The many lives of images...

I forget who first introduced me to 'Apogee', a jazz recording from the late 1970s that features Warne Marsh and Pete Christlieb, two highly regarded tenor players of their time. While the music is mostly straight ahead and pretty hard driving, there was something downright mellow about the album art, which is a picture of telephone wires against a background of sky and clouds. To my eye, the image appears as if it was composed in the square format, and, if I had to guess, I would say it was probably made using a Hasselblad. It looks like the final darkroom print was heavily toned and even splattered with chemicals.

The photographer was Benno Friedman, who states in an interview, "I think of myself as an abstract expressionist photographer... Taking the picture has been like stretching the canvas. It is not about the image. But freeing the elements of the image in order that they have their own life".

I was out the other day with the Leica R6.2 and the 60 mm lens. The telephone wires made me think about Friedman's photograph, and, from there, to give some thought to his notion of abstract expressionist photography. Freeing the image makes sense to me.

As photographers, I reckon we are indeed collecting memories, images, fragments, data... but, it is also true that I really took my time framing these two images, and I like the compositions a lot!

So, before I grant them their freedom, I plan on enjoying them as is for a while.