RICO, you darling little statute, you

    Come, sweetheart,
    live exquisitely,
    they usually say.

Drew Harwell
  and Matea Gold
While in White House,
  Trumps remained selling
  points for 'very special'
  Philippines project
The Washington Post
May 2, 2017©

Jay Directo
Billboard in Manila
Agence France-Presse
2012©

Being a picture

Lenin's objection to Beethoven

is so well known that it hard-

ly seems that it could add any

weight to the problem of look-

ing at Kertész these days. But

some day has to come soon, for

escapism to play no part in it.

André Kertész

Untitled Polaroid

  Photograph

1980

Robbie Beeser

Standard nautical font

8-meter vessels converge
precariously at a racing
buoy in the 1936 Olympic
games, and give us a vi-
sion in photographic ex-
cellence no one forgets,
of a contest marred by a
monstrous provenance. At
the same time, the univ-
ersal font for identify-
ing sailors is document-
ed beyond all propaganda.

Leni Riefenstahl
Kiel
1936

Amateur

It's axiomatic, in viewing
images created by Kertész,
to struggle against appre-
ciation tainted by axioms.
It can feel undignified to
allow oneself to look, al-
most as if one had to see.
















André Kertész
Untitled Polaroid
  Photograph
1980

Two outstanding studies of Shelley

Where does a writer catch
my eye?

His bedroom window looked west, towards the setting sun. There was a wide lawn, with a shallow bank to roll down, and then a cluster of enormous trees, elms with rooks in, cedars, American redwoods brought back to England by his grandfather, and further and darker, rhododendrons and fir trees. Through the trees was the lake. Then there was the orchard and the south meadow, and beyond an even bigger lake which was called Warnham Pond. It was two lakes really, joined by a stone bridge. His father kept the boat there, and the fishing lines. His father stood among the reeds and shot the wild duck, with their bottle-green feathers, and the snipe.

   On his best days the curtain
   of clouds was gone. The blue
   sky stretched above him un-
   marked and unobscured and in-
   spiration moved there, almost
   visible.






Where 
I'm taken.

Richard Holmes
Shelley
  The Pursuit
1974
New York Review Books, 1994©

Ann Wroe
Being Shelley
  The Poet's Search for Himself
Random House/Pantheon, 2007©