I’ve got a fondness for soft focus. I’d never quite put it in those words, but fellow Substack photographer Andrew Sanderson’s Are you a Softie? — with its subtitle “Soft focus and diffused optics can be creative tools” — has forced me to face the fact that yes, I am a softie.

Yes: My name is Mark White and I like soft-focus in a photograph.

Anybody who’s paid attention to my Substacks knows that I don’t talk technique much, nor do I seek out technical posts here. YouTube is where technique lives, IMO. Andrew’s post is technical, but I was drawn to it because the subject matter is seldom addressed in photography circles. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen praise for sharp glass and the detail it brings to a photograph. I’m certain I’ve read praise for soft-focus in a photograph, but it’s been rare.

As Andrew points out, soft-focus is old-school. It’s nostalgia. And I suppose soft-edged photography is too artsy for most, too precious. And maybe too gimicky?

I’ve personally published several posts on the softening powers of Vaseline. I’ve shared several of my cyanotype prints and attempts at the colodion process — both known for their soft rendering. And I’ve posted many photos a la Saul Leiter taken through rain-streaked glass — a classic soft-focus technique popularized by that soft-focus master.

I don’t love soft focus exclusively — not even close — but I’ve given into a fair amount of soft-focus urges on my photo walks, so I’ve collected my share of softies over the years.

In his post, Andrew gives an overview of the many ways one can achieve soft-focus through the use of bright lenses, plastic lenses, teleconverters, and more. He even mentions Vaseline. Please, take a look at his examples.

One that he doesn’t mention specifically that I’ve used a fair amount is steam. You know, the stuff that’s created when water is heated, causing it to change from liquid to gas. “Wet Steam,” which is a mixture of water droplets and vapor, is the specific kind of steam most available to us urban street photographers — as opposed to “Dry Steam” or “Superheated Steam,” industrial steams that aren’t readily available to most of us.

What I mean by using steam to achieve soft-focus is straightforward: you simply use it as a natural filter by shooting through it.

There’s plenty of steam in a city to shoot through, especially in the colder months. These three photos were taken in Seattle on the first day of the Covid shutdown in March 2020. With the sunlight facing in my direction, I simply leaned against a brick facade behind a heat exhaust vent coming out of a building. The light refracting through the water droplets is where the magic happens.

Steam has its challenge. For starters, it’s inconsistent. The slightest breeze dissipates it, so you’ve got to have your trigger finger ready. And it’s too easy to focus on the steam instead of through it. But as they say, it’s not brain surgery. Anybody can do it.

(Not to change the subject too much, but shooting through tear gas is another way to achieve soft-focus.)

I appreciated Andrew’s post for how it stands up for this little guy in photography. The praise for the almighty sharpness has had its day on the throne. Don’t get me wrong, I like me some sharp glass. In fact, one of my favorite lenses is sharp!

But anytime I have an excuse to pull out a softie to share from one of my photo walks, I’m happy.

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We have liftoff.1

Have some fun today! The world needs it.

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I’ve held this photo for nearly a decade now. It’s of a school wall on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan which I was visiting for work. Due to my host’s concerns over my safety as a westerner, I wasn’t able to explore Islamabad on my own as I’d normally do when I traveled, so my time at the school was one of my few opportunities “in the street” to pull out my camera.

For that reason, I’ve cherished these few photos. And I’ve always loved the distressed tone of yellow on the schoolhouse wall contrasted with the reds of the girls garb — a shirt and trouser combination called a shalwar kameez. And of course the cheerfully innocent faces of the girls themselves. Who would dare not want to turn a lens toward those faces?

Ok…I know I overthink things. I should drop this photo with a few words of explanation and be done with it. But as much as I love this image for those sentimental reasons, I’ve always had a problem with the message on the wall:

“If you don’t like where you are, move. YOU ARE NOT A TREE.”

Why a tree? Why motivate children by reducing a tree — one of our world’s most totemic symbols — to a single attribute — its immobility.

And at a deeper, more critical subtext: Is a child’s poverty the result of him or her lacking the imagination to escape their circumstances? Are there not structural conditions creating that poverty. Is a child to blame?

There’s a kind of unintentional cruelty to this statement that disturbs me: it’s a fault of your imagination if you remain here.

It’s precisely the tree’s immobility that conveys their steadfastness and strength to withstand storms. Trees are rooted. The reach deep into the earth and high into the sky for sustenance. They convey heft and wisdom as they age. Trees provide abundance at harvest, shelter in the rain, shade in the scorching heat. They give us oxygen. Without trees, our very existence is out of the question.

