Susannah and the Elders

I came across this picture today while I was trying to find the painting of Susannah and the Elders Diderot describes in his Salon reports. Jacopo Tintoretto’s version of events is the painting in this photo – it isn’t the one I was looking for, but the photo illustrates very happily my interest in the painting’s surface as a kind of pivot for the beholder’s gaze.

The Poetry of Silence

On Friday I saw the Hammershoi exhibition at the Royal Academy following Anisa’s recommendation. Anisa takes photographs of moments in quiet rooms, which are sometimes repeated, sometimes with the focus diffused, sometimes warm with light or with sharp points of detail.

We meet infrequently over tea and I ask her to bring photographs, and I go through them, keeping them in their careful order though she says I needn’t, folding them back into the papers and envelopes that separate them and keep them in their groups. They have a quality that presses its poetry onto the things around the prints, and so I want to be careful with the papers and envelopes,

If Alive

Polaroids

Jamie Livingston took a photo every day.