Truffled duck eggs

…and my second thought, even simpler: three duck eggs, same delicate Straus butter not quite allowed to brown, and a profligate mound of truffle, the effect of which is difficult to explain; quite aside from delicious and all that, it suffuses a sense of animal well-being that's very primal and that I've never experienced in the same immediate way from any other food.

I don't pretend to understand this, but I fully admit I'm looking forward to more research…

Truffle risotto

…and here's the risotto, or really truffle flakes on a risotto base, completely simple (arborio rice, a delicate local butter, chicken and mushroom stock, diced duck breast) and completely delicious.

Truffle: not trifle

Yesterday as I pulled up to my house, my friend Daniel de la Falaise was coming back from my front door, looking insufferably pleased with himself; he was on his way to Paris, would be back in a week, and had left a little something for me in the meanwhile. 

As it turned out, he couldn't have been as pleased with himself as I was with himself, since what he'd left is the mystic entity shown in the photograph; a superbly & voluptuously beautiful white (sic) truffle. The aromatics are pretty hard to believe; if there were only a "Nosebook" app (you listening, Mark Zuckerberg?) you could smell it on Facebook.

Haven't yet decided on the first trial dish to shave it over, but I'm leaning toward a very simple Carnaroli risotto, no soffritto but a little sweet onion from Mickey's farm stand, truffled as it were with freshly broiled Muscovy duck breast and a light perfume of roasted walnut oil. Will report back later...

This is the year of tiny yields and tiny berries, which of course produce red wines of unusual depth and richness, both from the lower yields and from the much higher percentage of skins - which is where color and flavor come from in red wines - to juice. Those in the image are from the 2015 Andromeda Pinot Noir, mostly about the size of peppercorns; I've never seen such a harvest before; the wine, just now gone dry, bears no resemblance in color to normal Pinot, yet seems at this point perfectly balanced, which is always what counts. May it remain so...

Distinguish Trebbiano from Urine

In brief, how it is possible, and why it is important, to distinguish Trebbiano from urine.

Dr. Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588) a prominent Renaissance physician who spent many years learning to distinguish Trebbiano (wine) from urine, shares with us why it is important, and how it is possible, to make that distinction.

:: Molière could have done wonders with all this, and I believe it should be viewed as though he had, in full Renaissance costume, and in an opulent palace setting worthy of Palermo circa 1550.

:: In this excerpt, the author, Fioravanti explains the manner in which doctors should examine their patients, and also specifies what they must take care to avoid. He says that they should enter the patient’s room with all due gravity, seat themselves by the sickbed, examine the patient, and question him/her closely as to the progress of their illness; they should then ask for a urine sample, and should examine it diligently to ensure that it is human urine, and not a trick.

:: Fortunately, since one does not naturally think of urine as existentially tricky, if one thinks of it at all, he goes on to explain that when he first began his practice, he was called to cure a noblewoman suffering from a “painful ventosity of the body”; he entered her suite “with all possible gravity”, took the lady’s hand, examined her pulse, and asked for a urine sample. But a “a certain matron” who was present said that since this was an ailment common to women, it shouldn’t require a urine sample; however, if he would please prescribe a remedy, a sample would be ready when he returned that evening. He promptly ordered “three drams of gentian finely pulverized, in excellent wine,” which cured the patient then & there, to the amazement of all the ladies.

:: But that same matron, gossiping with the other ladies-in-waiting, said, “This doctor appears very young indeed, and while he’s done all very well on this occasion, I really don’t believe he’s already an expert in analyzing urine. By all grace I beg you to say nothing, but when he returns this evening, I’ll test him, by letting him examine a little Trebbiano wine, which is the color of urine; & we’ll see if he recognizes it.”