I’ll never forget the June afternoon in 2022 when Seattle experienced its hottest day on record — 106 degrees F. The region was suffering from the effects of a heat dome that would kill hundreds in our state. (As an aside, the hottest temperature on record in Pakistan is 128 degrees F.)

While I was out documenting the near-empty streets at the height of the afternoon’s heat, I came across a couple dozen men and women, mostly homeless, huddled together beneath the only shade tree in the Pike Place Market, a popular gathering place for street people. They were sharing ice shavings, joking amongst themselves, and doing whatever they could to remain cool. While hundreds in our state were dying from the heat, this small group of men and women were staying alive in the shade of a tree.

That tree — which has since been cut down in order to renovate a leaking underground parking garage that had been built beneath it — created community and kept people alive.

Trees are aspirational. A tree conveys spirit. Its branches evoke family. A tree can be the lone constant in a world of change. I don’t know how many photographers I’ve come across here who have posted images of their favorite trees. Trees are totemic.

Like I said, I know I overthink things, but I can only ask why someone would reduce a tree to a single attribute as a way to motivate children. If I’m eulogized with words that describe me as a tree during my time on this earth, I’d consider my life a true success.

I understand the motivation behind those words. The school on which the message was written was a life changer for many of the students who attended. In a country with one of the highest illiteracy rates among children in the world, schools like this are precious.

Pakistan doesn’t have a caste system per se — it’s more feudal than caste-based. As such, the likelihood that poor children — especially girls — can climb out of poverty is slight. Education is one of the few ladders of upward mobility, but while middle- and upper-class children have their elite institutions, children born into poverty have poorly run and underfunded government schools.

This school was privately funded and served a poor community on the outskirts of Islamabad. My entrepreneur hosts in the city tithed a portion of their company annual earnings to this school.

In Islamic tradition, Zakat is a practice of obligatory almsgiving, one of the Five Pillars of the faith. Zakat is not a charitable practice, it’s a religious duty for those above a certain income level, a way for Muslims to purify their wealth and help redistribute a part of it to those in need. This school was one of the several community projects that their Zakat helped to support.

Schools like this offered a chance for these children to escape their poverty. It makes sense that the school would impress upon their students the need to dream big, to set their sites far beyond their circumstances. Islamad, one of southeast Asia’s crown jewels of a capital city — highly technocratic and wealthy — was only a few miles in the distance, though it must have felt a world away for these kids.

The metaphor isn’t wrong. Literally, a tree can only sway in the wind, it can’t influence the wind’s strength or direction. And while alive and thriving, it can’t move unless it’s cut down and sold for timber or pulp.

That’s the point of the metaphor. The tree is immobile. One hopes that today, thanks to that school, nearly a decade after I captured these children, at least a few of them have their sites firmly set on an escape route from their poverty, a concrete plan to use their education to transform their lives.

So I get it.

But why a tree? Why not a rock? A boulder? How about a hill? Or an anchor.

Am I overthinking this?

Now this is much better. Please Do Not Feed the Fears! Here’s a lesson that I know that I and most other adults in this world can use every moment of our lives. I can’t overthink this one.

Thank you for your eyes, as always.

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I hope that you enjoyed the ride and were buckled in!

, this one’s for you.

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My most memorable moment of the two times I’ve been to Iceland occurred outside my hotel in Reykjavik at closing time. I woke around 2AM from my jet-lagged sleep to a ruckus on the street below me. Outside the hotel a large crowd of maybe 50 people were circled around two blokes who were beating the shit out of each other. A handful of uniformed police officers calmly took it all in from the sidelines. I wish I could add that they were preoccupied with their coffees and donuts, but you get the point. I regret not rushing down with my camera, but I didn’t want to miss the TKO.

Alas, the blokes each pummeled themselves into a drunken exhaustion, the police wiped the crumbs off their chins, quietly whisked the crowd away, and that was that: closing time on a Friday night in Reykjavik.

I queued up an Icelandic Tom Waits cover band on my phone, put my headphones on, and dropped my head back into my pillow.

If you read between the lines of my “most memorable moment” in Iceland, you’re well aware that I haven’t spent much time there. The country is a photog’s frozen-palatial dream of volcanoes, lava beds, hot springs, and gorgeously blond rock stars. I promise you that midnight street scuffles are not on the itineraries of any of the 1,000 photo tours that contribute annually to the island’s GDP.

Truth be told, I’ve only been in Iceland for just enough time to hit the Blue Lagoon hot baths and check out a few restaurants and bars, but not enough time to try a baked, fried, or barbecued puffin or scale a glacier.

