goddamnit

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Let’s talk about Neil Gaiman. No, wait. Let me first offer up my creds.

I was, for several years, a private investigator specializing in criminal defense. I helped criminal defense attorneys defend criminals. That sounds awful, I know. But two things. First, the US Constitution says every person accused of a crime deserves a fair trial, and a fair trial means the accused has the right to challenge the evidence of the State. The other thing is this: my job was to investigate a criminal case and report facts and evidence to the defense attorney. Not facts and evidence that HELPED the defendant. Just facts, just evidence. It didn’t matter to me if the facts/evidence helped or hurt the accused. A good defense lawyer needs an unbiased account of the case.

I’m telling you this so you can judge for yourself whether or not I’m full of shit when I talk about Neil Gaiman. He hasn’t, to my knowledge, been charged with a crime. He has, though, been accused by multiple women of sexual abuse.

I believe them.

I wish it wasn’t true, but it almost certainly is.

A lot of feminists (and I like to count myself as a feminist) say we should always believe women. I don’t always believe anybody. If there’s anything I learned as a PI, it’s this: everybody lies. But as a criminal defense PI, I never had a case in which a woman lied about sexual assault. Some women may have confused some of the details of the assault (no surprise; sexual assault is pretty fucking traumatic), but I never had a single sexual assault/rape case in which the accusation was unfounded. I’m not saying women don’t lie about it; I’m just saying I never had a criminal case in which a woman lied about it. (I should amend that; I never had a case in which an adult woman lied about it. I did, sadly, have two cases in which adolescent girls lied about sexual assault—one apparently out of spite, one for no apparent reason. Kids don’t always act logically.)

But back to Neil Gaiman, a writer I’ve long respected and admired. He always struck me as being thoughtful, caring, sensitive, and honest. He may actually be some of those things most of the time. But based on the reports I’ve heard and read, I believe he also used his position and influence to coerce or pressure women to engage in unwanted sexual acts.

When the first woman reported, I hoped it would turn out to be an isolated incident (which, of course, is one incident too many). That was my hope, but I fully anticipated there’d be more. It’s always safe to assume influential men will be assholes. Hell, it’s always safe to assume all men, influential or not, will be assholes. I mean, patriarchy is built on a foundation of men being assholes, and believing in their absolute right to be assholes.

At this point, I think three more women have now come forward with accusations against Gaiman. Why is that important? Because any form of abuse can be a single act. A person might get roaring drunk and piss their pants once and never do it again. A person might get angry and hit somebody once, and never do it again. A person might pressure somebody to have sex once, and feel bad about it, and never do it again. Everybody is capable of acting badly. But a pattern of behavior is what defines an abuser. It’s necessary to distinguish between a person who commits a bad act and a person who’s a bad actor.

Neil Gaiman, it appears, is a bad actor.

Is it possible he’s being unfairly accused? Sure. But it’s highly unlikely. Is it possible that he believes all these acts were consensual? Sure. But he’s forfeited any claim to actual innocence, and my experience suggests these women are telling the truth.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This is further evidence (as if we need any more evidence) that we must burn the patriarchy. Burn it to the ground, gather the ashes, piss on them, douse them in oil and set them on fire again. Burn the patriarchy, then drive a stake directly through the ashes where its heart should be, and then set fire to the stake. Burn the fucker one more time. And keep burning it, over and over. Burn it for generations.

the bleeding ear of trump

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I confess, I’m a wee bit disappointed. I mean, yeah, I’m glad Trump’s idiotic but hypnotic control of the MAGAverse is waning. But I really thought this might happen. I’m talking about the potential for an Ellen Jamesian moment.

Now some (okay, probably most) of you right now are wondering, “Greg, old sock, who is this Ellen James of which you speak and what would that moment entail?” I’m going to tell you. Back in 1978 novelist John Irving published a novel called The World According to Garp. It won the National Book Award for Fiction the following year. Garp was the first novel I’d ever read that explicitly examined toxic masculinity, and the first novel I’d read that featured a trans character in a positive way. It also looked at ideological extremism and cults of personality. One critical element of the narrative revolves around a group of women who cut off their own tongues in solidarity with an eleven-year-old sexual assault survivor (Ellen James) whose tongue was cut out by her rapists to silence her.