:: "And", Fioravanti continues, “that’s what was done. That evening, when I returned, they presented me with the ‘urine,’which was really wine; and seeing how yellow it was, I said to the ladies, ‘This urine, being as yellow as it is, signifies, according to Galen & other authorities, the coleric humor, and means that the patient suffers from anger.’ One of the ladies responded, ‘But by my faith, how could you have known? It’s the truth! That rogue of a husband of hers chases after women, gambles, and makes her so angry I marvel she’s still alive!’”

:: So having finished his examination, he left; but then of course the ladies-in-waiting were convulsed with laughter, and “the matter being between women, who are all or mostly all gossips,” (this according to Fioravanti), it was soon a story about town, and he leaves the reader to imagine how he felt, being scorned in this manner.

:: He responded by ordering that ten or so urinals be bought for his household, and every morning he had everyone in the household urinate, so that he could see the differences, as he expresses it, between urine, and urine. Then he ordered urine brought in from dogs, donkeys, horses, mules, and other animals, and made every examination of these samples it was possible to make, in order never again to be deceived in the matter of urine; “and I made an extraordinary study of this matter, and appropriately so; because I have since philosophised in various and diverse parts of the world, & many times I’ve found myself in some city, where tricksters have wanted to test me by showing me the urine of horses, or liqueurs, wine, vinegar, and similar substances, but their game was lost, because it was immediately & shrewdly found out, and never has anyone succeeded in becoming other than the object of ridicule him self, and the laugh has been on him ...”

(in, Leonardo Fioravanti, De Capricci Medicinale, Venice, 1564; link to the original text is, http://wine-maker.net/T…/Library_pdf.files/Fioravanti-R2.pdf)

Wine Notes III

What sparkles in wine is powdered light. 

:: "Sopra il detto del Galileo. Il Vino è un composto di umore, e di luce." :: A remarkably rich evocation of the sensuality of wine within the world of a late 17-century Florentine aristocratic intellectual, who was also one of the great prose stylists of the Italian Baroque. Among its many charms is the thought that what sparkles in wine is powdered light.

:: Including even the productions of fin-de-siècle Paris, it would be difficult to imagine a more bejewelled and aromatic prose that that of Magalotti; yet Count Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712), in addition to being a counsellor of state to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and so forth and so on, was a well-respected scientist, and secretary of the most important Italian scientific society of his day; his friends were such as Redi and Viviani, and his idol was Galileo.

:: But Redi would chide Magalotti for not realizing that his letter upon an aphorism of Galileo's, was really upon an aphorism of Dante's. In the rarefied civilization of such 17th-century Florentine aristocrats as were civilized, it was taken for granted that any scientist knew Dante by heart, in minute detail, and could give support to any scientific proposition by an appropriate citation from an unpublished Provençal poet, preferably from a manuscript in one's own library.

:: Thus we are not in the presence here of a scientist for whom the pencil-protector is the coat of arms, "reproducible results" (predictable manipulation) the only object of science, and the repression of all that is not, a defense of truth. That doesn't mean we're in the presence of a better scientist; but certainly one whose idea of science was different than ours, and certainly one to whom it would have been unimaginable to take pride in the narrowness of his field of knowledge.

:: For Magalotti, clearly, one of life's most desirable purposes was to refine the pleasures of living it, and science was simply one such pleasure, as was wine. To the point that when he came to combine these two pleasures in the following essay, it isn't entirely clear whether he meant more to be taken in earnest than to give pleasure to his friends.

:: If his object was to give pleasure, he succeeded, without question. It would be hard to think of another short essay that more sensuously evokes an atmosphere of late 17th-century Florentine aristocratic intelligence: passionate, yet ironic; refined, so with melancholy; aristocratic, but not proud. A Symbolist poet couldn't have invented a better Magalotti.

:: But if his object was to provide a scientific explanation of the influences of solar radiation upon grapes and upon the wine produced from them, then, I'm afraid, he succeeded in giving pleasure instead.

:: He asks what Galileo meant by saying that wine is a compound of light and humor.