But on my last trip, I and my traveling companions drove the southeast coast toward the famous Black Sand Beaches. It took us three hours to get there, we walked around for two, and drove back. We yearned for more, but in that brief time we were able to bask in the lush light of Iceland’s late-afternoon sun.

My time was short, but the light I experienced that afternoon will stay with me forever. The only comparable light I’ve experienced was outside of Taos, New Mexico a few years back, but I suspect that the mushrooms I ingested at 8,000 feet altitude alongside a murmuring creek in a dappled forest of swaying coneflowers and dancing butterflies may have played a role in that.

In Iceland, no shrooms are required.

As always, you are the best for reading this far.

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For the past year, I’ve been immersing myself a series of intensive film photography and darkroom printing workshops at the Photography Center Northwest here in Seattle. In between my attempts at shooting and printing film, I’ve also been dabbling in a few historical photography processes through weekend workshops at the center.

My first historical weekend was with the Wet Plate Colodion process, the primary photographic process of the mid-to-late 19th century.

If you’ve seen any of Matthew Brady’s Civil War era photographs, that’s what we’re talking about. Brady was one of wet plate’s earliest and most famous successful practitioners. With his Washington, D.C. studio, and with the help of assistants like Alexander Gardner, who is credited with the famous photo of Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad, Brady made a small fortune with his craft.

Sally Mann is probably wet plate’s most famous contemporary practitioner. In the 1990’s, she began using the process to create negatives which she’d then expose onto silver gelatin paper.

My aim here isn’t to give a detailed primer on how to make an image from a colodion wet plate, but I thought offering a general overview might be helpful to anyone who might want to give it a shot.

A Dozen Chemicals and Many Steps to Make a Plate

The process doesn’t require a steep learning curve, but it comprises making several chemical elixers and following several manual steps that have got to be completed perfectly if you want to produce a quality plate. In practice, the colodion wet plate process gives you the opportunity to fail in a thousand different ways.

To prepare the plate for your camera — that is, to make the plate photosensitive — you pour a colodion mixture onto a glass or aluminum plate. The colodion is the binding agent that adheres to the plate and will hold the silver nitrate. You then immerse the coated plate in a silver nitrate bath for three minutes. Once the silver has fully attached itself to the colodion layer, the plate is placed into a modified film holder and you’re ready to shoot.

Experienced wet platers can complete this process in about five minutes. The bottleneck for newbies like me is in the coating of the plate with colodion — it’s an art to cover the plate with a smooth, even layer of the mix.

We shot with 4x5 view cameras, so we used pre-cut 4x5-inch glass and aluminum plates, though if we had the corresponding cameras, we could have used 8x10 plates.

After making your photograph, the plate is developed with solution of acetic acid and water, stopped with a water rinse, and then immersed for a few seconds in a fix solution of highly diluted pottasium cyanide. The entire developing process takes about a minute.

And voila! You’ve to your image! It’s not a stretch to think of colodion wet plate as the original Polaroid.

(The plates will dry within 24 hours or can be dried quickly an electric pancake grill. They also require a protective coating of Liquitex, a protective gloss varnish, to preserve them.)

The limitation to colodion wet plates is that you can’t let the plates dry out at any step in the process. This means you have no more than 15 minutes in a temperate clime to make your photograph once you’ve prepared the plate, and only a few minutes to develop it once you’ve taken your photo. (Now put yourself in the shoes of those Civil War photographers on those blazing hot southern battle fields!)

The Dry Plate Gelatin process, which replaced Wet Plate in the 1870’s and is considered the be the the first step toward modern photography, didn’t have the severe time restrictions, making it a much more practical way to photograph.

In our two-day workshop, day one was devoted entirely to learning how to prepare the plate. But by day two, we were all cranking out prints. I’d estimate that we averaged four successful plates over the two days and tossed another three or four failures.

A couple things to note:

Depending on its age, colodion has an effective ISO of 1-3, meaning that your photographs will require long exposure times. Our lenses were open to at least f4.5. The still life images you see here required either a hit of a blinding 9600-watt strobe as a light source, or long 15+ second exposures with illumination provided by 400-watt continual lighting. During our workshop, the sky was mostly overcast, which meant 10-14 second exposure times outside.

If the chemical list sounds a bit frightful, you’re not imagining things. The fumes from the ether used in the initial coating will make you loopy if you don’t have adequate ventilation. The development solution of ferrous sulfate, acetic acid, and alcohol is inert at room temperature but will explode and shatter its glass bottle in the hot sun. And did I mention the cyanide?

Is Wet Plate Colodion in Your Future?