When I first saw a Trump supporter wearing a sweatshirt with a ‘Diapers over Dems’ logo and other supporters wearing adult diapers with the logo ‘Real Men Wear Diapers’ I thought his cult of personality might have hit a high water mark. Then came the assassination attempt. Trump’s ear got pinked, possibly by a bullet fragment. It doesn’t matter what pinked his ear; it got pinked. It bled. He had to wear a bandage for a few days. And some of his supporters adopted the bandage. People actually put bandages on their ears. It looked ridiculous, but that never stopped them before.

I felt all the elements of an Ellen Jamesian moment began to coalesce. I actually thought there was a chance–not a great chance, but a chance–members of the MAGAverse would pink their own ears. But no. The cowards stopped with the bandage. Sure, there was at least one guy who got a tattoo of Trump surrounded by Secret Service personnel with his tiny fist raised and an angry look on his face. But that was about it.

Bloodless fake crucifixion

I truly believe that if the assassination attempt had happened a year ago, we’d have seen some MAGA fuckwits piercing their own ears. A year ago, a bleeding ear would have been seen as Trump stigmata. Maybe the most dedicated Trumpists died of Covid, maybe his people are just weary of having to support every idiotic thing that rancid motherfucker utters, maybe JD Vance has hollowed out some of his support, but a year ago Trump’s bloody shirt would be enshrined at Mar-a-Lago. A year ago Trump would be selling cheap-ass Chinese-made white shirts with symbolic blood on the collar. It seems clear (to me, at least) that Trump doesn’t command quite the same passion that he did a year ago.

And yes, that’s a good thing. A very good thing. But I did sorta kinda want to see Trumpists tearing out a chunk of their own ears.

madam president…oh, that sounds good

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President Uncle Joe has done something amazing. He made the decision to voluntarily relinquish the most powerful political position on Earth. He did it under some pressure, to be sure. But he did it with grace and dignity. Compare that to all the ugly bullshit Comrade Trump pulled in a desperate attempt to cling to power–the lies, the threats, the violence–even after he was legitimately defeated in a fair election.

Even more amazing, Biden did something no other politician has ever done. As an old White man, he is willingly surrendering his power to a Black woman. Think about that for a moment. He didn’t have to do that. In fact, by most reports, the majority of the Powers That Be in the Democratic Party opposed that approach. Even a lot of Harris supporters said they preferred a more open contest to determine who’d be their nominee. Biden deliberately scuttled that idea by quickly voicing his support for Kamala Harris. He basically challenged the Democratic Party, saying, ‘Don’t even think about denying a Black woman as the Democratic candidate.’ That was ballsy.

He didn’t do that out of pique; he didn’t support Harris out of spite, just to thwart the people who’d refused to support him. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do. And lawdy, our boy Joe was right. The organic groundswell of support for Harris has been nothing short of astonishing.

The timing couldn’t have been better. I’ve no idea if this was deliberate or not (I hope it was deliberate), but Biden waited until Trump had weighed the GOP ticket down with JD Vance, the oleaginous Senator from Faux Appalachia, as his VP pick. This effectively pits the most joyless, misogynistic, racist tag-team in US political history against a young(ish), vibrant Black woman who laughs and dances and embraces diversity (along with a PTBNL).

Biden’s move has totally disrupted the MAGA election plan (such as it was). At a rally yesterday, Trump was reduced to claiming Harris “is totally against the Jewish people” despite being married to a Jewish man, and complaining that she was disrespectful by refusing to attend Bibi ‘War Criminal’ Netanyahu’s speech before Congress–which is risible coming from an asshole who refused to attend Biden’s inauguration.

Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice for POTUS in 2020. He wasn’t even in my top five. But he’s been the most effective president in my lifetime, and he did that without calling much attention to his effectiveness. In a normal election year, Kamala Harris wouldn’t be my first choice. But she’s completely changed the dynamic of this election cycle, and she is without a doubt the most authentic candidate of this generation. I couldn’t be happier.

This kid? She’s gonna be the President of the United States of America. How great is that?

