Hollywood Blvd.
                                                                                                                                                                        Photograph copyright
                                                                                                                                                                        Bianca Dorso

A friend wrote and asked if I thought writing about the past lightened or thickened it.  I said both.  But maybe I should just go with obscured.  Obscured is probably more like it.  Writing about your past adds more layers and distance between the you that was then and the you that is now.  Or as my friend put it, a separateness emerges between the first person of the past and the first person of the present.

You think you are bringing the past into focus, but what you are really trying to achieve, what you are really looking for is that attractive out-of-focus composition that says and doesn't say, that tells and doesn't tell, that discloses without revealing everything.  

Someone told me the great photographer George Hurrell (1904-1992) shot his Hollywood stars without any makeup on, and then he added it in retouching the negative, which is why they all looked so flawless and perfectly glamorous.  Talk about starting with a blank canvas.  I wonder if that's true.

Thinking about Abstract Expressionists lately, I was going to make a case for this photograph of Hollywood Blvd. looking like a painting by Clyfford Still (1904-1990) but I wonder if that's true either.  More like a Franz Kline, right?

Being very nearsighted may be part of it, you know.  I can make any landscape Impressionist by taking off my glasses.  Only what is close to me is clear.  I should stick with the everpresent Now, shouldn't I.  What is right here right now right in front of me.  The moment that is always present, always here, neverending, always beginning.