photography tagged posts

“Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing,” wrote the culture critic and free-range intellectual Susan Sontag in 1973. Were Sontag alive today (she died in 2004), she would surely be slapping her forehead and bemoaning her abysmally inaccurate “almost” qualifier, given today’s specter of nearly everyone in the industrialized world carrying high powered cameras that sit snugly in their pants pockets or purses, mere add-ons to the smartphones that power their 24/7 connectedness to the world.

Surely, no one anywhere can possibly be having sex or dancing at even a minute fraction of the rate we pull out our cameras to amuse ourselves.

For better and for worse, we are awash in photography, perhaps the greatest democratizer of all art forms, a chance for most anyone to scratch a creative itch and record for at least his or her own posterity a moment in t...

It’s such a sweet time of year, sugared stuff everywhere in front of us. So in the spirit of the season, today I offer you yet another heap of delectables, but these of the eye candy variety that contain abundant nutrients but not one more calorie to add to your seasonal total. How’s that for a generous, health-wise, and environmentally conscious holiday gift?

You’re welcome!

All thanks and praise to the marvelous photographers whose own generosity and creative flair have added such rich visual context to the words on this page over the past two years. I hope these single shots from 10 photographers from around the world (11, counting the rotating shots above) inspire you to visit even more of their work, available via the links listed on the bottom of this page. So without further ado:

Not quite sure which of these photographed objects is the more spectacular…

Metate Arch in the Escalante Wilderness by Jo...

In this “Special Holiday Edition!” of the Traversing blog, I’m going to severely crimp on the words. Instead, I’ll let us all scroll and feast on just a sampling of the vision and verve exemplified by the photographers who have helped fill out the picture, as it were, of the world we have been exploring, questioning, and elaborating upon over the last year.

I offer this specifically as deep and lasting “nutrition” rather than the popular phrase “eye candy,” because photography such as this is calorically dense and nutritious fare that feeds us in untold ways. It is life-enhancing, with the power to stay with us and suggest new ways of pausing, seeing and absorbing the world in front of us.

So let’s get right down to it.

By Mahesh Telkar

“Lovely” and “beautiful” seem just hopelessly inadequate here…

By Bahman Farzad

How delicate yet powerful those wings.

By Pétur Gauti Valgeirsson