I not only feel hopeful for the 2024 election, I’m beginning to feel something approaching confidence. Of course, I was confident that Clinton would win in 2016, so I distrust my confidence. But I absolutely believe that the ONLY way Trump can win is by successfully ratfucking the election–by challenging legit vote counts, by voter suppression, by installing corrupt election officials and MAGA-friendly judges. And if SCOTUS is any measure, that’s a distinct possibility. So while I’m confident that Democrats will win the election, I’m only hopeful they’ll gain the presidency.

President Harris. I like the sound of that. If we work hard and we’re fortunate, the first conflict of the Harris administration will be whether it’s Madam President (my choice) or Madame President.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A reminder that we must dismantle the patriarchy. Pull it apart at every joint, disassemble every element, demolish every component. We must gather all those fragments, douse them in oil, and set them on fire. Gather the ashes, drop them in an acid bath. Enclose the acid in a titanium container and launch it into a distant sun. Then have tapas and a colorful rum drink with a tiny umbrella in it.

speaking of photography…

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I have a complicated history with Instagram. I downloaded the app and joined 11 years ago today, on 21 July, 2013. I did it under a pseudonym–Knuckles Dobrovic–because, like every good photographer I knew, I assumed Instagram was trash and I didn’t want to be associated with it. As I wrote at the time,

We sneered at Instagram for being a cheap, easy, lazy way to turn crappy photos into images that look artsy. Not ‘artful’ or ‘artistic’ but artsy. We sneered at it because the learning curve for using Instagram is — well, it’s hardly a curve at all. It’s almost a straight line. You shoot a photo with your cell phone, you flip through a couple dozen preset filters until you find one you like, tap to apply it, and hey bingo, you have yourself an artsy photo of your drunken friends at a tacky Chinese restaurant.

I hadn’t actually looked at Instagram; I was just operating on the assumption it was trash. I had to join it in order to confirm my assumption. And hey, I was right. It was, in fact, trash. It still is trash, mostly. But eleven years ago to my surprise, I also found a healthy dose of really fine photography. All sorts of photography, from street work to portraiture to landscape to editorial work to fashion photography. There was (and still is) solid work to be found on Instagram.

I used the Knuckles Dobrovic account mainly to explore IG. But I also felt an obligation to participate, so I used it as a platform for a hastily cobbled together project. After a few months, I decided to more fully embrace IG; I created a second account under my own name. Originally, the account was devoted to square format monochrome photos. Now, of course, it’s my main IG account for all types of photography.

I continued to use the Knuckles account as a platform for random photo projects (for anybody interested, I’ll include a list and a description of those projects in an addendum at the end of this post). The last Knuckles project ended in April of 2023. I haven’t posted anything under the Knuckles account since then.

Until today. My IG anniversary. I’m starting my 8th Knuckles project. Appropriately, it’s going to be pretty similar to how I began my personal IG account. I’ve always had four simple rules for a Knuckles Dobrovic project.

  1. It’s got to be simple (which means I won’t have to do a lot of planning or a lot of post-processing).
  2. It’s got to be organic to my life (which means it’s something I can photograph during the course of an ordinary day — whatever that is).
  3. It’s got to have at least one intellectual component (which is more accurately described as a pretentious bullshit element).
  4. It’s got to be able to keep my interest over time.

So here we go. Simple: high contrast monochrome, which is made easy with my new Ricoh GR3X camera. Organic to my life: my normal flâneur walk-about style plus whatever I happen to see that catches my interest. Pretentious Bullshit Element: my ongoing fascination with the Japanese Provoke-style photography, which is NOT how I normally see the world. Keeping my interest: Well, yeah. I’ve played around with this style of photography before and I see no reason why I’ll ever stop. At some point, I may feel the need to start a 9th Knuckles project, but until then…well.

ADDENDUM: Previous Knuckles Dobrovic projects.

Things on a Table — I put a thing on a table and photographed it.

My Feet on the Earth — I took walks, stopping periodically to photograph my feet. I selected two or three of the images during a walk and created multiple exposure images.

One Hundred Appropriated Google Street Views — This was sort of an homage to Hiroshige’s ‘One Hundred Famous View of Edo’. While playing the online game GeoGuessr (which involves finding a random location based on Google Street View), I made screen captures of interesting vistas. I converted those screen grabs into square black & white images.

Slightly Dislocated — During the enforced isolation of the pandemic, I shot square format photos during my solo walks or masked errands. I diddled with the color a wee bit, digitally sliced the image in thirds, then re-arranged the pieces.

