Well, that's my favorite thing, Rob, but during my winters in a Florida retirement community it's hard to get out enough to places where the street shooting is good. With any luck at all I'll be in St. Augustine for a few days before long.
For anybody who doesn't know who Robert Doisneau is, or doesn't know the picture I'm alluding to with my hat tip, here it is. Doisneau shot a whole series of pictures from inside this gallery. The keepers are all good but this one is the best: http://www.staleywise.com/collection/doisneau/oblique.html
He was one of my first loves – along with HC-B of course, and Ronis, in the pre-models era of my life. I have a rather good book on him:
Doisneau, Éditions Hazan, 5e Édition. The cover shot is Café la Tartine, porte de la Villette, 1953; it’s made up of the shot across the lower half and a blueish upper section with a portrait, I guess, of Robert. 665 pages of pics! One of those books that can easily help you through a lonely, cold evening, and get you into bed just bursting with zeal and enthusiasm that vanishes with the utter chill of morning and the condensation down the french windows. Hardly his fault, though.
The lack of people-opportunities that you face in your Floridian winter exile echoes mine here. The mundane is so darned mundane it passes almost unseen. And when you do see it, you wish you’d just kept on dreaming.
I try looking for new genres too; mostly, they disappoint me except now and then, as with my abstracts. I think that perhaps we really are one-trick ponies in this life: we find the single love and everything else is just a substitute… Sometimes I curse the day I discovered I had a love for images; perhaps the absolute philistine has no such illusions and disappointments. To counter, then inevitably he won’t ever find the highs. What a mess.
Rob C