I love the wet plate aesthetic, and I’m glad to have gotten a hands-on education on the process. But truth be told, it would be a steep entry price to practice it in the way I’d want to use it.

According to my back-of-the-envelope start-up calculations, you need two tanks — one for the silver nitrate and the other for the cyanide fix — at about $200 each, and between $300 and $500 of chemicals. Because the chemicals are shelf stable, they will last long enough to keep your per-plate costs extremely low.

In addition to the chemicals and tanks — which together would run close to $1000 — you’d also want to consider building a portable darkroom so that you could shoot landscapes and outdoor portraiture. A darkroom tent will add another $200-$300.

The costs aside, the biggest issue holding me back from taking on colodion as an ongoing project is that I’d want a partner or assistant to photograph with me — there are too many steps for me to take on by myself. So until indentured servitude is brought back as a legal and culturally accepted practice, my colodion days may be over.

We’ll see where I go with this. I have a lot of ideas of how to employ the process outside the studio, but I’m not sure I’m personally up for the challenges. But then again, I never thought at my age I’d make such a hot wet plate subject.

What about you? Interested?

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In revisiting photos walkabouts and travels dating back to 2016 when I bought my first camera, it’s become clear to me that I don’t pay attention to the big picture when I’m out shooting. I brain-fart my way along, not thinking about the larger context of my photographs. I’m all about the macro studies of wherever I am. People on street corners; alleyways in cities; cropped window reflections; angles; shadows; lines; cracked glass. My photos could be taken virtually anywhere. Only I know their context.

I actually got hired on this aesthetic by a developer in Seattle during the pandemic. They wanted to convey a “feel” for the Pioneer Square neighborhood in Seattle for the Web site they were using to lure new tenants. They loved my photos, I got paid well, but the development never got off the ground, so my work never saw the light of day and the photo rights reverted to me. I sometimes wonder if the images were to blame.

That example actually proves my point: I was asked to photograph within a specific context that someone else was providing, so I could focus on the particulars and not worry about stepping back for the wider angle.

But generally, who could distinguish between my alleyways in Seattle and from the ones in San Diego? Or the window reflections in Tuscon from the ones in Cleveland? I’ve always thought I was capturing a “sense of place,” but I never asked myself, “Can anyone actually tell which place?”

You get the picture.

It’s a self criticism for sure. But coming to this understanding 10 years in, I’m at peace with the fact that I need to learn to live what I can’t rise above, as a Jersey troubadour once sang. (Can you name that tune?)

So here we are, a summary of my road trip last summer from Seattle through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona in a handful of textures that will never make the cover of a Chamber of Commerce brochure or Lonely Planet travel guide. (Do they still publish travel guides?)

Who would want Chamber of Commerce brochure fame etched into their tombstone anyway?

Better this: “He walked, he saw, he shot, & we didn’t know where the hell he was.”

I can live with that.

My suggestion for this post is to use your eyes, but try not to look at them — feel them. (You might need gloves.)

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It was a gorgeous mile-high Colorado afternoon, the Sunday on the holiday weekend. The Rockies had just beat the Cubs. I was killing time before heading southward to the Great Sand Dunes. My Airbnb was run by a guy who spent the night I was there bottling Costco cucumbers into a jar for the pickle business he was calling Porn Star Pickles, Co. He got me drunk and before I knew it I was opening my Venmo app. Twenty-five dollars for a Mason jar of pickled Porn Star Costco cukes. My bad.

I wish I could tell you that I swore off drinking at that moment. But what I can tell you is that although I didn’t explore much of the city, I found time to cross this bridge.

In case you’re wondering, that’s not me.

Thanks for your eyes once again!

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The Millennium Bridge in Denver. According to the Lonely Planet Guide, it’s the “world’s first cable-stayed bridge using a post-tensioned structural construction,” roughly meaning that the bridge is supported entirely by cables. Taken with my Leica M6 / Tri-X 400.

I wasn’t more than 10 feet beyond the roots of this tree, lying atop of Judy Shindler. Another 10 feet beyond me was Michael Partridge on top of Candace Kelly. Judy was thin with thin lips and protruding teeth and long blonde hair that made her beautiful in my eyes. Candace was olive-skinned with thick, lush lips and curly auburn hair.

Like my father, I also had thick lips, which I was using to mash into Judy’s teeth, kissing her the only way I knew. Michael and Candace looked like they’d done this before. Their lips met softly in the middle. Where Judy was stiff and wide-eyed like a caught pigeon beneath my elementary-school weight, Candace looked like there was no other place she’d rather be.

