BEAUTY IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

           

 Everything beckons to us to perceive it,

murmurs at every turn 'Remember me!'

A day we passed, too busy to receive it

will unlock us all its treasury.

Rilke

"Everything Beckons To Us"

"Everything beckons to us to perceive it," says Rilke — EVERYTHING — and I take his counsel seriously.  In my daily journeys, I do my best to observe not only the larger forms that dominate the landscape, but also the smaller fragments that either make up or adorn these forms.  I try to look beyond the obvious, to see the overlooked and forgotten.  I try to "see beyond what is seen," for lack of a better expression, and to become intimate with everything, including the lost, the fallen, and the degraded.  Above all, I resist the temptation to ignore things that are not easily identifiable.  In my experience, true beauty seldom lends itself to names, labels, or classifications.

In this posting, I invite you see some of the things that have crossed my visual path in recent days and to reflect upon the words of various writers, photographers, and painters on the fascinating subject of "seeing."  If you suspend your natural desire to understand what has been photographed, and focus, instead, on the texture, lines, and hues of the compositions, I think you will be reminded that nature itself is our greatest artist.

Seeing, in the finest and boldest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions.  It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being.  It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

Freeman Patterson

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

Pierre Bonnard 

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.  The little, human detail can become a leitmotiv.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Whether he an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans

If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe;  if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first times.

C.K. Chesterton 

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Picasso

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.


Edgar Degas 

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of our eyes.


Goethe

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.


Edward Steichen

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Thoreau

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Dorothea Lange

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Edward Weston 

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.


Mark Twain

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn't detect.

Mark Twain

The bells and stones have voices but, unless they are struck, they will not sound.


Chuang-Tzu 

Notes on Photos:  (1) sailboat rudder and keel; (2) work boat transom; (3) sailboat keel and rudder; (4) work boat transom; (5) underside of a sailboat hull; (6) work boat transom; (7) underside of a sailboat hull; (8) work boat transom; (9) drainage marks below waterline on sailboat hull; (10) work boat transom; (11) barnacles and peeling paint on underside of sailboat hull; (12) underside of bow of sailboat; (13) work boat transom; (14) rusty chain found in boatyard; (15) section of painted window found in airport corridor; (16) dry-rotting industrial hose; (17) rusting bottom of metal chair; (18) patina of tarnished copper weather vane discovered on grounds of an antique store.