2 September

Angels Wings: The Whispers Of The Unseen (IR Photo)

by Jon Katz
Angels Wings: Whispers Of The Unseen
Angels Wings: Whispers Of The Unseen

Infrared photography is about what the human eye can’t seen, and this photography requires constant experimentation and a willingness to fail. I am learning more and more about the light that the camera can see but I cannot see.

Today, as the sun set behind the Rose of Sharon bush in our yard, I got on the other side of the bush, and the camera saw the light in these flowers, which are actually purple to my eye, but filled with light in reality, my eyes can’t see this by themselves.

Maria called them angel wings, and that hit me right away, of course, the wings of angels, dancing their unseen dancing, singing in the whispers of the unseen. This camera always tells the truth, even when I can’t see it.

2 September

Pizza Night At The Round House: Symmetry And Emotion

by Jon Katz
Symmetry And Emotion
Symmetry And Emotion

Friday night is Pizza Night at the Round House Cafe, a kind of unofficial community center for many people in our small town. Scott and Dominick come in early in the afternoon to fire up their new wood-fired stove, Scott and Dominick have been friends a long time, Scott is a mentor in our community.

He and Dominick work seamless to take orders, swirl the dough, apply the fresh vegetables and meats and maintain a steady flow of orders into the wood-fired oven. In early summer, when pizza night began, Scott and Dominick were nearly overwhelmed with orders.

But now, with two new modern wood-fired ovens, they are a ballet, a well-oiled machine, they work almost wordlessly and in complete harmony to keep up with the orders, and even stay ahead of them. Some nights, Scott and Dominick will make 50 or 60 pizzas, almost all with fresh vegetables from the Round House gardens at Pompanuck Farm.

Oddly enough, there is great emotion in this work, I think it reflects Scott’s obsessive determination to make the cafe a special place, and his relationship with Dominick, the two respect one another as well as their pizzas. I love that the camera caught the flour coming off of the dough, which Scott was twirling.

2 September

Sad Face

by Jon Katz
A Sad Face
A Sad Face

She had the saddest face, and it was buried in a book. She was sitting on a windy, wet sidewalk near Times Square on a tarp, one more person with cardboard signs asking for money. Maria and I sometimes argue about whether it’s useful to give cash to people who ask for money in that way.

Maria says anyone who does that is needy and in trouble and she usually gives a dollar or two. I gave this girl two dollars and she looked up and gave me the sweetest smile, but her face was very sad. I asked if I could take her photo and she nodded. I wondered about her story, whose daughter she might be, how she came to be sitting out on the street reading a book with a plastic cup occupied by a few quarters.

Most New Yorkers rarely give money to street people, there are a lot of them, and they’ve heard the stories about how the money often goes to liquor and drugs.

Life is hard on the poor and lost these days, nobody wants to spend any money to try and help them any more.  I feel I am surrounded by hard thinking and cold ideologies. I was touched by the pain in her eyes.

But I wanted to take the photo of the sad-faced girl, she gave me a smile and thanked me and went back to reading her book, a novel set in France. I wanted to go  back and offer her $10 for a portrait sitting, but we were already a couple of blocks away.

2 September

Faith: Finding Time And Space To Pray

by Jon Katz
Finding Time and Space
Finding Time and Space

Thomas Merton wrote that it is not possible to live a meaningful life without faith, and I believe this is true, we all have our own ideas of faith. Walking in mid-town Manhattan yesterday, I passed a crowded Halal water and food stand, it was one of the busiest intersections in the city and it has just begun to rain.

I saw one of the Halal workers leave his cart, he was holding a square piece of cardboard. He lay it down next to the curb as literally hundreds of people, almost all of them on cell phones, thundered by, the smell of automobile  exhaust and honking horns and jammed traffic on the other side of him.

It is hard for me to describe the din and smell and noise all around him, he lay the cardboard down and faced towards Mecca, the direction in which all Muslims pray.

He knelt down on the cardboard several times, sometimes lying face down, sometimes sitting,  then picking up his soaked cardboard and going back to the stand to make falafel and other sandwiches for the long line of hungry tourists and New Yorkers. I went over and shook his hand and he smiled and thanked me for noticing his prayer and said he was thankful I took his photograph.

Some people have shouted at him when he prays, he said, but mostly, no one seems to notice.

I was touched by his devotion, so many people speak of faith and preach to others, but here, on this wet and crowded street, this faithful man found time and space for his prayers and so many people marched by him, sometimes nearly over him. His faith is an integral part of his life, it is literally women in and around his life.

And all he needs is a piece of cardboard and a bit of space on the ground.

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