“Whitey,” Michael called over to me. I called him “Bird,” and he called me “Whitey.” “You got a boner yet?”

It’d be two years before I’d have a sleepover with Gordon Dean and we’d read The Happy Hooker1 aloud to each other, giving me my first feel of what a boner was. But of course I lied to Bird.

This must have been early fall. The ground was still soft enough for our bodies, the night air still warm enough to hang out in. In the summer the tree was our baseball backstop until the owner approached us to say that we were digging up the dirt around the roots where we had placed the batter’s box, and that we should find somewhere else to play. He was nice enough about it. We’d never met him before. There were rumors that he killed his brother in that house; we assumed he was in prison all those months that we were using his yard for our pick-up games.

Much later in the fall, deep into November, the ground was rigid but not yet frozen. I was with friends in the field playing hide’n’seek. Of course there were girls and the intrigue of sneaking kisses in the yard’s many hidden places.

I saw my mother come out of the house holding the hand of my baby brother, who was just starting to walk. She was in her pajamas and slippers, shuffling tentatively across the cement.

I quickly abandoned my friends and ran up to her. She asked me if I wanted to join them on the walk. I told her I was with my friends and that I couldn’t. She might have nodded that she understood, I don’t know. I ran back past the tree and she walked to the end of our short dead-end street with my brother, about as far as either of them could go, and that was that.

I don’t have a memory of seeing my mother again after that walk— of course I must have, but I simply don’t have a visual to draw from — though I can still recall visiting her in the hospital sometime over the next several days, and hearing her voice telling me to get out from under her bed where I had discovered her urine bag hanging down from the metal frame.

This was 1971, 16 Whitehead Place, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 01201. Funny how some numbers never leave us.

This was the third house we lived in since moving to Pittsfield a few years earlier. We could view the tree from our living room window. In late March, I’d gauge how close were were to being able to take out our gloves to play baseball by staring out at the grass beyond the tree as it began to poke up through the mud. The yards and fields of Pittsfield always began turning green before the snow piles in the streets were fully melted. Watching grass grow was the greatest anticipatory feeling of my life up until that point, and it would stay that way until sex overtook it. And when winter had finally given up its ghost, there was no smell in the world like that of fresh grass rising through the mud. I miss that smell more than I miss anything else in this world.

My father remarried within six months of my mother’s death, and his new wife needed to make her mark on the house. The previous owners were a wealthy optometrist and his Christian Scientist wife. I’m sure my mother learned from her church connections that the wife died and the house would be put on the market. That probably explains why it was still filled with their furnishings and various collections from their travels when we moved in: a baby grand piano, glass-front cabinets filled with china and crystal, an attic filled with boxes of optometrist glasses, lenses, and testing equipment, and more boxes filled with mahjong tiles and all sorts of trinkets and games from their travels to China. In today’s eBay paradigm, it was a fortune of curiosities and antiques.

My stepmother called a local auctioneer to get rid of it all. Two brothers owned the auction house. When they were done with their assessment, she called me over and said since I was the oldest, and this was our stuff and not hers, that I should negotiate with them. I was 11. When one of the brothers pulled out a hundred dollar bill, I was tongue-tied and the deal was sealed.

On the way out the door, one of them stopped and pulled a vase out of a box and turned it over to reveal Chinese script on the bottom.

“Here, you keep this,” he said to me. “This Chinese writing means it’s valuable.”

For many years I believed him, but I never got around to getting the vase properly evaluated. Then for years I realized it was probably just a mass-produced ceramic, and that he had thrown me that bone out of guilt because he knew he’d taken advantage of a kid. But now I’m back full circle to believing him again. That vase, and an 85-year-old photo of my mother spelling out her name “Sandra” on a blackboard, are the only two things I still have of hers.

As always, thank you for your eyes.

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It may not look it, but this is a popular fishing spot along the Duwamish River in south Seattle. A few weeks prior to taking these, I had photographed three generations of a Duwamish fishing family pulling up their nets in this water. I returned in mid October to catch the late afternoon sun and was in luck to find the waters clear of humans. I hope to share the fisher family’s story one day soon.

Shot with my Pentax 645 and Kodak Tri-X.

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I have a Berkshire Eagle newspaper clipping of my father — early 30’s, white, with a full head of pitch black hair and long sideburns — in the lobby of this building when it was still the city’s only movie theater, pressing a black man — younger but also with a head of pitch black hair and long sideburns — to the floor. A shotgun is within reach of both of them. My father has a pistol in one of his hands. Pittsfield police officer Jon White capturing a bank robbery suspect, the caption read.

