Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 3

The Past In Black & White

In 2001, Donna and I took a meandering road trip from Oakland to Seattle. It was an amazing trip and I made a lot of photographs. The other day, having some downtime, I fired up the scanner and worked some of those over. What follows are from some side stop in Oregon.

 

 

 

I’ll be doing more of these. I have quite a lot of color from the trip, too. Once again I am amazed at what these negatives can produce through Photoshop. The detail floors me every time. Of course, there are those times when the flaws are magnified, and that’s embarrassing, but in general…

I think I need to get myself an auxiliary hard drive to store these.…

Unwritten Novels

Over the last several months, things have moved, publishing-wise, that have given me some optimism about the future.  I can’t talk about them yet, since I do not yet know how it will all come out, but I am not sanguine. I’ve stumbled over too many obstacles over the last 35 years to start celebrating before the check has cleared, so to speak.

This morning, as I write this, I am about as unmotivated as I’ve ever been. It will pass, I’ve been here before: a combination of disappointment, weariness, and frankly disinterest. I have projects, certainly, but I just can’t muster the energy to give a damn.…

Time For A Photographic Interlude

…

Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part One

Many words get thrown around with too little regard for their actual meaning and intent. Love, friend, truth…a long list. There are two languages, it seems, operating most of the time. One we could call Colloquial Usage, which basically is the common application of a blanket term to cover all possible manifestations of a subject. Friend is a case in point. we blithely label everyone with whom we have more than casual acquaintance of a positive nature a friend. We do this without thought, mainly because it’s easier than teasing apart the various components of what A Friend may really be.…

Note The Date

May 30th, Donald Jay Trump is found guilty of 34 counts of felony fraud for covering up moneys spent to affect the election. People (some) will think this was for sleeping with a porn star, but it was not. It was for the crime of defrauding an election by way of illegal payments to muzzle someone.

Conspiracy is very difficult to prove because one must demonstrate intent. New York state prosecutors managed to do just that and 12 jurors came back after 9 and 1/2 hours with unanimous guilty verdicts.

This is historic, certainly. The first time a former president has been so convicted.…

One Year After

One year later…

Curious, how time just goes on as before, as if nothing has changed. And once the thought occurs, you look around and wonder what has changed?

Not much, really. The present emerged from a slow set of inevitabilities that challenged as they happened and left us with a sense of exhaustion, melancholy, and perhaps a tinge of unfocussed regret.

Life has a shape. We can’t always see it, not all the time, and it does change in response to, well, living, but it does have a shape. We rely on it, we live within it. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say it defines us—more that we define it—but it certainly contributes to our sense of self.…

Images

The one skill I acquired from my stint at my last lab job was color printing. I’d never been interested before. My few attempts in my own lab had been frustrating and unsatisfying. But I had to do it for the job. I learned. But.

But I will always be fond of black & white. I value good b&w more than color (with certain narrow exceptions).

So I’ve been playing a bit. Here, for your pleasure, are some recent results.

 

…

Welcome to Granger’s Crossing

It’s been a year since publication and it seems many people still do not have their copy of this important novel! So, a little promotional video….

 

https://www.left-bank.com/book/978194...

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...

 …

What Is, Is

…

Hope Projected

An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.

But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it.…