Last week I said that I seldom do images with people in them. And this week I have three images that are contextual portraits. They’re of my wife working out on her bike trainer in the basement.
When she’s not at work, she spends a lot of time training for triathlons. With Michigan shut down she can’t swim, but she can still run and bike, doing that latter on her trainer. She’s a beast.
I’m working from home, teaching, writing, and sort of overseeing an archive. It’s hard to get much archival work done when the material you work with is locked up in a library. But I am getting more comfortable with recording lectures in PowerPoint.
As you can imagine, When I’m not working I spend time doing photography. These days most of it’s in or around the house or while walking in my neighborhood. I don’t get out more than once, maybe twice, a week, and that’s for groceries and other immediately necessary stuff, not photography.
The weather has been mixed this week, with some clouds, rain, and even snow pellets. But much of the week has been gorgeous spring sun. A bit of Easter and Spring in a season when it’s hard to celebrate either. Here’s one of sunlight on buds emerging on a tree.
And one of the sun on a dead flower from last year. Still beautiful.
And two, one the cover shot for this post, of bright morning sunlight streaming through a trellis and glass door.
There’s no gainsaying the grimness of the moment, everything from friends or family with Covid-19, to news stories with awful statistics and anecdotes, to fear-inspired obsessive-compulsive cleanliness habits.
But the very grimness has woken me to the beauty of life and the world around me. It’s not quite an antidote to what’s wrong with the world ecologically and politically. But it helps me sleep and it gets me out of bed in the morning.
And that’s often enough in the moment.
No Ordinary Light 