Vintage Photo Of The Day, June 2

The sun rises in the first quarter hour after 5AM in early June during the few weeks before the summer solstice.  June is also a wet month in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes the systems that spill from the sky at night linger as broken clouds in the morning and glow like the embers of a dying fire when the sun shines through them.

Vintage print, $625

Commencement-Bay--Glowing Embers

Commencement-Bay--Glowing Embers

I created large format silver photographs of my home town for 20 years from 1990 through 2010. These are rich, beautifully crafted silver images processed for permanence. Vintage prints are made within a year of the photograph create date. My usual practice was to print within a few days or weeks of exposure. There are at most six prints per image; most images have three or fewer prints.

Vintage Photo Of The Day, June 1

Under the bright sun of August, above the beach piled with gravel, mussel shells, and pale drift wood, a red cedar tree held fast to the ground with vines of periwinkle crawling around its base. The light shown directly on the cedar's bark at mid afternoon, setting off the parallel striations left by rapid growth.  Under the bright sun the periwinkle's leaves appeared metallic and burnished. The vine has no thorns and throughout the year puts its blue flowers up against the leaves of dark green.

Vintage print, $625

Cedar And Periwinkle

Cedar And Periwinkle

I created large format silver photographs of my home town for 20 years from 1990 through 2010. These are rich, beautifully crafted silver images processed for permanence. Vintage prints are made within a year of the photographs create date. My usual practice was to print within a few days or weeks of exposure. There are at most six prints per image; most images have three or fewer prints.

Proctor Street Bridge

The bridge is just a couple of blocks from home. It was built in 1927, then rebuilt in 2006. The roadway is wide and the deck is high above the trail below it. Seven thousand cars and trucks cross it daily. Tacoma's shoreline is cut by deep gullies. As the city grew Tacoma bridged these gullies with arched spans of concrete. The area is rich with aggregate stone pushed to the water by glaciers, which made concrete the material to use.

Original photographs; poster 17x19, $25

ProctorStreetBridgeLightStandards.jpg

Girl In Plaid With a Boy in Red

In the early evening this past month I passed a couple in the shade of a grove of huge trees that erupt from the long parking strip between the sidewalk and the street. It is a warm evening and we pass each other without slowing.  We eye each other, they curious and suspicious because I carry a camera, while I am determined to be nonchalant. It never works.

I noticed he carries a leaf in his left hand, low at his waist, and I caught it barely.

GirlInPlaidWithABoyInARedSweater©ChristopherPetrich-1020384.jpg

Spring Sky Through The Alder Trees Of Puget Gulch In North Tacoma

Photography sometimes lends itself to fantasy, and photography of the computer is most accommodating. Starting from a regular, ordinary picture, the fantastic tones and shapes assemble themselves on nothing much more than a click.  The image first displayed is inspiring enough, but when I let my Irish imagination loose, my machinations push the display into a thicket of black branches under a sky of blue and white. Or is it a forest of kelp?

Spring Sky Through The Alder Trees of Puget Gulch - What One Saw Today ©Christopher Petrich 17x17 Matted in Museum Rag White Board. Printed to Hahnemuhle PhotoRag.

Spring Sky Through The Alder Trees of Puget Gulch - What One Saw Today ©Christopher Petrich 17x17 Matted in Museum Rag White Board. Printed to Hahnemuhle PhotoRag.

Like Leaves Of Grass

Photographs number as the stars. But not too long ago, the stars were bits of plastic film mounted in cardboard frames. Some of those old things fell to earth, forgotten, landing on old lawns, bent and stained.  Why did someone make this photograph? Why is it now so small and worthless.

Such are photographs when they no longer serve to remind you of what and why, of who and when. 

They land on the grass on the way to the dump, forgotten in plain sight.

Discarded Slide On The Grass - What One Saw Today ©Christopher Petrich 14x17 Matted in Museum Rag White Board. Printed to Hahnemuhle PhotoRag.

Discarded Slide On The Grass - What One Saw Today ©Christopher Petrich 14x17 Matted in Museum Rag White Board. Printed to Hahnemuhle PhotoRag.

March For Our Lives -- Long Hair Protestor

On the March For Our Lives Saturday my mind was filled with memories of protests long ago, when I was at school. At that time gun violence was on everyone's mind, as it was the time of Viet Nam and Kent State. When counting by tonnage of bombs dropped, that time was more violent than this. But this time is more personal because the gun violence now is in our schools, just as it was in Viet Nam, back then.

But on the scale of human suffering, this time is far worse because we don't know when to quit, or how. Our thing is money and domination.  It wasn't always, but nevertheless.  The two go hand in hand, and there isn't a more sure way to gain control than to start killing people. But staying in control using violence is sure to loosen your grip on power. 

We can say we are justified in spreading war and violence across great regions of the world. We can say it, but the people who live with what we do know different. They know US as indifferent to suffering, even as we say we care. 

This time is personal, too, because the war is in the streets and all colors are at risk, not just red, black, yellow, and brown.

This violence was planted long ago, and now it has returned in full bloom. We were the boys who went to Viet Nam, or ducked it. We were long hairs back then. Now we are gray, and this time we are responsible.