We often asked him (in our efforts of wasting time in his religion class) about free will. If God knew in advance of a coming cataclysm why did He not ever prevent them? Was this an example of free will? His answer was a pragmatic gray, neither black nor white. He would have told us, “God is up in a mountain looking down on a sharp curve. Two cars are coming from both ends. In the middle of the curve, there is a large rock. Whichever driver sees it will by necessity have to steer the car into the other car, or the driver might just slam into the rock and thus the other driver might survive. God knows this. He sees this coming and does nothing. That is free will.”
Much like God I can write here what I am going to write about on Sunday February, 19. The blog is here and it is called, On Reinterpretation – Lauri Stallings.
What you see here is a stark portrait of one of my most popular (to me) photographic subjects who happens to be a professional dominatrix. In the photo here and others that I took I photographed her in her extremely small sleeping cubicle that resembles some of those capsule hotels in Japanese airports. I wanted to re-visit but somehow re-interpret my somewhat cliché and romantic view of the woman photographed in bed.
Yuliya was nursing the end of a cold. She had rings under her eye and put on little makeup. In the picture here I could remove (in the blink of an eye closing and opening) those rings. I chose to not do so ( I did a bit, I must confess )as I like the in-your-face starkness and darkness of her expression. The room was so small that the 50mm wide angle of my Mamiya RB-67 could barely handle the limits of the rooms. I have done here what I would damn any of my students for doing. Yuliya’s fingers are cropped. That’s very bad. Also bad is how I cropped her feet. I might have been more careful.
But I still think that this picture has some sort of power to engage. It may not be romantic, but at my age that may be something of the past.