:: For anyone in the wine trade, this is already pretty humorous; but we know he didn't really mean that. So we should ask what the word actually does mean here.

:: It means "moisture", as in "humid": umore.

:: It also means "temperament, disposition of mind, caprice", and in Magalotti's era was still used in this sense, which was the sense given to it in Roman medecine, particularly by Galen. And it would be one of the many pleasures of etymology to trace the path by which "humorous" ("all wet") came to mean amusing or funny, but this is beyond both my competence and my present object. I think it's sufficient to say that Magalotti (and Galileo before him, and Dante before Galileo) meant "humor" in this particular context to mean the "characteristic moisture" of a particular vineyard - a concept rather like terroir, except more intelligent - which, when acted upon by sunlight, produces wine.

:: So far so good, and so much for umore. As to light, Magalotti's theory is this: 

:: Light rays fall upon all fruits, yet grapes are exceptional. Why? Because they absorb more of the light that falls on them, just as black absorbs more light than white. How do grapes do this? By their pores, which are cunningly designed to trap light rays, just as certain bird or fish nets let birds or fish in, but not out. So, light rays, once trapped in the grape, cannot escape, and in their attempts, ultimately shatter to powder. 

:: But they shatter over time; thus, the rays which fall on the vineyard in late summer, being still intact & having lost none of their energy, boil forth when released from their prison by the crushing of the grapes at harvest, "whence the must conceives its heat, whence the boiling, the rarefaction, and the steaming." Whereas those rays which entered the grape early in the year, being shattered into powder, remain in the wine, emerging only when the wine is tasted, "making themselves felt upon the tongue, and palate, by the charming prickle of their many corners and twists".

:: Well, the same may be said of the letter itself, which also is charming in the prickle of its many corners and twists, but particularly in proposing that fermentation is simply sunlight escaping from the must, and that what sparkles in wine is powdered light. Whether Magalotti intended it to be, in addition, a monument in the history of plant physiology, is unkown to me, may at this point be unknowable, and may even be superfluous.

:: We know that it gave great pleasure to his friends, since Redi refers to it as "quella vostra lettera dotta e maravigliosa, dottissima ed elegantissima", and I think it gives great pleasure to us now: which is why I've transcribed it here, in its entirety.

:: in, Lettere Scientifiche, ed Erudite del Conte Lorenzo Magalotti. Florence, 1721. (but from a MS c. 1670?). Link to the original transcription: http://wine-maker.net/Thackrey_Library/Library_pdf.files/Magalotti_Light.pdf

Wine Notes issue II

Wines that sparkled 200 years before Champagne was taught to do so.

:: Since we now think of sparkling wine nearly exclusively in terms of Champagne and its imitations, it is easy to assume that wine didn't sparkle until the Champenois taught theirs to do so, and found bottles to put it in.

:: But there is in fact a quite separate tradition, far older and more generalized, which is what this excerpt is about. Such wines were called vini raspati (vins râpés, etc.), and since they far predate the introduction of commercial bottling, were never intended to be bottled. They were household wines, intended to provide a pleasant drink for daily use, which they could still do in restaurants today, if anyone cared to go the trouble to make them. 

:: In a winegrowing district, it wouldn't even be much trouble, and depending on certain microbiological imponderables, might produce a very agreeable and lighthearted wine for many months after harvest. The idea, with innumerable variations - some of which Petronio discusses - was to take a clean barrel, remove the head, fill the barrel loosely with whole uncrushed grapes, fill the remaining space half with good older wine, half with fresh must, and close up the barrel. Once the initial fermentation was over, the barrel was kept tightly bunged, except when wine was drawn from it for use; each time that was done, the barrel was topped up with more wine (or even water) and re-bunged. So the only troubles here are that God is in the details, and that most of us haven't a clue how to remove and reset barrel heads. The second of these problems is solvable: several companies manufacture drums, and even barrels, with removable heads.

