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photography

Paris-Match (1)

So it goes. You learn some interesting things from a book you received for Hanukkah, and then you get caught up in much more fascinating questions about the book’s author. Let me report on both, today and tomorrow, respectively.

The book, Photography and Society, by German-French photographer Gisèle Freund, is a seminal study of the relationship between photography and society, including its political implications.

Freund had to flee Germany in 1933 where she was involved in political resistance against the rise of the Nazis. Finding shelter in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and began to photograph an ever widening circle of cultural icons and famous literary types, later published in Paris-Match, and Life Magazine, among others.

The book is an assessment of photography’s role up to the late 1970s, when the book was first written (published in translation in 1980). Freund could not have been more visionary in what was yet to come in the next half century than she was on those pages.

What could I, a photographer who is often thinking about politics, find more fascinating? I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s installment.

Here’s the Heuer’s Digest review:

Freund, using the dissertation she wrote at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, first lays out photography’s history, including how it was invented and how it displaced the many artists who had come to serve the demands of a growing and ever wealthier bourgeoisie for portraits: painters, engravers, lithographers. Originally hailed as an advancement to serve science, it soon dominated in the social realm as a token of status or a means of remembrance. The early phases of artistically creative photography were soon superseded by adjusting to the mediocre tastes of those who paid for the pictures. Eventually professional photographers, a trade that had grown like wildfire due to demand, were sent packing when do-it-yourself photography took over.

The second part of the book relegates the big question Is photography art?, to the dust bin where it belongs. Of course, it can be. Why not ask the much more relevant question instead, What is photography for?

For one, as a means of reproduction, it has been a wonderful tool to disseminate art (painting and sculpture included) – just think postcards in museum stores, or books that open the minds of generations to visual art otherwise confined to museums.

Secondly, there are many types of photography that impact society in other ways. There is “concern” photography, the documentation of suffering in poverty and war and general social justice issues, photography as personal artistic expression, photography as photojournalism, as a propaganda tool, and last but not least, its commercial aspects in the advertising industry. And, of course, always, always self-representation – although the term Selfie did not yet exist when she wrote.

Freund provides memorable examples of how the “objectivity” of photography is laughable, given how what you select can shape an impression, how captions under a given image can completely change its meaning, or how juxtaposition of two photographs can manipulate opinion. For example: take a photograph of a Russian tank sent to squash the Hungarian uprising. Consider caption 1 vs. caption 2:

1. In contempt of the people’s right to self determination, the Soviet government has sent armored divisions to Budapest to suppress the uprising.

2, The Hungarian people have asked the Soviets for help. Russian tanks have been sent to protect the workers and restore order.

Freund concludes her book with thoughts roughly summarized below: What began as a means of self representation has become a powerful tool that penetrates all aspects of society. Yet finding photographs that go beyond representation, some that are truly art, is rare. The tool has democratized mankind’s knowledge and built bridges between people by providing a common language in civilization, but has also “played a dangerous role as an instrument of manipulation used to create needs, to sell goods and to mold minds.”

How was Freund’s life and photography influenced by these insights? Stay tuned.

Photographs today are street photography from my 2014 visit to Paris, Freund’s chosen home.

Music is mainly interesting for the vintage film clips of Paris in the background.

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Mix and Match, Upside down.

Since cheer is hard to come by these days, I grabbed this story by the horns and ran with it – I found its subject so utterly clever and amusing.

Hungarian artist and architect Andi Schmied spent some of the last years exploring New York City from above. During an artist residency in NYC she realized that the city can be viewed from above publicly only from three locations, the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center and ONE World Trade Center.

Before you knew it, she had taken on the persona of an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire. Or the wife of one, to be precise. During the real-estate agent guided tours of over thirty exclusive high-rise properties, she photographed the views (as well as the interior of these decadent abodes,) and recorded the sales pitches.

