Several weeks ago I helped a friend move into a sweet little house she just bought. We moved boxes of books and pots and pans and six or eight framed and matted 20x24 landscape photographs I had given my friend, including the waterfall image above. It was a photograph I'd forgotten I'd shot.
This does NOT happen to me, this forgetting of imagery. Yes, I lose track of where I put my sunglasses or car keys, but my brain is wired in a way that photographs stick there. Paul Strand's image of the "White Picket Fence" is in my memory, and it has lots of good company. I could amaze and astound you by describing the thousands and thousands of pictures archived in my otherwise unremarkble brain. When Leah and I watched the movie Bobby, I waited to see how the movie-makers reproduced Bill Eppiridge's iconic photograph of Bobby Kennedy, dying in the kitchen of a hotel in Los Angeles.
Some words are memorable for me too. The war photographer Robert Capa wisecracked: If your photographs are no good, it's because you are not close enough. And Georgia O'Keeffe said she painted one New Mexico mountain again and again because God had told her that if she painted it often enough, she could have it.
Weird, me forgetting that waterfall.
