Monday in the Snow

It snowed somewhere around 18 inches the other night.
When my job released me out into the world, my immediate universe happens to be Times Square. Seeing the entire metropolis covered in a blizzard was really surreal and beautiful. People were swarming all over the place, snow stinging their faces, throwing snowballs and laughing. Sometimes this universe is beautiful.

Regardless.

As our money grows towards getting a camera, all of my previous obsession with photography has swarmed my soul again and I spend hours hunting down every image I can on the internet. At one point in history, mainly the 60's and 70's, photography was a thriving part of the artistic community. Perhaps it's the advent of the internet's potential to catapult nearly anyone and everyone with a faint interest into global exposure that somewhat killed it off, or maybe it was the introduction of the pixel, and the whole digital age.
Somewhere, the "art" of it was lost.
What was so explosive was the concept of taking a medium, film, that was only what it was. It was a process involving light and chemicals. It was not for the impatient or the flighty. It was not something that someone could take a slight interest in. It was selective. In a way, it selected you. If you didn't have "the eye" you knew right off the bat, and you would be damned if you would spend another day of your life trying to develop an image that wasn't extraordinary.

Edward Weston was one of the first photographers to really capture my entire sensibilities. The image of the bell pepper is so brilliant in its obviousness. This is clearly a man who was born an artist. Given the strenuous and costly aspects of photography at this time, ideals of grandeur ran rampant. To see an every day object, an edible one at that, and see beyond the usual adjectives to see into the beauty of its contours, and to then be able to capture the humanistic aspect of those curves, is pure genius. Weston's sensibilities seemed to peer beyond first sight and able to delve into that rare second glance.