Monday, August 26, 2013




After supper... with Patrick and Elaine, we talked about photography because Patrick and Michael visited the very house near Tournus, France, where Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826 made a photographic image that is the earliest surviving camera photograph in existence today.  It's a view from the window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes).  I told them I learned last week that Debora Klochko, Executive Director of the Museum of Photograph Arts in San Diego, travels (now on a ship going around the Black that lies between Europe and Asia.) with only her iPhone for photographs.  Deborah knows more about photography than just about anybody else I know.

Some of you who regularly see this BLOG know that occasionally I use my cell phone for my daily picture fix.  Today was like that.  I thought about Niepce and Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre working together to make the pictures that we know today as the earliest photographic images ever made... and pointed my phone at Margaret, then Elaine, then Patrick... I think both Niepce and Daguerre would be delighted by Twenty-First Century photography, but neither of them would be surprised.


Another Frenchman whom I respect and revere, Roland Uberschlag, has published Velo Plaisir, Velo Sufferance, a book of writings and photographs about his travels around the world on a bicycle.  I had the pleasure  (and sufferance) of riding with him from Vancouver, B.C. to San Diego a few years ago.  I received today the copy of his book.  His personal inscription ends with the phrase, Without a touch of dreams; without a touch of madness... Nothing Happens."  Perfect.




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