:: The excerpt itself is from Alessandro Petronio, Dell Viver delli Romani et di Conservar la Sanità, Rome, 1592, which is the Italian translation of the same author's De victu Romanorum of 1581. Petronio died in 1585, having practised medicine in Rome for more than 60 years. His translator, Basilio Paravicino, says it cost him more pain to translate the book than it would have taken to write an entire new one of his own; but this passage, at least, was worth the trouble. It is charming in itself; it tells us what a fad there was for sparkling wine in 16th-century Rome; and the author makes an earnest attempt to analyze why sparkling wine pleases us (and clearly him) quite as much as it does.

(link to the original text: http://wine-maker.net/…/Library_pdf.…/Petronio_SparkleV1.pdf )

Wine Notes issue 1

A particularly interesting thing about the history of wine-making is that there isn't one.

Yes. Wine has been made for at least 10,000 years; yet no one has ever written, or at least published, a history of how this was done.

But why should that be surprising if wine has been made in France since at least the arrival of the Phocaean Greeks in ca. 800 BCE, has always been a major underpinning of the French economy, one of the glories of France and of French culture and creativity, and yet there's no word for wine-maker in French, which there is not?

So the history of wine-making is interesting for many reasons that have nothing to do with technique, and cut across vast expanses of history, sociology, national identity, the eternal games of the oligarchy, and as a reward for slogging through all that, even finally the history of pleasures, and how they change.

This interests me intensely, since it's the craft by which I live and opens out into such an astonishingly vast but secret garden where endless swaths of unanswered questions bloom in riotous profusion, while still untended and indeed unseen; so, being pretty well trained in elementary academic procedure, I thought, I'd better read through the source material first; and due to a birth freak rather like an aptitude for crossword puzzles, I have a certain aptitude for languages, and can read easily in all those I thought would be central to my search, at least at first.

For reasons I'll go into later, it turned out there really was no way to read the material without finding it myself, collecting it and actually reading it, to the genuine distress of some of my favorite rare book dealers, who felt that actually reading these things, instead of admiring them as objects, was a suspect trend not to be encouraged. But I wound up with the library I needed, that neither the Bibliothèque Nationale, nor the British Library, nor the New York Public Library, and so on through the rest, could provide; which was a library not based on nationalist collecting but on wine-making itself, wherever it was practiced and described, from the beginnings of literacy until the present.

Hopefully it will be understood why this is such a long-winded introduction to a series I'd like to pursue of short posts drawn from all this material; they will be called "Sean's Wine Notes" until I come up with something less blockheaded.

I'll start these posts with one tomorrow about the invention of "Champagne" by the British, who used the "méthode Champenois" for their cider at least 50 years before I have any evidence of its use in France…

Stories: is it bunny rabbits?, or dinner?:

Used to be that the standard way of buying grapes, which of course is by weight, was to get a certified weight tag at a certified weight station; I'd weigh in with the truck empty but all the harvest containers aboard, called "tare"; then I'd weigh back out with the truck full of grapes; obviously, the difference between the two weights was the weight of the grapes, and that determined what I owed the grower.

The certified station I then used most was in Schellville, near Sonoma, and was no big deal; just a truck-size flat scale inset in the ground in front of a modest shack. The woman in the shack was Jackie, short, tough as nails, butch as it comes, could throw any trucker out the door; I thought she was great, and we got along very well. She was maybe in her 40's, still lived with her father in a dubious compound across the intersection, where they raised rabbits. She had many Polaroids (hopefully someone remembers what they were) posted in back of her counter in the weigh station, with bunny rabbits dressed up in little costumes as Santa Claus, TV characters, and so on.

This brought up a question in my mind, and after she'd weighed out the truck one day, I asked it.

"You know Jackie, you've got all these really cute photographs up here of your bunny rabbits dressed up in various costumes; but, then, you sell them for people to eat. How do you put that all together?"

