple to write down, although I see it very clearly. I was not happy because I didn’t ever do what I would have been able to do. I have not recognized what is the very thing I could have done, and not only do it, but do it eagerly, impatiently and always. No wonder that I couldn’t do it—my circumstances couldn’t have been less favourable. Not too good a spiritual connection with my parents, extreme poverty, not a true friend, being a Jew in pre-war Hungary, early family ties with adequate financial troubles, disturbed university years loaded with money problems, the incessant fluctuation between hope and despair—have I or haven’t I talent—and above all, the spirit-killing, cruel, devastating struggle for life in contemporary Hungary. These are not excuses, only explanations.

from A Common Seagull by Sheila Heti

a black and white photo of a room with rubble on the floor, a doorway, and mud and straw nests on the walls

2025-08-15

Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.

Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

a black and white high contrast image of a pitted, coarse, pocked and jagged cliff

2025-08-13

3 small photos in a white rectangle. Top, a reflective window with a hatted figure seen in it. Middle, a rounded road mirror with a figure waving, a blue sign with a white arrow below. Bottom, a barren islet glowing in the late sunlight, sitting in the blue sea.

2025-08-01

a blurry photo of a large orange cubist style sculpture of a horse on it's hind legs, in the middle of a traffic roundabout

2025-07-01

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

from V1, On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin

2025-06-19

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.

To Myself By Franz Wright

2025-05-27

2025-05-25

Nada importa, tudo interessa.

Yung Xalana

2025-05-21

Material form becomes meaningful form through design—that is, through considered relationships. And this meaningful form can become the carrier of a meaning that takes us beyond what we think of as immediate reality. But an orderliness that is too obvious cannot become meaningful in this superior sense that is art. The organization of forms, their relatedness, their proportions, must have that quality of mystery that we know in nature. Nature, however, shows herself to us only in part. The whole of nature, though we always sell it, remains hidden from us. To reassure us, art tries, I believe, to show us a wholeness that we can comprehend.

Anni Albers, On Weaving (1965)

2025-05-19

no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it

James Baldwin, Equal in Paris

2025-05-16

I am sending you one of my last works. I suppose it will be strange to you. But, dear Father, don't straight away judge it harshly, for you surely know that every language when it is new can seem strange and even repellent. One must make the effort to understand, as with any new language that one has to learn from scratch. One mustn't let one's soul protest - the soul has to exert itself and to suffer. And in that way one comes to understand. It's always like that.

Alexej Jawlensky in a letter to his priest friend.