Either Mr. Richardson has a bevy of able assistants who can develop, scan, and post a photo from a date-stamped roll of film in less than a day, or Mr. Richardson is watermarking a digital date-stamp onto the lower-right corner of his pictures for a decidedly analog, snapshot touch.

You be the judge?

“Egg,” by C.G. Hanzlicek

I’m scrambling eggs for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.

I remember the appreciation his voice found in the last three lines. Together we wondered what gave them their force. Principally, I think it’s the sudden telescopic collapse of scale: from the speaker’s total love of his daughter into the simple serving of an egg.

It’s the preparation of this same egg that opens the poem. The poem’s structure, then, mirrors its message. The speaker meditates upon the happiness he’s found in fatherhood and wedded love, and the power they have to transform and give dimension to even the smallest features of daily life. These considerations, though, begin with the egg and his daughter’s question, to which she herself provides the answer in receiving the egg at the poem’s end. Grand and universal themes unfold from, and then return to, what is after all a mundane, quotidian routine.

In respect of which, it is striking to see how much the poem operates like a photograph. Not every photograph works this way, of course, but the ones I care about tend to, and it’s as near as I’ve come to a single reason for loving photographs: the capacity to find and show the large in the small, to find meaning in the literal and mundane merely through a choice in perspective (see David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” for an oration on the daily importance of this principle). It’s not as academic as it sounds. Anyone has experienced it who has studied the snapshot of a loved one and perceived in that picture a summation of the person.

Edward Weston wrote of transcendance in his journals while photographing bell peppers: “It is classic, completely satisfying—a pepper—but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter.” Those photographs fix the large and the small—here the abstract and the concrete—upon the same plane, and the image resonates with the tension of opposing polarities delicately balanced. It’s as though Weston drew together the ends of a giant magnet: a nudge in any direction and they should go shooting far apart: we would be left with either just a bell pepper, or just an abstraction.

Pepper, 1930 (30P), by Edward Weston

I’d identified this feat primarily with photography, but the last lines of Hanzlicek’s poem—their collapse of one end of the scale upon the other—achieve a similar sensation of glimpsing the connection between those opposing poles.  If we need a name for this device, it would be hard to do better than Hanzlicek’s own symbology, for it reports the coincidence of literal simplicty and unbounded potential.

In what artworks, then, have you found an egg?

Joel Sternfeld – Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979
(from American Prospects)
n: 1979, p: 2003

The photograph is part of the permanent collection at the High Museum in Atlanta, and there’s a current show up called “Look Again“, curated by Asst. Curator of Photography Danielle Avram, that assesses marvels of the photo collection that may not have been viewed in awhile (See: Sommer).

I was talking to Danielle about the show, and Sternfeld’s picture, and she said a museum-goer sent her a link to a newspaper article about the elephant. Here’s the full story of what has happening on a country road in Woodland, Washington on June 27th, 1979.

Register-Guard – Eugene, OR, June 28th, 1979

The story’s pretty tragic, and there’s one paragraph that specifically deals with the circumstances of the photograph:

“A second elephant, Thai, escaped from the farm and refused to return, attracting more than 100 spectators and tying up traffic on a nearby road. The animal was coaxed onto a borrowed flatbed truck and returned to the farm late Wednesday.”

While Morgan Berry, the elephant’s trainer, was killed that day (by a different elephant, in the throes of Musth) his Animal Farm apparently kept operating for awhile. In true internet fashion, one fact led to another, and Berry’s farm is shown to have sold “Thai” to the Houston zoo in 1980, less than a year after the picture was taken. Thanks, elephant database!

Thai’s now the main bull Asian elephant in Houston, and is 43 years old. He’s come a long way from the wilds of Thailand, and along the way, he’s sired 14 elephants, most recently Mac, all of whom have died at relatively young ages. It must say something about the difficulty of raising Asian elephants in captivity, I suppose.

Thai’s even on flickr now. Is Mr. Sternfeld?

(Flickr photos via the Houston Zoo.)

In the meantime, here’s a reminder from Raoul of just how complicated video can be: outtakes from his Print on Demand review Lucky he’s French…. and remember, the camera is scary!

This endeavour has been a while in coming: it’s been the result of a long-term itch shared by a few good friends that simply needed scratching. While we’re still figuring a few things out, we can promise that we’ll try to do things a little differently and not take ourselves too seriously in the process.

Thanks for stopping by, we hope you’ll stick around and share your thoughts and opinions with us. Needless to say, potential contributions and contributors are always welcome: drop us a line at contact@insig.ht.

Hin Chua, Raoul Gatepin, James Hendrick, Michael David Murphy & Ben Roberts