Paul's Reflections

"At the core of it all, there's something more.
Something luminous, something shimmering."

- Paul Cotter

Long-time readers of my blog will have seen book reviews appear every now and then, but I haven't posted as many as one might expect (given my general penchant for books). By my count, I have about 20 (depending on the minimal length and depth that defines a "review" and excluding a post in which I summarize the book my mom and I wrote about my dad's life and art); just click on "Book Reviews" in the Themes and Places section in the left sidebar to see the full list. That's 20 reviews out of a total of 1660 total posts since 2004, or less than 1 per year! The main reason is that I only post reviews of books that have made a strong - a strong positive - impression on me. I can further distill this already select group to a set of exactly four books that made me blurt out "Wow!" and which altered my perceptions of the creative potential of photography as an art form: (1) Bruce Barnbaum's Visual Symphony (in the 1970s), (2) Fay Godwin's Land  (middle 1980s), and (3) John Sexton's Recollections (in 2006), and (4) Wynn Bullock's Color Light Abstractions (in 2010). To this short list I must now add a fifth - Paul Cotter's Paul's Reflections: Photography and thoughts about life and living - mostly because of how brilliantly it combines "verbal and visual" aesthetic - even spiritual - spaces, an observation made also by Barbara Bullock-Wilson in the foreword she wrote for Paul's book.

Full disclosure: (1) Despite never having met in person (though we both look forward to the day this is no longer true), Paul and I have "known" each other for about 10 years, and connected over an essay Paul had published on Wynn Bullock in 2016 (which I found by following a link I'd seen on Barbara Bullock Wilson's Facebook page). And, as dedicated readers of my own blog know, Barbara serendipitously become a treasured friend of mine soon after we first corresponded in 2012 via email about my "discovery" of her father's color abstractions; (2) I purchased Paul's book online as soon as I learned of its existence. Does my knowing Paul make the "review" you are about to read biased? Objectively, perhaps. But you'll have to take my word (on faith, of course) that I never recommend a book (about photography or any other subject) unless I believe it is special. Which brings us to my review.

The softcover book (this is the only version available) consists of 53 of Paul's favorite essays and accompanying photographs that have appeared on his blog between March 2023 and early 2026 (you can read more about the book and place your order here). Apart from the foreword and introduction, it follows an elegantly simple two-page format: a title introduces a short essay and a quote/callout (that highlights salient text) on the right, and an accompanying photograph appears on the left (a few sample pages are here and here). 

While the photographs reveal Paul's gift for simplicity and reflect an inner calm honed from years of studying Buddhism (Paul has been featured in National Geographic magazine, gallery exhibitions, and international photography annuals), the essays - each a perfect companion to the image it is paired with (as explained below) - are a world unto-themselves. Each essay is anchored on a single idea or observation (or, as you'll find on page 29, "thoughts about thoughts"). What sets these essays apart from those by most other photographer-authors is the Zen-like spark of illumination they ignite in the reader; Paul is as gifted an author as he is a photographer! Indeed, as I've emailed him privately several times after reading his blog posts, I am in awe at how few words - often no more than a few spare, poetic-like paragraphs - Paul needs to convey ideas that will take root and linger in your memory long after you've closed his book. I tend to think of them as sacred clippings drawn from the life of a wise and gentle sage. Though they are all short and can be finished in a minute or two, I recommend that you savor these essays by reading them slowly, thoughtfully, letting your mind wander and muse on whatever related themes and ideas you will no doubt find percolating inside you. 

You will find - and grow to appreciate after spending quality time with Paul's book - that each image-essay pair is subtly interlocked and self-reinforcing. When you turn to a page, your eye will first be drawn to the photograph on the left (since we are fundamentally visual creatures). After you've absorbed the first layer of meaning (there are other, typically many other layers you'll discover as you revisit the image), you'll shift your gaze to the accompanying essay on the right. This will also quickly draw you in, and you will momentarily "ignore" the image because you will have become consumed with the story that's taken you along for a ride. At some point, as you are reading the essay, your eyes will suddenly dance back to the image to pick out a detail you somehow missed before but which some words you've just read reminded you (or your mind's eye) was there to be discovered all along. You smile ("Of course, I should have seen that!") and turn your attention back to the essay. You smile again ("Paul's describing a world the photograph is showing me just a small part of!"). The essay seems somehow even richer than before; and you see textures and rhythms only hinted at by the words themselves. You glance back at the image and suddenly see that it doesn't just mirror some explicit part of the essay (what probably originally caught your eye), but includes deeper latent layers of meaning; the image is somehow transformed into something more ("I want to just keep looking at it, I don't want to leave."). Then back to the essay ("I wish it would go on. I'm not ready to leave this world. I never saw the world this way!). Back and forth you'll go, until distinctions between image and essay start blurring, and eventually disappear altogether. You'll "see" a world that the Zen-master's boat (i.e., which I'll colloquially refer to as "Paul's image-essay pair") has gently guided you across the stream to see. You smile again, relishing the anticipation of revisiting this stream before turning the page to step into another boat. 

