August 20th, 2020

I'm re-reading  Robert Adams' "Beauty in Photography" again.  What he wrote there was backed up in my experience when I came across this old image:

"We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.  It is the fitness of a landscape to one's experience of life's condition and possibilities that finally makes a scene important or not."

When I look at the image above, a flood of memories—aesthetic and emotional--are called up in me.  So many happy memories—San Francisco will always be a bit like the Emerald City for me: stunning, almost overwhelming in beauty.   And full of so many possibilities!  

Coda:  and filled with smoke right now, I believe.  Not a happy possibility, but living on the San Andreas fault and so near to so much dry vegetation , that's part of its beauty too—its fragility is part of the life-condition of being there.