Outside Powell's Books

Stopped at Powell's on my way home from Sue's house to buy a book she's reading, that I now want to read: That Good Night, by Sunita Puri. It's beautifully written by a physician specializing in palliative care. She writes, "My work in the borderland between life and death has shown me how we--doctors, patients, families--talk around, rather than about, suffering, dignity, living, and dying.... This book is my humble attempt to inspire tough but necessary conversations in hopes of easing the suffering associated with the silence around mortality." She writes very reasonably about how natural death is, how "normal." Not a failure but the next great portal. 

While I was in Powell's, I drifted up to the third floor to see the photography books of course, and there was a new edition of Daido Moriyama's How I Take Photographs. His approach is to avoid making "pretty" pictures and avoid trying to be "original," instead "casting a net." His biographer, Takeshi Nakamoto, explains, "The image that is captured in that instant will always contain vastly more information than the person behind the camera had in mind." True, I find. I love finding surprises in images while I'm processing.

Moriyama laughs at all the fuss over copyright and says he would like to do away with copyright on his own photographs, though his publishers won't allow it. I find his views refreshing and his photographs sometimes inscrutable but often gripping. I brought the Moriyama book home with me, along with Puri's and three others.

One more thing if you have time: A big dustup! A fascinating AI image just won a major photography award, but the creator of the image refused the award and tried to have a "conversation" about AI and photography. Apparently nobody at the awards was willing to talk with him.