While Paul's book is not meant to make you a better photographer or writer (though there are lessons galore for those who aspire to refine their skills at either), it will undoubtedly enhance your appreciation of - and ability to see, to really see - the "everyday miracles that are all around us." As for me, I look forward to dipping into its pages for inspiration for years to come. Highly recommended!

Quiet Light

"It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I 'listen' to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening - a time for making photographs."

- John Sexton (1953 - )

Wynn Bullock: Color Light Abstractions

"Light to me is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe. My thinking has been deeply affected by the belief that everything is some form of radiant energy." - Wynn Bullock (1905 - 1975)

Wynn  Bullock is arguably one of the greatest fine-art photographers to have graced our world with his soulful mind, heart, and eye. He is also one of three photographers (of a bygone generation, relative to mine) that I deeply lament not having had the opportunity to meet and get to know personally (the other two being Ansel Adams and Minor White). Though I was certainly alive when Bullock passed away (and I was already "taking pictures"), I was but a young lad of 15, and had yet to appreciate the Buddhist transience of life and everything precious in it. Plenty of time to "get to know the greats..." (or so I thought)

How would my creative life have been different - what alternative paths would I have taken - had there been a chance to learn - and possibly muse with - such extraordinary artists; whose work I have learned to respect and resonate with on ever deeper levels as I grow into the late summer of my own life? Adams first showed me how nature can be seen as its own transcendent reality. And White how the best photographs are those whose "outer appearance" reflect one's "inner perceptions." But it was Bullock, whose work I came to know and admire deeply a few years after studying Adams and White, who (continues to) pave the way for my own creative journey; one that strives to combine - and transcend - the (nominally pseudo-orthogonal) aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of experience, thought, and reality.

Apart from living in slightly different times (I was born 55 years after Bullock) and different places (he on the west coast, I on the east), and apart from the fact that Bullock's work is well-known to almost all photographers and mine to almost none (outside of family, friends, and an occasional tip-of-the-hat from a kind reader of my blog), our respective histories and creative predilections share a few traits; I therefore feel an especially close affinity towards him. For starters, both of us were married twice, the first time rather unsuccessfully in what was more of a "trial" (in both literal and figurative senses), and not-at-all conducive to producing any kind of art - in Bullock's case, I was saddened to learn that his first wife thought his photography was a waste of time (mine was more understanding); she'd sometimes enter his darkroom to tear up his prints in fits of anger! In both cases, our second marriage found us soul-mates and muses.  Bullock's second marriage led to two girls; mine, to two boys.

The most important traits we share have to do with our photography: (1) we are both opportunistic, taking advantage of family trips and outings more than Ansel-Adams-like dedicated month-long trips away from home (reveling primarily in finding and revealing the transcendent nature of everyday reality), (2) we both incessantly experiment with new modes of visual expression (perpetually seeking that extra "spark" to ignite a new line of aesthetic inquiry), and (3) we both heavily ground our photography in intellectual - sometimes deeply metaphysical - musings (invoking images of time, space, reality, illusion, ...); a fact that should be obvious (on my side, at least) to anyone who has perused just the topics of my blog entries, much less their substance ;-) Bullock's musings may be sampled on his website (lovingly crafted and kept up-to-date by his eldest daughter, Barbara Bullock-Wilson) and in a few of his books that are still available: (1) Wynn Bullock: The Enchanted Landscape, Photographs 1940-1975, (2) Wynn Bullock: Photography a Way of Life, and (3) Wynn Bullock (Aperture Masters of Photography). (Links to other references are provided below).

And so we come to the point of this blog, which is to introduce interested readers to an extraordinary new book of Bullock's color abstracts - Wynn Bullock: Color Light Abstractions - which also serves as a catalog of a traveling exhibition that premiered on May 15, 2010 at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel,California. I label this book "new" not only because it has only recently been published (in 2010), but because it contains over 50 color light abstractions that have rarely before been seen in public! Though Bullock was primarily a black-and-white photographer (another trait we share), he had experimented heavily, in the late 50s and early 60s, with color. Unsatisfied with the color printing at the time, few outside his family and circle of friends ever saw samples of this work, and even then mostly via slide presentations. Inspired and helped by a close family friend (John Hong Hall, to whom the traveling exhibition is dedicated and whose moving story appears in an afterword to the book), the heirs to (and caretakers of) Bullock's work undertook the prodigious task of organizing, restoring, scanning, and printing 50+ year-old Kodachrome color slides.

