I’ve spoken about the beauty of trees, of their appeal to a mythic chord within us, and of some of the great photographers, like Beth Moon and Ansel Adams, who have excelled in capturing this special subject.  So not surprisingly I was taken this past Sunday by Guy Trebay’s column in the New York Times Sunday Review about the majestic, vaulting row of elm trees that stretches from 110th to 59th Streets in New York’s Central Park.  Central Park was meant to be a gift top the people of the city and these trees are there for anyone, who pauses long enough from the brutal bustle of the city in winter and looks or photographs.  Indeed the column is accompanied by a beautiful image of the snow covered elms along Poet’s Walk in Central Park by New York Times photographer Craig Blankenhorn. And this image demonstrates that there is beauty even on the gloomiest of winter days – ready to be captured by the camera.

Photographers, of course, are always looking.  And in this sense they really do pause to smell the roses.  If you do a simple Google or Bing search of “Poet’s Walk,” you will find a century’s worth of some really beautiful and wonderful images of Olmstead’s gift to New Yorker’s.  It is spectacular in all seasons.

Figure 1 – Vaulting elms lining Lafayette Street in Salem, Massachusetts in 1910. From the Wikipedia and reproduced from an original postcard published by the Hugh C. Leighton Company, Portland, Maine In the public domain because of age.

Great vaulting rows of elms used to line and shade the Main Streets (and Elm Streets) of many American towns.  I include as illustration Figure 1, which show’s Lafayette Street in Salem, Massachusetts in 1910. But most have fallen victim to Dutch Elm Disease.  I remember, as a graduate student at Cornell University in the 1970’s watch the last fight by these glorious trees that once lined the center of the campus.

Winter is ripe with photographic guilt.  There is great beauty outside, but it is also very cold.  So I have to say that Mr. Trebay’s column and Mr. Blankenhorn’s photograph have inspired me anew to venture out in the New England winter to record the glory of trees in snow.

I promised you some really gorgeous photographic “shtick” today and I am going to deliver.  Someone posted a link to this on one of the Facebook Photo Groups and I was truly amazed and well, bewitched by the imagery. So I’d like to introduce you to the spectacular and truly magical photographs of fashion photographer, Zena Holloway. Ms. Holloway is both a highly talented photographer and an experienced diver.  Her “shtick” is to photograph her models floating under water, usually with equally spectacular clothing floating like ethereal gossamer.  All of this combines to titillate our sense of wonder, of dreaming of merpeople, of defying both gravity, and the need for oxygen.  I for one am totally captivated.

And in directing you to some of her photographs, I am at a loss as to where to begin or which to chose.  For pure magic let’s begin with the image of a woman swimming and entwined with the light of a jelly fish – certainly a hugely difficult picture to construct.  Then there is this wonderful picture of an encounter between a  child and a seal, a touching interspecies moment.  And finally basic, but really intriguing, is this picture of a swimmer with a horse in “Open Water.”. There is a huge amount of work and talented in setting up this kind of shot and elaborate reworking and combining in the light room. The more of Ms. Holloway’s pictures I look at the more I am enchanted.

Figure 1 – Daniel Chester French, American Sculptor, in his studio in 1920. Image from the Smithsonian Institution vis the Wikimedia Commons and has no known copyright restrictions.

I know that I use the word wonderful a lot.  Still there is a wonderful set of images on MSN showing artists and writers in their studios at work.  It is absolutely delightful! So I felt that I had to share it with all of you.  And apropos of our discussion of how the photographs gives you admittance to another time and place, where you feel at some level to be interacting with the artist, here you feel like you are meeting these people in the flesh – despite the fact that many of them are long gone to us.  Such is the magic of photography. (Psst! I say that a lot too!) I’ve got several favorites among these.  First is a portrait of Ansel Adams working in his studio on a print in 1968.  Second, is an intensely personal picture of David Hockney painting on the floor of his studio in 1967.  And finally, out of deference to a  certain reader Hunter S. Thompson in his studio in 1996.

We learn that these geniuses are just like us.  Some are neat-niks and some are slob-niks.  In some cases the studio is austere and nearly empty.  In other cases it is cluttered and reminiscent of what Joseph Campbell referred to as mythic ruins.  I have included as Figure 1 a similar type of picture of American Sculptor Daniel Chester French in his studio in 1920.  This image is more posed than the images in the series, but still presents and intimacy with the artist and places him among the relics of his own creation – relics that mimic the monumental and the classic.

On Wednesday we spoke about droughts in the American West, Floods in the United Kingdom, and about the whole issue of global warming.  Today we are hunkering down in front of the fire as New England is once again walloped with a snow storm.  It’s really getting pretty repetitive and boring.  While weather is forefront in my mind, I promised myself that I would not post yet another snow picture.

OK so how about this.  The picture is from January 28 by Ueslei Marcelino of Reuters and takes us inside the Cuncas II tunnel near the Brazillian city of Mauriti in the
Ceara state, Brazil.  The $6.8 billion  tunnel, if it is ever finished, is meant to link canals that will  divert water from the Sao Francisco river to agricultural land in four
drought-plagued states.  The project is, like all such projects three years behind schedule and already at double cost.

The picture to me is amazing.  The man gives size perspective – man and what man creates. And of course, we are haunted by the knowledge that a lot of such projects have unforeseen ecological consequences.  The reflections create an other worldliness.  Tunnel imagery in mythology and its ultimate connection with birth we have already discussed.  Hey, I’m not making this stuff up.  There’s a reason that tunnels are so haunting. Here what seems most important are the allusions to classical mythology that describe journeys in tunnels (where the protagonist swallows a hard gulp of innate claustrophobia and ventures forth, Yes, to be reborn!): to Dante, to Beowulf, to Alice in Wonderland, and even to the Hobbit.

It seems to me that as winter rolls around, we find ourselves talking more and more about the weather.  We talk about it in person, we talk about it on social media, and we are bombarded by images of the weather .  This is arguably the great oppression of winter.  The rest of the year you hardly think about.  But winter…

Anyway, this morning I was scanning the weather photos and found a couple that pretty much say it all.  The first taken on February 6 in Bakersfield, California by David McNew for Getty Images shows a sign warning people not to jump off a bridge into the river below.  It is sage advice since the river bed is total dry and free of water free. California is in its third year of drought and is suffering through the driest year in 119 years of record keeping.

The second image was taken by Mathew Horwood on February 5 and shows waves breaking over the harbor wall in Porthcawl, United Kingdom.England has been experiencing an unusually rash period of storms and flooding this year. More than 130 severe flood warnings were issued since December 2013.  This contrasts with only nine in the whole of 2012.

What is, of course, the most amazing aspect of the second picture is all the people standing there and watch.  I mean, “Hello!  Anyone worried about being swept at to sea?”  I guess not.  I mean you can just go home and watch the videos and look at the photographs in you dry and cozy living room.

Now I know that I am supposed to stop here and not get into the subject of climate change.  However, I get kind of upset whenever there is an affront to science as basic as this.  There are natural weather and climate cycles – but there is also a very troubling manmade effects.  Indeed, the British Met Office is coming down pretty strongly in arguing that these winter storms are caused by global warming.   The effect of mankind on the Earth’s climate is a proven fact – despite all the claims to the contrary made by hosts of people, who are not qualified to express their opinions on the subject.  There are many places on the Earth, where people live dangerous close to the temperature limit where human life becomes untenable.  We are expert at not reacting intelligently to global problems both because they are difficult and because they are inconvenient.

So while to first order these pictures are beautiful even whimsical, at another level they hold a much deeper and profound message.  It is a message that we cannot really afford to ignore!