To get to that point she had to engage in quite a bit of cloak and dagger maneuvers. A friend in Hungary posed as the excessively rich husband including a designated website of his business etc; her wardrobe and make-up were changed to play the role. With her background “checked” and her passport inspected, she sailed through guarded sky-scrapers, fawned over by the sales fleet.

The results can be seen in a book, recently published, that is about much more than getting a glimpse of New York from above, usually reserved for the privileged few.

Private Views: A high-rise panorama of Manhattan can be explored here.

“The skyscrapers visited by Schmied were carefully selected due to their representation of a new type of luxury. Those selected for their architectural interest include the MOMA Expansion Tower by Jean Nouvel, Gehry Tower, Jenga Tower, and 432 Park Avenue. Among the buildings visited for political reasons were the Trump Tower or Time Warner Centre, where recently more than a dozen owners have gone to prison, after anonymously buying an apartment through shell companies. For buildings of economic interest, Schmied visited 220 Central Park South, where its penthouse duplex has been sold for a record sales price. Other buildings selected ranged from reconstructed early American skyscrapers to luxury condos (such as the Woolworth Tower Residences, or Pine Street 70) and penthouse suites for sale within luxury hotels (such as the Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton and the Baccarat).”

The photographs and conversations with the sales personell are interspersed with essays that discuss the issue of “Private Views,” including the problem with the shadows these buildings cast, and ghost apartments used for money laundering or speculation. Essay contributors include Peter Noever, Anthony Vidler, feminist architecture collaborative, Sam Stein, Sharon Zukin, SITU Studio, Sara Bernat, Jack Self, Ava Lynam, and others.

Marvelous idea, smart execution, hope she gets the attention she deserves!

Schmied’s previous projects focused on architectural idiosyncrasies as well. A book depicting a quasi ghost town in China, near Beijing, allowed a glance into a world usually closed off to us. Jing Jin City contained photographs, essays and renderings of a luxury resort town that has remained largely unoccupied since construction began in 2002.

“The city’s four thousand mansions exist in various stages of incompletion, set around a Hyatt Regency Resort Spa, horse racing track, and 18-hole golf course. The place is maintained by a small army of caretakers who also make up most of its permanent population. Lacking tasks to complete, they spend their time wandering the streets, occupying the homes they are meant to guard, building constructions in living rooms, and adapting the city to their needs.”

I figured I’d match Schmied’s views of Manhattan from above, which can be found here, with my photographs coming from the other direction, looking up, like the rest of us foot soldiers. I’ll take the woman on the street gig any time over the dame in the tower scenario….. for the company alone.

This is where I lived in the 1980s in NYC, overlooking Sheridan Square in the Village.

And what better music for the ravages of capitalism than the Drei Groschen Oper…..


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Local Color

Let’s end the week with a mix of colors, captured on these strangely sunny October days.

Many come from plants.

Some come from houses.

I will probably go out and photograph some of the famous painted houses next week. For today, it is just color that caught my eye, a bit of cheer in cheerless times.

Some are just part of the streets….

It is surely fitting that the poem below was first published in The Southern California Anthology in fall 1999. If I had energy and time I would go and photograph all of the colors Piercy lists – but that has to wait for another day. Or another lifetime.

Colors passing through us

BY MARGE PIERCY

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.

Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.

Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

Marge Piercy, “Colors passing through us” from Colors Passing Through Us (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

As a counterbalance, today’s music is black and white….

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The World speaks to Us

Next time you’re bored, or uneasy, or need to entertain the (grand)kids during the umpteenth hour of self-isolation I suggest you try what I do when I need to feel less lonely.

Pay attention to the little, transient details on your walk (often easier in urban environments, but also recommended for your daily round in the park.) Collect them like small gems and thread them together into a story. I, of course, do it with a camera, but you can do it just as well in your head our out loud in conversation with your walking companions.