Are Bure Bampot — I’d been playing Geoguessr again, and during a break I read something about Daido Moriyama, the godfather of a photographic style called are bure bokeh, which roughly translates as “rough, coarse/crude, out of focus.” That same afternoon, on Twitter, a Scots acquaintance referred to somebody as ‘a total bampot,’ which I was told means “an idiot, a foolish person, a nutcase”. For reasons I can’t explain, the phrase are bure bampot came to me, and I decided to follow through on it. As before, I made Google Street View screen captures of scenes and locations in Scotland. This time I modified them using the are bure bokeh style.

Geoguesser Bus Stops — A bus is the most democratic form of public transport. They’re most commonly used by the poor and working classes, but the bus stops for everybody. A bus network is fundamentally simple: a series of designated routes with consistent designated arrival/departure times and stable designated boarding locations with predetermined fees. It’s a predictable, reliable, efficient dynamical transportation system in which bus stops act as fixed point attractors. Bus stops are ubiquitous; they’re everywhere because a bus network is socially elastic–the design can be stretched to fit almost any community anywhere in the world. Bus stops are both local and global.

the flâneur school of photography

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There are people–lots of people–who like to name things. I know people who’ve given names to their car, who’ve named their computer, who’ve named their favorite camera. I’m not one of those people. I don’t anthropomorphize gear. A camera is just a tool. You choose the tool best suited for the job you’ve got planned.

I say that, but lawdy, I’m starting to develop a relationship with my new camera. My Ricoh GR3X and me, we’re becoming buddies.

A bald guy walks down the street.

Why? Because this camera seems to have been designed almost specifically for the way I shoot photographs. I’m not a street photographer, although I enjoy shooting street. I’m not a landscape photographer, or a fine arts photographer, or a portrait photographer; I don’t really belong to any of the more common photographic traditions. I belong to what I like to call the flâneur school of photography.

A tree in the library courtyard.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a flâneur is somebody who roams around idly observing the world while being somewhat emotionally detached from it. Somebody who’s not necessarily involved in what’s taking place around them, but is keenly aware of it. One writer described a flâneur as “an amateur detective and investigator of the city.” The term is usually applied to urban life, but it’s a philosophical approach to the world that can take place anywhere. It’s a strange nonjudgmental balance between being analytical and emotional.

(By the way, the term flâneur is French but it’s derived from the Old Norse verb flana, which meant “to wander with no purpose.” And if you’re wondering how a French word is derived from an Old Norse word, you need to read more about Vikings.)

I don’t think those guys were intentionally walking in step, but…

That’s how I shoot photographs. Hell, that’s largely how I’ve lived my life. I’m a flâneur both by nature and by training. Almost every career I’ve had involved the same basic process: observe, analyze, filter the analysis through emotion (or the emotion through analysis), then act. It’s a skill set that helped me as a medic in the military, as a counselor in the Psych/Security unit of a prison for women, certainly as a private investigator specializing in criminal defense, and even (to a lesser extent) as a teacher.

In terms of photography, being a flâneur just means noodling around, paying sharp attention to detail, and seeing stuff in terms of composition. What’s cool is that when it all comes together–the scene, the light, the moment–there’s an immediate emotion, a serotonin hit that’s generated whether you have a camera or not.

Yeah, road closed.

My Ricoh GR3X is ideally suited to the flâneur school of photography, partly because it’s so compact and easy to carry everywhere. I’d heard you could carry it in a regular pants pocket, but I assumed that was mostly bullshit. It’s not. I’ve done it; I’ve walked around–I’ve ridden my bike–with this unit IN MY GODDAMN POCKET. It also turns on almost immediately, which is incredibly handy. Best of all (I’m not sure this is actually the ‘best of all’ because there are so many ‘best’ things about this camera), you can shoot with one hand. Even in the manual mode, you can control all the settings you need with one hand.

Ginger cat.

Seriously, you can pull the camera out of your pocket, turn it on, compose the shot, adjust all the elements of exposure with one hand, take the shot, turn the camera off, and put it back in your pocket…and you can do all that in just a moment. Which is pretty much what I did with the photo above. As I was walking down the street I noticed the ginger cat. I stepped off to one side so as not to spook the cat, which is when I noticed the woman’s legs. Her legs were in shadow, so I had to quickly adjust the exposure to make sure they’d show up in the photo. Then a step back to include the tree and the window in the frame, and there it was. Maybe ten seconds from seeing the cat to taking the shot. One hand.

