A day of remembrance

When I started writing this post yesterday, it seemed like the perfect time to share these powerful paintings which I saw during my visit to San Francisco’s de Young Museum last summer. At first I hesitated to include Jack Levine’s piece, above, because it felt like such a negative image. This painting commemorates the Birmingham Campaign, a series of direct […]

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Mixed media

I collected this set of images during two separate visits to two different museums: Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum (September 2019) and San Francisco’s deYoung Museum (August 2022). The artists and the media may be widely varied, but each one speaks to me in a profound way, and the more I consider them, the more connections I seem to discover. Al […]

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Blown glass

On my visit to San Francisco’s deYoung Museum last August I revisited some of the blown glass pieces I had seen previously, in 2019, and spent some time getting a better look. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with some of the pictures I shot with my phone on my earlier visit; this time I used my Canon SL2, and I think […]

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Violence, deconstructed

I think that once you’ve seen one of Al Farrow’s mosaic sculptures you’ll never quite forget it. That was why on my visit to the deYoung Museum in San Francisco last August I suddenly found myself experiencing a strange feeling of deja vu; it took me a few minutes to realize why. His intricate pieces are both jarring and thought-provoking, […]

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Lighthouse

Although the iconic notion of a lighthouse is a lonely structure standing straight and tall on the rocks, dashed by the raging sea, lighthouses actually come in many shapes and sizes. Most US lighthouses these days are either completely automated or else they’ve been done away with altogether. I feel quite lucky I’ve been able to visit a few of […]

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Memory Monday: Scenes from the ROK

All of the photos in the current collection are held in five old-fashioned self-adhesive “magnetic” albums, with acetate covers intended to protect the photographs. Even though we now know these types of albums are actually destructive to prints (especially those in color), they are still being sold in stores. Pictures stored in them tend to become brittle and discolored and, […]

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Train, trolley, and bus, Part 1

You may have noticed by now that I really enjoy shooting photos while traveling — as in, literally going down the road (or track, as the case may be). Sometimes my favorites of these shots aren’t especially good photography, but I don’t mind too much because they manage to capture some memorable or transient detail that otherwise might have been […]

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