She frowned, definitely not happy I asked, but still answered straight away: "Well, I dunno. One day, they just stops looking like bunny rabbits, and starts looking like dinner."

I don't think concise expression gets much better; and I've never heard any definition of that fatal change that's close to being as honest; although I recall the observation that man is the only predator that lives in affectionate proximity to his prey before eating it.

So I've admired her eloquence for years; but one has to imagine the rabbits feel otherwise, when the atmosphere in the hutch suddenly takes a mysterious turn for the worse.

I don't really know why I'm posting so many stories at the moment; perhaps it's because harvest was over so soon, but anyway:

This was some years ago, when it was more normal to separate wine grapes into, on the one hand, "noble varietals", needless to say all French, and on the other hand, the rest. Hardly necessary to note that I found this irritating, particularly in that the whole stupid concept was more the creature of oligarchs promoting their investments than aristocrats protecting their heritage.

So I was pouring our wines at a trade event in San Francisco, when a particularly affected buyer for an important wine merchant came to the table - you know, just the right hair gel, ascot, open collar, cufflinks, the whole thing; we went through the various wines, & came to the 1988 Taurus, the first wine I'd released made with Mourvèdre, then truly unknown in California, where it was still officially called "Mataro".

I served it to him; he swirled & sniffed & asked the price, which was very moderate. Still, apparently he had to say, "Well, I must say that seems quite a lot to ask for a wine that isn't even a noble varietal!". I replied instantly, with a genuine smile, "But then neither are you; so what's the problem?" He actually smiled back, and moved on.

It was an important lesson for me, or at least a clarification of prior experience, that I could say something so blatantly insulting about something I did think was, well, stupid, and yet not really offend, since I actually felt an empathy for the man, and had not the slightest wish to demean him; I said something that could be taken as no more than a witticism, and fortunately was taken as such; the enlightenment being that my actual, if exasperated, kindness of intention could somehow be subliminally understood, apparently allowing my remark to be taken that way.

Another story, about wine and its bureaucratic discontents:

Many years ago, when I first applied for my basic permit to make wine, the neighbors who owned the substantial meadow in front of my house were Juergen and Anne-Marie Ruesch. She was then perhaps in her late 60's, had been brought up in Berlin, left for the obvious reasons in the late '30's, but retained the splendidly ironic Berlin-Jewish sense of humor and its accompanying accent that ensured we'd get along perfectly, which we did.

Anyway, on this occasion, she came by on her horse, Punky, and we chatted over the fence, as usual. I had just gone through the ordeal of applying for my basic license, and had had no clue in advance what I was getting into; firgerprints, FBI background checks, inspections, charts, and so on; it was quite overwhelming, particularly for one who doesn't take well to regulation in the first place.

So when Anne-Marie asked me, "Tell me, Sean, iss zair any regulation of vine in ze United States?", I really had no idea how to answer. But Europeans were always amused by the name of the agency then involved; so I replied, "Look, Anne-Marie, I don't think I can do any better than simply tell you the name of the department I'm dealing with; it's the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms".

She looked a me for a moment, surprised and bemused, then replied, "Vat? Nozing about sex???".

Told this to my then-supervisor at ATF, Lennie Goldstein from the Bronx; she snapped, "not around here, honey, I can tell you". She was more than enough to make even so grim a bureaucracy amusing. How could even I resist a plea such as, "Sweetheart, just get all your missing Form 702's in to me by Valentine's Day and we'll still have a beautiful relationship". Unfortunately, I never even met her in person…

Stories; this one, another about old ladies with Attitude:

When I was 4, my father took me back to visit family, mainly my paternal grandparents in Kansas, who were pious Methodists in a very small town; in fact, my grandfather was the local minister.

It was the 4th of July; much of the rest of the family was there as well, so I had plenty of little playmates my own age, and we helled around as one might expect; I was particularly entranced that we could set off fireworks such as Roman candles that were strictly forbidden in California.

