Come Closer...And Closer...And Closer.

I was walking to my car in a parking lot on Church Street in Montclair. I have parked in this lot hundreds of times, but each time I look at the same white brick wall to see how the light is hitting it and whether something, in some way, is new.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

The wall faces west, and from early afternoon onwards the sun hits it strongly but from an oblique angle, highlighting all the paint spatters and textures in the brick and mortar.

Yesterday the light was bright but hazy, no harsh shadows. The white looked luscious, and every color seen against it popped.

What was new since last time I parked here, about a week ago, was this five gallon Benjamin Moore paint bucket and the thick crumpled wire lying in it, as black and certain as ink on paper.

My first thought on noticing the bucket was, I don't think I can make a picture of that.

By which I mean that while it is obviously simple to aim the camera at the wall and press the shutter, the result would not necessarily be a photograph.

By which I mean a picture that is its own reason for being. That is self-sufficent, needing no explanation. That shows something to be exactly what it is and yet a little bit more.

But just for the hell of it, I backtracked a few steps to the spot where I had first noticed the bucket against the wall and took a picture. (The top one at left)

I didn't think that was anything, so I took a few steps closer and took another picture. That didn't feel like anything, either,  though you don't always know until you look at the pictures later, full screen, on the computer.

At this point I did what everyone seeking to understand anything should always be willing to do--abandon one's preconceptions and start fresh.

So I forgot about the wall as a big backdrop and took another step closer and zoomed in from wideangle to slight telephoto to look closer at the bucket and its contents.

Suddenly the tangled black wire reminded me of a famous picture by the Polish-born American photojournalist David Seymour, who was known as Chim.

Chim was in Poland, on assignment for UNESCO in 1948, when he took the picture (Bottom left) of a disturbed girl named Terezka, who had grown up in a concentration camp and was now living in an orphanage. As davidseymour.com explains it, "The scrawl on the blackboard is her drawing of 'home.' "

I didn't remember the circumstances of the Chim picture when I was looking through the viewfinder. I just remembered the scribbles and the girl's face.

Knowing the circumstances heightens the impact of the picture considerably, but doesn't turn it from nothing into something. It turns it from something arresting and disturbing and universal into something that retains each of those qualities but becomes horrific by being placed in its historical context.

Which takes me a long way from where I expected to be when I started writing this entry a little while ago.

By no means am I comparing the third photograph in this series with Chim's portrait of Terezka or with any work of photojournalism, powerful or pedestrian.

I'm merely saying that when I took that third step closer I began to understand my interest in that wire in a new way.

And that, in turn, makes me look at this last picture in the series in a different way, as a representation of life's contradictions.

Everything in the picture is random yet organized relative to the frame, which defines the immutable boundaries of its existence.

The bucket is both a bottomless pit and a full circle.

Overlaying the chaos of the man-mangled wire is a dead branch, orderly in its structure, poignant in its fragility, beautiful in its filigree, ghostly in its pallor.

Amid the stalks of dead grass, the tangle and tumult of the living, the drooping languor of the long slender leaves mimicking and mocking the stiff curves of the wire.

Tags: Montclair | photography

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