(Yes, it's Lake Tenaya)
During the 2015 photo safari to Yosemite National Park, Brooks Jensen and I were discussing if the Masters of West Coast Photography had made any memorable photographs of Lake Tenaya. Later that year, at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library I spent some time looking for an Edward Weston photograph of Tenaya Lake. I found the photograph as well as an Ansel Adams photograph of Weston photographing at Tenaya Lake in the Aperture book, “The Flame of Recognition.”
Walking out of the Hesburgh Library this thought struck me. The book I held in 2015 was the same book I read and re-read in 1972. That copy of “The Flame of Recognition” was the exact same book that inspired me to consider photography as an art. So much of our current digital life is ephemeral and disposable and the catalyst that began my lifelong affair with photography was still on the library shelf. Has this slim volume ever inspired another person to make a life-long commitment to photography? I don’t know, but I bet that somehow that little book does.
Comments