Understandably, my grandmother wanted to restore order; so she said to us, "Look: you'd better behave & be good: because if you do, you'll see the most surprising thing you've ever seen: and if you don't, you won't!".

We wondered what to do; because we certainly didn't want to be good, but the prospect of the greatest surprise of our lives, short though they'd been at that point, was too tempting to pass up; so we toned it down a lot. But eventually we reminded her that we'd been good as gold & wanted the payoff. She said, alright, come to the back porch, and gather around the bottom of the steps; which we did.

She came out, looking perfectly & normally her gentle grandmotherish self, and asked, well, were we ready; and we said yes.

She reached up, yanked her false teeth out of her mouth, clacked them up and down in her hand like a demented predator, and attacked us down the stairs.

She was and remains entirely right; I've never been so surprised again.

Stories: this one about wine-making:

Some years back I'd bought a new French oak quarter-barrel, and had filled it with water to be sure it didn't leak. This only takes a few minutes to determine, but it was crush, and I forgot about it for a week or so. When I finally remembered, I drained the water into a large pail; the water was dark and ugly, but smelled wonderful from all that new Vosges oak. At that very moment, as I was contemplating this, one of best friends in the wine world, Bill Mitchell, arrived from Philo for a visit; so I said to him, "Bill, look at this stuff. It smells great, so I don't want to just throw it out; but what could I possibly do with it?".

He replied without missing a beat, "Well, you could just add some alcohol and some tartaric acid and call it Chardonnay".

So quick, and so true of so many Chardonnays then, and still now.

Stories: a series

Stories; a series I think I'd like to to start here, because it's simply fun for me; and this is number one.

OK. So, my mother was born in 1899 on a remote ranch outside Bismarck, North Dakota, and that, then, was remote indeed.

No point here in trying to summarize her life since then, but just after her 100th birthday, she fell badly, and as a result could no longer drive nor live alone, so finally moved into a shared care house near me in Bolinas, where I could visit her every day, and at least weekly take her out in her detested wheelchair to a now gone and much lamented local restaurant called "The Blue Heron", where there was a nice little table at the end of the porch that I could wheel her into.

We were having dinner, she was then 102, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, lively as could be, but in the middle of dinner suddenly stopped; looked very seriously at me; and said, "you know, dear, we haven't heard anything from Grandma or Uncle George for years! What do you think the problem could be?".

Give me credit, I didn't flinch, talking to my 102 year old mother about why she hadn't heard recently from her grandmother.

I said, "Well, Mom, I never knew Uncle George. As I understand it, he died before the ranch was sold, which was when it went bankrupt in 1918; and Grandma Knudtson died I think in 1906, but maybe years before, when the ice broke on the Missouri, flooding the ranch, and she went up onto the roof to escape, but then an enormous ice block knocked the roof off and she floated down the Missouri and died".

My mother looked startled for a moment, then smiled her wonderfully pearly smile, and said, "Well, then: that explains it!"

I don't even know how long I laughed, and she didn't mind at all that I did; & what was so good about our relation, was that laughter at what we said to each other was a pleasure for both of us.

At my fingertips

Myself in Paris, 1978, on the balcony of my favorite room at the top of the Hôtel St-Louis, on the Ile St-Louis, photograph by Suzanne Parker. I've often thought that most of my life since has been devoted to trying to recapture just the calm and ease of that state of spirit; I can still remember exactly that moment it as though it were still at my fingertips, or at least those of my mind…

This is the year of tiny yields and tiny berries, which of course produce red wines of unusual depth and richness, both from the lower yields and from the much higher percentage of skins - which is where color and flavor come from in red wines - to juice. Those in the image are from the 2015 Andromeda Pinot Noir, mostly about the size of peppercorns; I've never seen such a harvest before; the wine, just now gone dry, bears no resemblance in color to normal Pinot, yet seems at this point perfectly balanced, which is always what counts. May it remain so...