It will not exactly produce poetry, but a sense that the world is talking to you is often good enough for short-term distraction. Note: I am NOT suggesting to capture the moment, one of the most overused phrases in all of art. If I had a penny for every recommendation of how to capture the moment in photography, in writing, in visual art, I could build housing for the entire PDX homeless population (one of the first things I’d do with a surplus unexpected funds.)

Instead, I just like to imagine that the world is speaking to us, commiserating, scolding, encouraging, reminding and comforting – just what is needed.

Yup, can’t deny it, woes….

But not of biblical proportions,

And no unextinguishable giga fire, like the ones they have here now.

There will always be moments to rest

and places where you are welcome.

It pays to heed good advice

And you might just be remembered if you made use of your skills and time.

And there will always be beauty

If you just keep your eyes open.

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It all depends on your perspective.

Almost half a century ago, in 1975, The Boston Review published an interview with Susan Sontag about writing, photography and memory. As my readers know, all three topics are close to my heart – I write, I photograph and I have spent large parts of my life as a researcher focussed on issues of memory. Of late I have not done much of any of the three, and I miss most the ability to photograph beyond the occasional snapshot on my iPhone, between parking my car and arriving at my son’s loft, or during very short walks when I have a window of time. Or the energy.

No wonder, then, that a chance encounter with writing about photography caught my interest. While I agree with a lot of what Sontag lays out and however much I admire her prescience for the role photography would play in our consumer culture, some of what she said does not necessarily square with my own experience.

Sontag sees some photographers as setting themselves up as scientists, others as moralists. The scientists “make an inventory of the world,” whereas the moralists “concentrate on hard cases.” The themes for “photographers as moralists have been war, poverty, natural catastrophes, accidents—disaster and decay. The photographers as scientists are discovering beauty, a beauty that can exist anywhere but is assumed to reside particularly in the random and the banal. Photography conflates the notions of the “beautiful” and the “interesting.” It’s a way of aestheticizing the whole world.”

I don’t find myself particularly attracted by decay nor do I intend to imbue the banal with a sense of beauty. My lens, (in contrast to my montage work) captures more often than not what IS, documenting from an attempted neutral perspective what I perceive. That spans a wide variety of subjects – from the truly beautiful in nature to the witty in graffiti to the mundane in street scenes to the mysterious in abstract detail.

Sontag argued that making any selection of experience is very tendentious, ideological. While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important. I disagree. If you photograph practically everything that is in front of your eyes – as I am wont to do as you all have seen across the years of this blog – the output becomes a form of documentation, rather than a moralist preoccupation or an attempt to shape the viewers’ experience.

Which brings me to the second disagreement with Sontag who’s writing I admire. She claimed “that the photographer’s orientation to the world is in competition with the writer’s way of seeing… Writers ask more questions…Narration is linear. Photography is antilinear.“

Really? The photographs I take are not just visual documentation but they inspire my writing that, not always linearly, conveys the reactions that the photographed subjects instill. In this regard there is no competition but rather mutual exchange between what I see and what I think and what I ultimately communicate.

Case in point: the many twisted branches you find along the coastline and in Sunset Park in San Francisco which is a block from my little pied-à-terre that has been my blessed, nightly harbor. I started to whip out my iPhone when I realized that they could be – were – seen by me in two completely diametrical ways. One association was with twisted bodies, harmed and distorted by the vicious winds, forced away from their natural growth trajectory towards the light, stunted.

The other was of resilient refusal to be broken, engaging in fluid, curvy movement below the canopy, finding shelter against the storms in low-slung positions that seem the starting point of a languid dance once nobody is looking. No moralizing depiction of crippled nature nor an inventory of overlooked beauty. Nothing antilinear here in the photography, but a rather contiguous trigger of thinking through the psychological puzzle of how much perspective affects the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. The images are the seed-bed for asking this question – how do we chose the perspective that will govern our perception? Now all I have to do is come up with the appropriate answer…. regarding arboreal forms of existence as much as the rest of my life.

Music today by the master of musical ambiguity, Johannes Brahms, oscillating between pathos and tenderness.