Around my 11th birthday, not long after my father’s 15 minutes, I saw Jesus Christ Superstar with my grandmother and walked out hoping to become the man himself when I grew up. My grandmother thought Judas stole the show.

Sandy Cancilla and I sat in the front row of the Capitol craning our necks at 90-degree angles for two hours and fifty-nine minutes for the WWII flick, A Bridge Too Far. Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, James Caan, Gene Hackman…none of those names meant a thing to me. It was Sandy Cancilla who meant everything to me. At 16 to my 15, she was an older woman, the fact of which will achieve prurient relevance in Part 2 of this remembrance. Stay tuned.

On our way to watch Saturday Night Fever, John Koslowski and I sat in the theater parking lot in my father’s VW bug getting high and drawing pictures of dicks and tits on the inside of the windshield, which we rubbed clean with our hands after the movie, but which all magically reappeared in full, weed-reeking detail the next morning when my father turned on the car defroster on his way to work.

Pittsfield used to be an All-American General Electric town of 60,000 people. The Transformer Capital of the World, a sign claimed. When the transformer business moved south, GE pivoted and turned the city into The Plastics Capital of the World, according to another sign. In 2016 when these photos were taken, the city was dipping below 50,000 in population. It’s closer to 40,000 today.

Proof of General Electric’s long history in my hometown can be dug out any number of the city’s many public parks and baseball fields: landfill dirt cut with ground-up transformer parts that the company donated to the city’s park department. Free dirt! What city wouldn’t accept that? The gift certainly secured the company’s legacy: playgrounds and baseball fields landscaped atop that dirt which contained one of the world’s most toxic chemicals, Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCPs, a byproduct of the very transformers that Pittsfield thrived beneath for decades.

If you were a boy in Pittsfield, and you were good enough like I was, you’d play in one of the four Minor League baseball leagues at 7, one of the four Little League divisions from 8-12, one of the two Babe Ruth League from 13-15, one of the three High Schools teams during the school year and on the one American Legion team during the summer. If you played in college, like I did, you’d return summers to play on the semi-pro, collegiate team. Soccer was still a few decades out for Pittsfield, so it was baseball or bust. What’s more American than that?1

I’ll close out Part 1 by pointing out that Paul Rich & Sons wasn’t always Paul Rich & Sons. In a previous life the building held the honor of having been home to the record shop where I bought my first LP ever — Springsteen’s Greetings from Asbury Park — which I pulled out of the $4.98 bin and which I still own.

I had $10 and had asked my neighbor, Mark Shepard, son of Bud Shepard, my Little League coach who worked in the transformer division at GE and never changed his canvas green factory clothes that smelled of cigarettes and dried armpit sweat, what record I should buy.

What I recall him saying was, “Springsteen.” What he later claimed saying was, “Anybody but Springsteen.”

It was Mark who gave me my first joint, my first beer, and introduced the concept of cunnilingus to me. A beautiful walking cliche of a man, he was: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Madman, drummers, bummers
Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat.
In the dumps with the mumps
As the adolescent pumps his way into his hat…2

More of Pittsfield from November 20, 2016 to come.3

As always, thank you.

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One of my many walkabouts that month. Waterfront, Pike Place Market, Chinatown. One of my loops when I worked out of the neighborhood. I miss it.

The reflection is of the Great Wheel on the waterfront, taken from Pike Market.

Thank you once again for your eyes!

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Gotcha!

Thank you for your eyes!

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“This is the story of a naturally brilliant, inherently iconoclastic, fearlessly imaginative, fundamentally lovable and side splittingly funny person who was touched early and deeply by art and found it to be a dominant force in his nearly ninety-year life,” this 350-page Leiter-Foundation retrospective announces in its adverb- and adulation-rich second paragraph.

Thus the tone is set for this lovingly produced and colorfully rich retrospective (hagiography?) of Saul Leiter, the iconoclastic painter and pioneering photographer who seldom strayed more than 10 blocks from the lower east-side NYC apartment in which he lived in for 60 years.

As I mentioned in a recent Substack “Note,” I somehow made it on the good-boy list for Christmas and was gifted this beauty. There is no question that it’s a “must” for any serious Saul Leiter fan, but I can’t in good conscience not offer this caveat: as welcome as it is to those of us who revere Leiter’s work, it could have been so much more.

But more on that later. For now, a few samples from its pages with a handful of “Leiterisms” for your viewing and thinking pleasure.

Leiter was the son of the renown Pittsburgh rabbi and Talmud scholar, Wolf Leiter, who emigrated to Pittsburgh from Poland in 1923.

