Baldwin, Avedon, and Als. Again.

More errands, hence this photo made from a doctor’s office. If you look closely you can see in the yellow building a window with many potted plants and a LOVE sign proclaiming someone’s effort to humanize the urban landscape. The rain passed, sun returned, little floating sheep-fleece clouds punctuating the blue sky.

I continue studying Avedon and Baldwin, reading Als, thinking about writing, photography, and what it is to be a caring human in a violent and greed-poisoned world.

Hilton Als writes in The Way We Live Now, “What Avedon and Baldwin shared from the start as creators…was an imagination that was not so much informed by reality as inseparable from it: they saw the exceptional in the real. Not the ‘sublime’ or transcendent, but the brutality, theatre, innocence, and confusion that made up their racist, sexist, sexy, and impossible city of love and lovelessness.” 

To see the exceptional in the real. 

Later in his essay on their essay, Als writes, “Part of Baldwin’s genius was based on his ability to be moral without moralizing.”

To be moral without moralizing. 

Goals.

Extra: view from my bedroom at dusk yesterday, heavy front moving in over the sunset. The exceptional in the real.