Harvesting Hossfeld Vineyard in 2015

Hossfeld Vineyard, high above Napa Valley, 6:15AM, September 15; hooking the trailer to the crawler to begin harvesting the 2015 Cabernet Franc...

Living in the past?

Excellent cartoon by Robert Mankoff in the current issue of the New Yorker: a patient exclaiming to his therapist, "But I like living in the past. It's where I grew up."

INDICATIONS IN THE FIELD

(I've been using this journal almost entirely as a test ground for a website devoted to my photography, to give me some visual evidence for what might work and what does not. What follows is my current draft of an introduction to that prospective website, partly to explain why I don't think it's a good idea…)

I suppose it should be difficult to explain why, for nearly 60 years, I have worked steadily at photography as an expressive and purely personal art, but have worked entirely in seclusion, without making any effort to exhibit the results.

The answer, which in fact is less difficult to express than it may be to understand, is that my photography is for me a matter of life and death, as is so often true of certain artists in almost any medium. A successful work is a resolution to a question that otherwise has none, since it cannot be asked in any other way; so the necessity to me of my work has always been the need to achieve such a resolution, one image, one realization, at a time.

But it's hardly my own work alone that affects me so strongly or has such great importance in my life; in fact my own work would not exist - which is to say that I would have had no notion of its possibility - were it not for the profound influence on me of that unbroken chain of great work in all media stretching back through the millenia to the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, which continues to this day to be my constant reference and inspiration.

The corollary to being given so much is to give back what I can, and to begin that attempt is the purpose of this site. If these works did not move me, they would not exist; so, they might have real meaning to others as well, and that would please me greatly.

But its not clear a website can do this.

Because, in the same sense that "meaning" in abstract painting is generated as a consequence of the realization that what one is looking at in painting, is paint, not a window, it is true that "meaning" in most of my own work is likewise based on just what's right there as marks on a particular piece of paper, and thus has little to do with most contemporary photography.

Such "meaning" is assembled uniquely each time anew from the infinite particles of meaning we have painstakingly and individually evolved over a lifetime in making sense, literally, from the optical chaos into which we each were born; it uses that evolved particulate language of making sense from what is seen, and thus of all visual meaning, to express something, however complex, not representational of anything but itself.

But of course "itself" is its physical embodiment, and any change in its physicality changes its meaning. Most photography, and some of mine, survives this translation easily enough; Cartier-Bresson, as an obvious example, placed little value on the details of his prints and his images can be seen across a variety of media and remain essentially intact.

Of most of mine, and of all my recent work, that simply isn't true. A photograph whose meaning is embodied in the particularities of its physical presence as a pigment print on rag paper 24" x 40" will have that meaning always radically changed, never improved, and often lost entirely when translated to pixels on a computer screen, particularly since the change of scale is as crucial as the change of medium.

These prints are comparatively large because that is the only way they can be completely experienced. Viewed small enough to be taken in by the eye all at once, they remain stable, which is not my intention. When larger, they can be viewed closely enough to burst suddenly into a living expressiveness, with a complex of movement and interactions that is literally the life of the work, and carries the meaning of the work.

So there will always be an unbridgeable divide between the real thing and its digital (or any other) reproduction. But that's hardly unique to my work; and something often jumps that divide, hopefully often enough to awaken an interest in seeing the real thing; & what I'm really doing here is based on that thought. 

My objective is simple: I was an art dealer for 25 years, and a specialist in photographs; I'm comfortable in that world, and I'd like to move my work out into it now, so that the real thing can be seen as it really is; if this site helps accomplish that, while providing pleasures of its own in the meanwhile, it will have done everything I could have wanted from it.

I think it's important to note that the photographs posted here have only one purpose, which is to let me preview which individual images might succeed online well enough, or not well enough - since "well enough" is the best I can hope for - to give me some guidance in deciding which to include in setting up a website devoted to my photography. 