The photo above, included in the book’s “Beginnings” chapter, is one that Leiter held throughout his life. In it are the rabbis on Leiter’s paternal side — all of whom, save for his father, were killed in the Holocaust.

The retrospective offers the broad-strokes of Leiter’s life with images of several of Leiter’s personal curiosities and contains sentences like this: “He was a good student, bright and curious.”

In other words, if you’re looking for a detailed and critical account of Leiter’s life and art, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a sampling from each era in Leiter’s artistic life, starting with his early black-and-white street photography and documentary work.

“Freckles” is unique to Leiter’s catalog in its figurative directness; most of Leiter’s early black-and-white street work, like his later color photographs, leaned heavily toward the impressionistic. Similarly, the “Shoes of the Shoeshine Man,” which came out of an essay he published in Life, is a rare example of Leiter’s documentary work.

He was friends early on with the Life photographer W. Eugene Smith. In fact, Leiter purchased his first Leica from selling a print that Smith had gifted him. Smith also introduced Leiter to the influential MoMA curator Edward Steichen, who organized a dual show with Leiter and Robert Frank at the Photo League in New York City. The Photo League disbanded before the show was to open, thus postponing by several decades Leiter’s opportunity for wider notoriety.

This would be a theme repeated throughout Leiter’s life: chances to make it “big” that were always somehow scuttled.

When I think of Leiter, I think of the red umbrella, which appears in several of his well-known photographs.

What this collection makes clear, though, is that Leiter’s signature style — in addition to the tonality of his color work, especially in its use of the color red — involved his use of street structures and the natural elements to frame and layer his subjects.

For instance, the ways he framed his subjects in storefront windows and mirrors:

I’d argue that he also used the natural elements as a layering opportunity. Snow and raindrops often appear as a filter, or semi-transparent curtain, to his scenes.

Upon his death in 2014, his estate’s executors discovered hundreds of intimate images that Leiter had taken of his lovers and friends. Even with his nudes we see him employing the similar framing techniques that he used in his street work.

A surprisingly rich contribution the retrospective makes to our (read: my) understanding of Leiter’s career is the chapter on his fashion work — primarily with Harper’s Bazaar, but also with Esquire and Vogue:

Despising consumerism and the fashion culture in general, Leiter strove to create fashion work that was undifferentiated in style from his street photography.

Here’s the Vogue stylist and former model Grace Coddington, recalling a shoot with Leiter:

“He famously used a long lens and specialized in fashion photographs that felt uncannily like reportage. After dressing in Vogue Studios, I was told to go out into the adjacent Hanover Square, where he was waiting for me. After walking around the square several times, I went back into the dressing room, distraught as having somehow missed him, only to be told that Mr. Leiter was very happy with the picture he had taken.”

Leiter considered himself a painter first and foremast, leaving behind thousands of watercolors and acrylics at his death.

A major criticism I have of this retrospective is that the only technical insight it provides to any of Leiter’s practices is that he eschewed easels and made his paintings while stretched out on the floor. We learn nothing of Leiter’s darkroom work, the cameras he used, his personal views of composition, or any details whatsoever of his street techniques or practices.

I’ll close with my favorite side of Leiter’s paintings: his painted photographs. Although he dabbled with painting over his silver gelatin prints throughout his life, it appears that in his later years, starting around 1970 as his fashion work diminished, he began taking his “painted snippets” seriously, leaving behind dozens of them tucked into the pages of his books.

Don’t get me wrong: I was very happy to have been gifted this book. (Truth be told, I asked for it.) It had been on my list since its publication, but with a price tag I wasn’t willing to cough up for what I suspected it would be: a beautifully produced, but superficial, overview of Leiter’s art.

Given its 340 terrifically rendered and sequenced photographs and illustrations, and competent, informative text, it’s without question a welcome addition to any Leiter collection. But given his posthumous reputation and the Leiter Foundation’s position in the photography world, couldn’t it have included at least a few critical essays on Leiter’s art and practices that don’t read like school-text biography?

I’m being overly harsh and shouldn’t complain. I may find myself with an empty stocking next Christmas. It is an absolutely beautiful book with the ideal low-luster paper for the color photos’ tonality and a sewn binding that let’s you lay it nearly flat to truly appreciate the photographs. Add that to the more than 300 of Leiter’s photographs — I can only say, Thank you, Santa!

Let me close with a few Leiterisms:

Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective. 340 Illustrations. Edited by Margit Erb & Michael Parillo. 2023, Thames & Hudson.

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All Seattle 2017-2021. No so many urban wings from the first few years of my photo walks. I spent too much time looking down.

