John Michael Swartz

Several reasons compelled me to finally leave my apartment. I had to go to my purposefully slightly inconveniently-located pharmacy. And I had recently acquired a small upholstery cleaning machine for which I needed some cleaning solution at the Lowe's next to the Culver Viaduct which runs over the Gowanus Canal.

Although it was fixing to rain quite heavily, it wasn't slated until further along in the evening, and so I set out with my camera, no umbrella, and water permeable Vans.

Rain is, to an extent, like a natural polarizing filter. Contrast is selectively increased. Blacktop deepens (where there aren't puddles), tree trunks saturate.

Although my Olympus is robustly water resistant, dealing with water on the lens is a pain. I'll need to figure out what kind of cloth works best in these conditions, and how many of them I'll need.

These photos revist so much of the character of my Civilization Day era that I decided to make them into squares.

Only a few people, but I have been getting somewhat bolder lately. I didn't include the teenaged boy with a broken foot, making his way uphill on crutches. It just didn't work as a square, though the full photo is decent. I could really sympathize.

Nothing particularly remarkable here, but sometimes that's the point. I was just reading an interview about different ways of being a concert soloist, and the cellist remarked (about one of his teachers, János Starker, from whom I receive much of my technique a few generations removed) that those who are constantly operating with great emotionality can lead an audience to boredom, because there's nowhere to go, no contrast.

So too with photos, if you're lucky enough to get anyone to look at more than one of your pictures at a time, and in a particular order—as in a book. But as I am increasingly fond of yelling at clouds I think it is the case that whatever ground photographers may have gained in this regard, they have lost to the Doom Scrolling generation—much like the algorithmic playlist has made the act of listening to an entire record through, in order, quite an old-fashioned feeling activity.

But there's always been a variety of ways of presenting and getting at photos, which play with various spatial and temporal patterns, so I do my best not to be doctrinaire about it.