Say hello to my little friend

It’s not a perfect camera; I’d love for it to be weather-sealed and dust-proofed, but I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without making it bigger. It’s more important (to me, at any rate) to have a camera I can tote in my pocket than one I can shoot in the rain. There have been a couple of instances where some fill flash would have been handy; the GR3 series doesn’t have a native flash. But, again, that’s small beans.

Big S.

The fact is, this camera has already allowed me to get some shots I couldn’t have done with any of my other cameras. And it’s allowed me to get some shots quicker and more easily than with my other cameras. I could have made the shot above with any of my cameras, but it would have taken longer and I’d have had to use both hands. It’s not a great photo (I shot it largely as a reminder to go back when this bar was open), but I was able to get the depth of field I wanted with a minimum of fuss. That absence of fuss is like heroin; it’s fucking addictive.

So yeah, it looks like me and the GR3X are becoming good buddies. I look forward to spending time with it.

if it had been anybody other than trump

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Yes, it’s an impressive photograph. You know the one I’m talking about. Trump, bloody, angry, fist raised. I’m not going to post it because I’m already sick of it. But it’ll probably win a lot of photojournalist awards, and rightly so. A lot of folks (and by ‘folks’ I mean ‘political pundits’) believe that photo is going to help Trump in the coming election. They think it’ll carry Trump along on a groundswell of sympathy.

A lot of folks are wrong.

Had it been anybody other than Trump, they’d probably be right. But we’re talking about Comrade Donald J. Trump here. Trump is different. There’s not a lot of sympathy for Trump. Perhaps the most remarkable (and, in a very real way, incredibly sad) aspect of the assassination attempt against Trump is this: so many people are disappointed that it failed.

Yes, that’s a horrible thing to say. But there it is. I’ve heard it and I suspect you’ve heard it as well. It’s usually expressed in a soft voice–maybe even a whisper–and it’s often said with more than a little shame. But it’s being said all the same. Regret that Trump didn’t catch one of those rounds fired.

The people saying this aren’t raging ideologues, they’re not political junkies, they’re not rabid progressives or conspiracy nuts. They’re regular people. Moms to their kids, people in the produce aisle at the market, couples eating smashburgers at a diner. They’re saying stuff like, “You know, I don’t really want anybody to get shot, I’m opposed to any sort of violence, but….” And they let that ‘but’ hang there, and the person they’re talking to frowns and nods. Or maybe they turn it into a joke. “Nobody’s been that disappointed by a couple of inches since Stormy Daniels.” And we cringe and groan, but we’re still nodding.

Most people who feel this way are properly reluctant to say it out loud. It’s a horrible thing to say. It’s a horrible thing to feel. I mean, we’re decent people–or we try to be. But that thought and feeling is out there, and it’s widespread. And it’s Trump-specific.

If it had been anybody other than Trump…

hey MAGA, remember this?

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We knew there was going to be violence, didn’t we. I mean, the threat of violence has been a constant theme in the MAGAverse. Just a few days ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, announced, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Hell, Trump his ownself, during the George Floyd protests, asked his Sec. of Defense, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Of course there was going to be violence. We just didn’t expect the violence would be directed at Trump. It’s always been MAGA that’s been doing the threatening. They’re the ones with all the guns. Democrats and the left have all been threatening to…you know, vote. We’ve been threatening to…you know, hold criminal investigations and give Trump and his MAGA fuckwits a chance to defend themselves in court. We’ve been threatening them with the Constitution of the United States. Or the tattered shreds of the Constitution after SCOTUS ripped it up.

And MAGA? This is their approach:

A pickup tailgate with the image of a kidnapped President Biden.

We post images of Trump in an orange jumpsuit on social media. They celebrate the imagined kidnapping of Joe Biden. And let’s not forget, just four years ago 13 men were arrested by the FBI and charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and ‘try’ her for the crime of…you know, implementing Covid public health restrictions.

But the MAGAverse is trying, once again, to turn reality on its head. Here’s one of the headlines in the morning’s Washington Post.

Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric

There are LOTS of examples of GOP politicians and supporters blaming Democrats. I’ll just mention one. Senator Tim Scott, once a hopeful VP candidate, said “This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.” Scott ignores the fact that Trump actually IS a threat to democracy.

At this point, we know very little about what happened yesterday. We know the shooter was a 20-year-old registered Republican armed with an AR-15 style rifle. That’s about it; that’s about all we actually know at the moment. We’ll know more by the end of the day. We’ll also be inundated by a cascade of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and outright bullshit. It’ll be hard to separate what we know from the bullshit. Hell, a lot of folks won’t even try to separate it. MAGA won’t.

But we can count on this: Democrats and folks on the left will be held to a higher standard of behavior than Republicans and other MAGA fuckwits.

in which I look at an old photo (part 2)

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I used to pay a lot of attention to photography. Not just the practice of photography (you know, shooting photos and all that), but photography as a craft and art form. Then, for a lot of reasons, I stopped doing that. For a few years, I just wasn’t interested in photography. I shot occasional photos with my cellphone and that was enough. But a few months ago I picked up one of my old cameras and…hey, guess what. My interest in photography was resurrected.

I started thinking about photography again. I started reading articles about photography again, and studying other photographers again. In doing so, I came across an article that suggested looking at your old photos as if they were made by a different person. I’ve never really bothered to look at my old photos. I saw them when I took them and again when I processed them; why look again? But I thought, “Well, what the hell, I might as well try that.” And I did. I picked an old photo and studied it (and wrote about it here). Now I’m doing it again.

Here’s a thing I learned the last time I did this: looking at old photos–and I mean actively looking at them, not just thumbing through them quickly–is weird. It’s sort of dissociative. At least it is for me. It turns out there’s two or three things going on at the same time. You 1) look at the photo as a photo, an object in its own right. But you also 2) consider what was happening in the world around you when you shot that photo. And 3) you remember why you shot the photo.

6:59 PM, Sunday, August 7, 2011

This photo was shot on a Sunday evening, at 6:59 PM on the 7th of August, 2011. It was shot at a hospice facility for veterans, where my brother Jesse Eugene was dying from pancreatic cancer. I visited him almost daily during his stay. On that particular day, I’d wheeled his bony ass out to this small enclosed porch so he could look at some trees and feel some sunshine. He stayed in his wheelchair, I sat on the bench. We didn’t talk much. I think the trees and sunshine meant more to me than to him. He may have been humoring me when I suggested visiting the porch. We were only out there a short time before he said he was tired and wanted to return to his room.

I remember wanting to shoot his photo while we were out there; the light was amazing. But he looked awful–the cancer had pretty much ravaged him–and I knew he wouldn’t want his photo taken like that. After I got him back in his bed and comfortable, I scurried back to the porch and took this photo, catching the last little bits of that delicious sunlight.

He died a few days later. This may have been the last time he left his hospice room. I think it was. It’s possible somebody else might have wheeled him out to that porch, but I don’t think so. At the time, it never occurred to me that he might never get to sit in the sunlight again.

Here’s a weird thing. I knew he was dying, but I can’t remember ever thinking something like, “This will be the last time he ever eats black-eyed peas” or “He’ll never get to hear this song again.” I take that back; I vividly recall bringing his dog to visit, knowing it would be the last time he got to hold and hug his little buddy. That was pretty crushing. But that was unusual; mostly I always thought there’ll be at least one more day. But, of course, eventually there wasn’t.

Here’s another weird thing–an uncomfortable weird thing. There’s a selfish part of me that wants this to have been taken on the last day Jesse Eugene sat in sunshine. Why? Because it would give the photo more emotional weight. That complicates my thoughts about this photograph. I have to wonder if my memory is reliable. It’s entirely possible I’m remembering this as the last time my brother sat in sunlight because I want to remember it that way.

Without all that context, I think it’s a pretty good photo. The light is sweet, that yellow bench is an absolute treat, the hint of flowers in the left of the frame is a nice touch. The last rays of sunlight give the photo a sentimental quality that, I hope, isn’t entirely sappy.

I’m still uncomfortable with this idea of examining an old photo of mine, but I’m willing to consider there may be some value in it. I’ll probably do it again in a month or so.