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Portraits, Doubled

To end this week devoted to portraits I will tell two stories, one of a clever way to create indirect portraits, the other about how to portray someone who portrays you.

The first story is about Matthias Schaller, who has an ongoing project to portray living and deceased artists by photographing their palettes. His website in the link above gives you a good idea of the kinds of palettes he has pursued and portrayed. The work supports his claim that you can often identify the painter by looking at how the palette is arranged, geometrically used, and by the assigned color range. (The website also has one of the strongest warnings about not using any of the materials without permission – so you have to go there yourself, I can’t put up teasers here.)

Alternatively you can peruse the article below,

Photographic Portraits of Famous Artist’s Paint Palettes by Matthias Schaller

or read an interview with images here or enjoy the views on one of his exhibitions two years ago at the Berman Museum of Art. I am always a bit taken aback by excessive proprietary actions when it comes to art on the internet. I probably err in the opposite direction, with art on my ow website being easily snatched – but then again why should people not enjoy what they desire? Nothing you print off a website comes even close to the quality of the real object, with its particular paper and color requirements.

Anyhow, I digress. I like Schaller’s idea, I think he is on to something, and I truly admire when someone pursues a particular passion across many years, hunting down and negotiating with those who hold the palettes of famous artists in their collections, archives, museums, or wherever.

The second story I first told three years ago here. It described the thoughts and feelings of portraying a painter, Henk Pander, at work, while his work was you yourself – a portrait of your scarred body.

The artistic collaboration created some meaningful results, although, as is so often the case, the gorgeous painting got the exposure it deserved in public, while the photography slumbers along in an overly expensive, little book collecting dust on bookshelves. Double portraits, uneven distribution.

In any case, the photographs today are from those sessions, with a focus on Henk’s palette since those tie to story #1, and a few extras to wrap up the theme of portrait.

Music shall be my eternal go-to in hard times, Schuman’s Davidsbündler Tänze. I will resume reporting when I am settled in San Francisco.

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The Beauty of Age

I have visibly aged by about 100 years in the last month, through fear, worry, helplessness. No wonder then, that a project called The Beauty of Age caught my attention. I was taken not only by the portraiture of numerous people all above 75 years of age, photographed with a gentle lens and loving perception.

It was for me all about the approach to the project which explicitly combined a focus on the photographic portrait with attention to the life experiences behind the faces, the at times unbearable suffering that put my own anguish in perspective.

Laura Zalenga, a young European photographer, supported by the Adobe Creative Residency program, spent 2018/19 interviewing more than 30 people in Germany. Here is her description of the project (my translation from the German.)

“The project contains hundreds of photographs, weeks of listening and more than 2000 years of combined life experience. None of these statistics can capture though the gift these encounters. The wonderful people I met. We laughed together, sat silently with each other, cried softly. I heard so many beautiful, stunning, horrible, funny and sad stories. I sensed such aliveness. Such power and pain and contentedness, so much quietude, loneliness and courage. There is much to discover and learn if we allow the oldest of our societies to say their piece. If we afford them a bit of our hectic time, they return to us a piece of their wisdom, bear witness to our own history and express much gratitude.”

The work, as displayed in traveling exhibition, is a combination of the pictures of the faces and written quotes from the conversations, printed alongside the portraits. A companion book to the exhibition provides more detail.

What struck me, when perusing the photographs in The Beauty of Age was something practically all of the portraits had in common: they pulled their emotional weight without the visual tricks and forced stylishness of so much contemporary portrait photography. Not that the artist doesn’t know how to: she is on top of the contemporary demand for slickness as much as any of the big names these day.

In her project with the aged, however, Zalenga, in her 20s at the time, saw with the heart – she has, I predict, a clearly marked path to success in this image saturated world. These were mostly naturally lit snaps of people in their living rooms or other personal environments. Perhaps because of the naturalness of the approach the photographer captured something essential that is not always there when the sitter is too aware of and tense in the image-taking situation. I am thinking here of the mildness of the gaze. Look at all of their eyes, their expression – softness abounds, despite the hardships in their lives.

