Monday, November 17, 2008

When Yellow Leaves


...or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

-Shakespeare (from Sonnet 73)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S DIARY: Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 has always seemed to me one of the most haunting and sublime songs in the English language - the futile rage that concludes the first quatrain, the black hush in which the second ends, and the just resignation to ongoing process of the third. The sonnet returns to me each fall about this time, and on days like this its polyphonic strains are a likely accompaniment as I shoot. I believe it is much more important that I find the tempos and harmonics of a place than find the shots. If I'm properly tuned, the shots appear.