This means posting examples from wildly heterogeneous aspects of my work; self-evidently, the result is a hodge-podge of wildly conflicting if not mutually canceling styles and atmospheres that I would never  agree to display in the same room, for example, unless held at gunpoint.

I apologize for this, since I am not currently held at gunpoint; but I thought I should at least mention the reason for such a confusion of forms, & since almost no one knows of the existence of this site to begin with, hopefully the few that do will be able to recognize the problem easily enough & be able to see around it to some degree.

From another current series, Eros/Thanatos…

Another in the Venetian series…

Much of my most recent work has arisen in Venice, and this is an example. One might well ask what it "represents": an Istrian stone up for replacement on the Palazzo Zen in Cannaregio, or is it closer to representing its effect on my soul, which is far more like, say, the crumbling flesh and sense of loss of an antique Greek torso…

Another from the same series, on the mysteries of water...

(click to enlarge to full screen)

Since I'm briefly on leave from the winery, I'm working on a separate website devoted to my lifetime of work in photography; what follows is the current draft of my introduction to that site:

I suppose it should be difficult to explain why, for nearly 60 years, I have worked steadily at photography as an expressive and purely personal art, but have worked entirely in seclusion, without making any effort to exhibit the results.

The answer, which in fact is less difficult to express than it may be to understand, is that my photography is for me a matter of life and death, as is so often true of certain artists in almost any medium. A successful work is a resolution to a question that otherwise has none, since it cannot be asked in any other way; so the necessity to me of my work has always been the need to achieve such a resolution, one image, one realization, at a time. 

Thus if the title that appeals to me for my work as a whole is "ernste Musik", music meant in earnest, the German for what English so coldly terms "classical" music, my work's great importance in my life may indicate why this is so. But mine is hardly the only such music, and it's hardly as though it's only my own music that affects me so strongly; in fact my own work would not exist - which is to say that I would have had no notion of its possibility - were it not for the profound influence on me of that unbroken chain of great work in all media stretching back through the millenia to the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, which continues to this day to be my constant reference and inspiration.

The corollary to being given so much is to give back what I can, and to begin that attempt is the purpose of this site. If these works did not move me, they would not exist; so, they might have real meaning to others as well, and that would please me greatly. 

But its not clear a website can do this. 

Because, in the same sense that "meaning" in abstract painting is generated as a consequence of the realization that what one is looking at in painting, is paint, not a window, it is true that "meaning" in most of my own work is likewise based on just what's right there as marks on a particular piece of paper, and is thus in this respect far closer to modern painting than to nearly all modern photography.

Such "meaning" is assembled uniquely each time anew from the infinite particles of meaning we have painstakingly and indvidually evolved over a lifetime in making sense, literally, from the optical chaos into which we each were born; it uses that evolved particulate language of making sense from what is seen, and thus of all visual meaning, to express something, however complex, not representational of anything but itself.

But of course "itself" is its physical embodiment, and any change in its physicality changes its meaning. Most photography, and some of mine, survives this translation easily enough; Cartier-Bresson, as an obvious example, placed little value on the details of his prints and his images can be seen across a variety of media and remain essentially intact. 

Of most of mine, and of all my recent work, that simply isn't true. A photograph whose meaning is embodied in the particularities of its physical presence as a pigment print on rag paper 24" x 40" will have that meaning always radically changed, never improved, and often lost entirely when translated to pixels on a computer screen.

Still, something often jumps that divide, hopefully often enough to awaken an interest in seeing the real thing; & what I'm really doing here is based on that thought.  After all, I was an art dealer for 25 years, and a specialist in photographs, so I'm comfortable in that world, and I'd like to move my work out into it now, so that the real thing can be seen as it really is; if this site helps accomplish that, while providing pleasures of its own in the meanwhile, it will have done everything I could have wanted from it.