What an optimistic thought – we all might be able to come out un-hardened at the other end of life’s crises. I cling to that, while turning my back to the mirror.

This will be my self portrait, then, in the near future….

And here is the Marshallin from Rosenkavalier singing about getting old…

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Hope for the Future

In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times. –Bertholt Brecht, Motto to Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark, 1939.

Some people sing about the dark times with their camera, documenting state imposed cruelty as much as the defiance by those affected. One of those contemporary photographers is Ximena Natera, a Mexican reporter and documentary filmmaker who specializes in migration, human rights violations, peace processes and collective memory in the region. Her work with Pie de Pagina’s investigation unit – they support at risk reporters in conflict zones – has been recognized by Mexico’s National Journalism Award, Gabriel Garcia Márquez Foundation, and Pictures of the Year Latam.

Ximena Natera

She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, while attending the documentary photography program at the International Center of Photography in New York on a Jan Mulder Scholarship prize.

Ximena Natera

I had known about her work given my interest in issues of migration, but was reminded of her when a recent issue of Mother Jones featured her brilliant portraits of young children who attended Black Lives Matter marches, gatherings and other communal functions.

These Photos of Kids Protesting Systemic Racism Will Give You Hope for the Future

The photos were taken in the beginning of June, 2020. At that point, no-one would have hesitated to take their children to marches and demonstrations against police brutality and racism, that would take place in city squares, in front of public buildings, the streets of various cities in this nation. They would have been able to sing about the dark times, gaining a collective memory of civic action, learning that each voice counts at a young age.

Ximena Natera

Can you imagine now, with teargas, toxins and other ammunition shot randomly into peacefully protesting crowds of mothers, dads, veterans and nurses, how a child could be traumatized, if not physically hurt? They have to stay home, or do their little neighborhood bike parades which are gratefully happening all over Portland, deprived of large communal experience that would guide them on their path to be engaged citizens. The political implications of the current PDX situation will be far reaching and long lasting. Dark times, indeed.

And yet, seeing the photographs of the NYC kids create pure hope. Hope for a better future.

My own photomontages for today were the results of working at a peace camp with children of all religions some 7 years ago.

Music from the Resistance Revival Chorus singing about the dark times.

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The Rewards of Routine

I am not exactly a creature of habit but I do like the contentment that comes from frequent and regular visits to specific places, like my once-a-week walk at Oaks Bottom. This week it offered a rhapsody in green. The water did not just reflect the canopy of green above it, with trees and bushes having long grown all their leaves. It had developed its own thick coat of paint, a saturated green layer of duck grit.

The migratory winter water fowl were gone, the geese and herons stayed put. It is lovely to see change, experience surprise a n d feel the warmth of familiarity, all in one fell swoop.

That said, in my next life I would like to combine my Wanderlust and artistic preoccupations along the lines of the life and work of the duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. I had introduced them earlier here, with their project Eyes as Big as Plates, portraits of older people in their natural environment. Alas, the book has sold out on Amazon.

A different project, stretched out over four years, can be explored here.

Time is a Ship that Never Casts Anchor

The project’s title, Time is a ship that never casts anchor, is derived from a Sami proverb which implies that it is better to be on a journey than to stay still. It is wonderfully descriptive about the longitudinal nature of their work.

Sami culture is, like so many indigenous cultures, severely threatened by both climate change and political forces bent on exploiting the Arctic. Here is a guide to the basic facts of Sami lives and customs now under attack as well as the legal means to defend themselves. Worth a look, particularly in view of the horrendous fuel spill last week that is now contaminating the Siberian rivers flowing into the Arctic ocean, blamed on climate warming, but likely also caused by human greed, indifference and ineptitude.