I will spare readers a "description" of these images, since whatever pale words I may attach to my "experience" of them will so distort their essence - inevitably altering the meaning the images would convey on their own if viewed by your eyes only - that to do so would be an aesthetic injustice on my part. Suffice to say that this collection of color light abstracts is nothing short of breathtaking! Were one not told of how these surrealistic, other-wordly images came to be (a word or two on that in a second), but was simply presented with the finished portfolio, with only the implicit understanding that the images were obviously produced by a prodigiously gifted photographer, one would be forgiven for believing that it was all "some Photoshop trick," albeit an astoundingly creative - indeed, visionary - one! The fact that these images were produced c.1960 using everyday objects like broken shards of thick colored glass, beads, jewelry, polarizing filters, and both artificial and natural light, makes this already exquisite portfolio all the more remarkable. A short description of his method appears here, and also in a superb 30 min documentary on his life and work, Wynn Bullock: Photographer.

I have written before of heretofore having only three epiphanous reactions to photography monographs, to which I simply went "Wow!" upon seeing, and which fundamentally altered my perceptions of the creative potential of photography as an art form: (1) Bruce Barnbaum's Visual Symphony (in the 1970s), (2) Fay Godwin's Land  (middle 1980s), and (3) John Sexton's Recollections (in 2006). To this short list I must now add a fourth, Wynn Bullock's Color Light Abstractions. This work is, in a word, a masterpiece! 

Additional references: Wynn Bullock's biography appears here, and a sampling of color abstracts that appear in the book appear on this page. A 3-min video may be seen here. A portfolio of some of Bullock's black-and-white images appears in Lenswork Issue #55, available in Adobe pdf). A few books may also be ordered directly from Bullock's website. Other include: Wynn Bullock (Phaidon Press), Wynn Bullock (Scrimshaw Press), Wynn Bullock Photographing the Nude: The Beginnings of a Quest for Meaning, and The Photograph as Symbol. As of this writing, copies of Photography and Philosophy of Wynn Bullock (by Clyde Dilley, published in 1984) are also still available.

Postscript: I stumbled across Bullock's color abstractions somewhat synchronistically (at an age close to Bullock's when he first started experimenting with color), insofar as I have recently also embarked on what has turned out to be a multiyear "color experiment" in (what in my case, I call) "Synesthetic Landscapes" (and that I have discussed before). Though the specifics of our methods differ, like Bullock, I am essentially driven to photograph light itself, not the physical forms that light makes visible or otherwise gives shape and texture to. My "color abstract sources" (thus far, at least) have been impromptu / makeshift "in the field" mini studios consisting of doors or bottles of rum (among many, many other everyday "things"); the best results are eerily reminiscent of the hyperreal dimensions discovered first by Bullock: realms of fluidic time and space, ineffably infused with mysterious luminescent protoforms of life and consciousness ;-)

John Sexton's Magnificent New Book: Recollections

The on-line Oxford Dictionary defines the word magnificent simply as "impressively beautiful"; where beauty is said to be "a combination of qualities that delights the aesthetic senses." While both words come to mind in describing John Sexton's new book, Recollections: Three Decades of Photographs, if we are to go by Oxford's rather banal definitions, neither word even comes close to conveying the depths of visual and spiritual pleasures that await anyone who focuses their eye on the masterful B&W images assembled here.

Though I own hundreds of photography books, and regularly peruse most of them for years, I have had a relatively few "Wow!" reactions over the years - indeed, the last such experiences are at least two decades old (!): to Bruce Barnbaum's late 1970s' Visual Symphony and, in the middle 1980s, to Fay Godwin's Land - but Sexton's new Opus not only evoked an immediate heartfelt "Wow!" from me, it also raises the bar on what will trigger a similar exclamation from me in the future. I sat transfixed for hours after receiving it in the mail yesterday, and already consider it a sacrosanct member of the deepest core of my photography library. It is truly an extraordinary work of art; one that I will be savoring - and learning from - for years to come.

It is also clearly the work of a master photographer and printer, at the height of his creative powers; and a "master" not just of the "moment" compared to his living peers, but a "master" as judged in the context of the history of the medium.

Of course, it is impossible to describe the "contents" of this book, except to say that it contains 52 plates (and a few short essays) of such things as rocks, trees, and water. But, as with all great photographic art, by the time you get to even the second image, such conventional, blandly and trivially representational categories are understood as absurd and meaningless. The best of Sexton's images - and there are none in this book that are not! - capture spirit itself.

In short, a masterpiece!