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So many wings, so little hard drive space. Time to cull.

Actually, hard drive space isn’t the problem. I’m cleaning up my past of digital crap because who needs to be reminded of crap? I’ve got my news feed for that.

Please be patient with me these next few weeks as I wander back through my first years with a camera, 2017-2021. These three ruffians are keepers, at least until my next cull. They each have a story I don’t want to forget, and they are each pre-Covid Seattle.

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Greetings you! I’m just now getting back into my 2026 Substack swing of things. I’ve been recently consumed during the day with prepping for an exhibit I’m having in February, and at night I’ve been binging movies while cleaning up several years of catalogs — 2017-2021 to be precise.

I can finally see the light on my exhibit preparations and am now working to get back into my groove.

In my night-binging, I came back across this candid photo, one of my favorites from my 2020 Covid walks. There’s a backstory to it that I’d like to share.

Here goes:

In my early twenties, I suffered from a series of lucid nightmares — three that I remember most clearly — that I could only stop by forcing myself awake.

In the one that remains most clear in my mind’s eye, I was the “Christina” in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. I was in her exact location on her hill, in her exact pose, and like her, I couldn’t move my legs. (Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth’s neighbor in Maine whom he used as his model for the painting, could only move about her farm by crawling due to a neuromuscular disorder that had disabled the use of her legs.1) But unlike her, I couldn’t move my arms either. I was frozen in place. And while she was peering up toward a set of barns on her farmland’s horizon, in my dream I was looking up at a sky that was filling with an expanding mushroom cloud. As the cloud grew and darkened the sky, I braced for the fallout, paralyzed in place. In every instance of the dream that I recall — probably a half-dozen of them over a two-year period — I forced myself awake before the radiation could reach me.

I have a handful of dreams that are never more than finger-snap removed from my consciousness. This is one of them, and as far as I know, the only one that’s informed one of my photographs.

As always, thank you for your eyes.

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I can hardly believe what I’m about to admit to y’all, but January 6, 2021 was one of the most entertaining days I’d experienced in months. Five years ago today I spent 12 hours at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia covering MAGA’s “Stop the Steal” rally that coincided with the storming of the capitol building 3000 miles away in D.C.

I’m not making a political statement. I’m sincerely testifying to what I saw and heard.

Compared to the months of the grim Covid-infected streets and righteous Black Lives Matter marches, protests, police battles, and memorial services that I covered throughout 2020, the Jan 6 rally in Olympia, Washington was a circus. I’m not saying people weren’t angry, or any less sincere or righteous in their beliefs than their liberal counterparts in Seattle, but for most of the day, the event had more of a carnival feel to it than a political protest. Costumes, singing, and the craziest shit coming out of people’s mouths that I’d ever imagine hearing.

I’m not going to get political here. You’ve figured out your relationship to MAGA by now, nothing I say will put a dent into that. But here are a few things I observed:

• I was treated with nothing but respect. People posed for me, answered my questions, joked with me. One guy I think wanted to kill me — seriously — but the other 499 at the event let me do my job in peace.

• I’d say 300 out of the 500 were armed with a rife, AK, shotgun, open sidearm, or sheathed blade.

• Did you know that the CIA, China, and Biden were using Covid vaccines (and our cell phones) to alter our DNA?

• You surely heard how Bill Gates got together with the Rockefellers and Rothchilds and George Soros to devise software that would brainwash us through our computers?

I’m sharing old news by now, but back in the day, this shit was fresh, at least to me. If you lived in a liberal bubble like I did, and didn’t watch Fox like I didn’t watch Fox, you could only wonder what planet these people had beamed down from.

One curious incident: I was in the stands watching the first few minutes of the live stream of the D.C. violence with a Seattle Times reporter. Images of MAGA climbing the Capitol building walls were streaming. A young guy tapped me from behind on the shoulder and said, “That ain’t us. That’s Antifa.”

Ok, dude.

It did take a serious turn at the end. A group led a march to the gates of the governor’s mansion, broke through the iron bars, and banged on the governor’s door. He was inside with his family. The protesters — 150 or so — demanded that he come out of the mansion or they’d break in to get him.

It turned out to be much ado about nothing, as a few of the leaders huddled with a few of the state troopers. It looked to me like they were planning their next barbecue or discussing a blockbuster fantasy football trade. Let’s just say that they were chummy. But I guess chummy has its charm in cases like this. One of the protesters took the bullhorn and said, “Let’s all go home now so we can get up tomorrow to fight another day.”

And that, as they say, was a wrap.

God bless America.

And as always, I appreciate your eyes.

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