The two photographers explored the transformation of Kirkenes, a vast region at the north-eastern Norwegian border with Russia and Finland. They documented the construction of a new hospital and in the process visited with and photographed hospital personnel and consultants, Sami reindeer herders, detonation workers, midwifes, wrestling coaches, taxi drivers and local peace workers and the local supporters from electricians to the mayor. The completed artworks were eventually on display at the finished hospital.

“…joined a round-up with Sami reindeer herders and learned how to make our arctic charr sushi dance. We’ve taken the mayor to a bog, manned a taxi station in Båtsfjord, wandered ancient cemeteries with academics and archaeologists, driven to the bottom of an iron-ore mine to find a turquoise lake, wrestled with a peace worker at the border and drunk black coffee with a sound recorder in many living rooms, hyttas, cars and offices to better understand the Jack-of-all-trade Finnmarkings.”

Detonation master Pål

Doesn’t this sound like something I would have fun with?

Seriously now, I do find the dual nature of their work extremely appealing. On the one hand they are documentarians in an anthropological sense, concerned with the cultural diversity, the history of the place and the customs of the people they connect to. They invest time and resources in learning about place, seeing things grow, following the path, not without obstacles, around these kind of huge community projects.

Taxi driver Arne

On the other hand they are painters – with a camera, not a canvas and a brush, but still. Their innovative costuming, sensibility for color and form, the intensity of creative use of natural materials for staging all mark them as gifted visual artists. And none of these images are slick or even tinged with a hint of fashion portraits, like I might have argued (on a mean day) for other photographers I introduced previously.

Thus the repeat performance – they deserve every bit of exposure we can provide. I’ll make it a routine, like my Tuesday walk.

Music today is by a Sami woman, Mari Boine, who is a professor for musicology in Norway. She has a strong, openly anti-racist stance, and, for example, refused to perform at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, because she perceived the invitation as an attempt to bring a token minority to the ceremonies.

Here is her single hit Recipe for a Master Race that deals with the racism against the Lapps, and here is a beautiful entire album.

Alas, often interrupted by advertisement. If you don’t have the patience for it, just listen to the third track, starts a bit before 12:00 to get a sense of the language.

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The Urge to Display

Yesterday was an emotional day. We attended my son’s dissertation defense via Zoom, sad that we could not be there in person for his graduation. I was also bursting with pride, of course, and simultaneously raging that the current circumstances prevent travel so I could not hold my son in my arms. I was frustrated that I did not understand a word of what he talked about in his presentation, just as I never did when I had occasion to hear my father giving a talk – both passionate chemists. It was bittersweet to think that his grandson chose the same path, never to be seen by him, or his other grandfather, unless there are little viewing slots between this dimension and the one for the departed. Shutters that open for special occasion….

Shutters made me think of windows, windows made me think of how people decorate them, or simply use them to display, well, almost anything, from signs to art to whole collections of stuff. So much stuff. Spilling out.

I have attached a small sample of what caught my attention over the last decade, most of it from Europe, but a couple of them from the U.S.

*

For me it was simply curiosity, while more professional photographers approach window displays with strategy. To lovely results in the case below, I might add. Larger images can be found on the links.)

Jean-Luc Feixa has a new book out that really captures much what is familiar to me from Northern Europe (in his case he photographed in Belgium.) Although I am keen to introduce mostly young women photographers, given the gender imbalance regarding recognition in this as in so many fields, I really liked Feixa’s work when I first saw his landscapes some years ago. They were photographed at the Franco-Spanish border with its contradictory landscape of misty mountains and barren desert. And how can you not covet an artist statement like this:

False American decor – perfect! Now what do we call all that decor in the windows? Open to suggestions!

And here is poetic wisdom that points to the trouble with clinging to the past, the urge to display, and holding on to things…..

The Three Oddest Words

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

And here is César Franck‘s quintet, wistful (in honor of the Belgian windows,) and intricately constructed (in honor of my son’s synthetic molecule.) Mazel Tov, Solomon!

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