121 | Gone Rowing

2021 | Tomales Bay, California

2021 | Tomales Bay, California

This marks the beginning of the second year of the blog. If you don’t mind, I’ll take a break today from setting up the second issue of the magazine, commemorating the past six months of posts. I just looked out the window and the bay is glassy in a very low tide. I’ll have to walk a bit farther to the water, but I’ll get a free ride back when the tide turns and the afternoon breeze picks up as it swings to the northwest.

Thanks for your attention and support of my work this year!

▷ The ink is dry on the March book, Travelers Advisories: Unfamiliar Notations, and the April book, Brush Work: Tracing Urban Wildlands. The order info is up for you, under the BOOKS menu above.

▷▷ May 18, 2021 UPDATE: The Mixed Documents Handbook No. 2 is available now, covering the blog posts from October 2020 through March 2021. It’s on the books page here...

https://www.mixeddocuments.net/books/david-wing-book-blog-handbook-2-photographs

▷▷▷ Oh, and that other book I was musing about in Post 118 on March 23…

https://www.mixeddocuments.net/books/verticals-book-fifty-years-david-wing-photographs

118 | Verticals

2011 | Balboa Park, San Diego

2011 | Balboa Park, San Diego

I rarely turn my camera on its side, but when I do, something happens. The results are different, not because the picture is tall but because it comes from another part of my sensibility. I think a separate part of my brain is engaged or my brain quickly disengages and my camera leads me into another world.

As I look at these now, I imagine that when I hold my camera differently, it takes me through a mirror into a world of definite mysteries.

I have no way to account for this.

Perhaps I should put them together into a book.

I wonder what I would call it.

▷ One of the most intriguing accounts of passing through mirrors is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Some of the most wondrous magic is the present-day story of how her book made its way into the world and into the hands of her readers.

▷▷ May 18, 2021 Update: The book is available NOW on the books page here…

https://www.mixeddocuments.net/books/verticals-book-fifty-years-david-wing-photographs

117 | Urban Forestry

2016 | Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

2016 | Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

One of the best short hikes in L.A. is up the exterior steps on the south side, over the saddle, and down into the structure with peeks into the interior of the hall. It’s almost all steel, concrete, and glass, and I always find fresh upper air and fine views.

114 | Good Air

1993 | Badwater, Death Valley

1993 | Badwater, Death Valley

My equipment seems heavy until I am far from the road. Along the way, there are occasional traces of earlier movement, but these are drawn on another layer; in my own space, there are no other explorers. When the only sensation is the crunch of my steps on the pseudo-ice of the salt pan, I am making my approach.

Then I am clear, standing lightly on a bright, distant moon with an empty yet freshly sustaining atmosphere. It is cold and calm, and I am surprised that the water bottle on my belt is not frozen. I am no longer restrained by my thoughts – they are quiet, broad, unified. I cannot explain what I might now know, or what I will never understand, but I can photograph these things.

▷ From the prologue in Death Valley: The Ambiguous Landscape. I have edited it into the first person since it’s based on my experience; your own will be different.

▷ The Death Valley book is still in print…

www.mixeddocuments.net/books

112 | Travelers Advisory

2004 | Kauai`i, Hawai`i

2004 | Kauai`i, Hawai`i

I understand that many of the people who try to outsmart this warning are not lost in the surf, but at the end of the trail in the roaring creek which must be forded to reach the splendid narrow beach backed up against the enormous and spectacular cliffs which face the entire North Pacific.