Gateway to the Pacific

A shadow walks in. A bird walks out. A tanker walks in. A fish farm walks out. A sister walks in. A brother walks out. A kelp bed walks in. A house walks out. A stone walks in. A grave walks out. An industry walks in. A mist walks out. A friend walks in. Answers walks out. A postcard walks in. A city walks out. A lover walks in. A ghost walks out. A river walks in. A street walks out. A seagull walks in. An echo walks out. A knowing walks in. A wind walks out. Shallows walk in. An open palm walks out. A skeleton walks in. A key walks out. A prayer walks in. A signal walks out. A fish walks in. A mutant walks out. A bus walks in. A canoe walks out. A sidewalk walks in. A vein walks out. A bypass walks in. A village walks out. A bottle walks in. A person walks out. An explosion walks in. A bank walks out. Fears walk in and a woman runs out into your open mouth. A beach walks in. A hip bone walks out. A sister walks in. A brother walks out. A breast walks in. A mountain walks out. A high-rise walks in. A tree walks out. A politician walks in. A raven walks out. A raving walks in. A dream walks out. A wall walks in. A sunrise walks out. Words walk in.

Alex Leslie
Vancouver for Beginners

In deciding how a picture should
look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are
always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a
sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just
interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the
world as paintings and drawings are.

To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no
subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to
suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value
to their subjects.

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard
of the beautiful.

While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually
think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists
like Weston, the photographer’s venture is elitist, prophetic,
subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing
the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, “revealing to others the
living world around them,” as Weston described his own work,
“showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed.”

No one now considers the beauty revealed in photographs to be epitomized
by scientific microphotography. In the main tradition of the
beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human
decision: that this would make a good photograph, and that the
good picture would make some comment. It proved more
important to reveal the elegant form of a toilet bowl, the subject
of a series of pictures Weston did in Mexico in 1925, than the
poetic magnitude of a snowflake or a coal fossil.

But it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naïve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind
of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be
present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually
interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art
photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical
counterpart to photography’s democratizing of the notion of
beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the
representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the
body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs
as existing everywhere.

Flowers
By Wendy Videlock

for my mother

They are fleeting.
They are fragile.
They require

little water.
They’ll surprise you.
They’ll remind you

that they aren’t
and they are you.