Sunday, December 14, 2014

Downward Climb



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Here is the trip down into the Taj Casino. We could even hear the bling, though nobody was gambling then. I was going to omit the image from the series until this morning when a subscriber wrote to say she wanted to go to Atlantic City one day, "to gaze at the chandeliers." I immediately did a google search and turned up dozens of images of “Atlantic City Chandeliers.” Perhaps we failed to look up. 

Another reader put casino culture in a perspective I find intriguing: "It's like being in the midst of some kind of capitalist porn - a theme park for an economy based on the lust for money.”

To that I add a thought I came on this morning at breakfast while reading from the Journal’s of Henry David Thoreau.

"In my experience nothing is opposed to poetry–not crime–as business. It is a negation of life."

I suppose it all hinges on what Thoreau meant by, "business."