One inspired by Aaron Broadwell, one by Steven Levine; I get a little help from my friends.
Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Two notes on gay moral purpose
August 3, 2026Reptilian fruit couplet
December 24, 2025Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
“As the Mind Spins”
October 27, 2025The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
Scam rounds 2 and 3
October 20, 2025Background: scam round 1. From my 9/29/25 posting “Today’s scam”:
Let’s summarize. Copyright Agent (CA for short) assumes my blog is a company, with a staff. They refer to an image on an arnoldzwicky.org link — which contains two images, and I have no idea which they’re referring to. They then say that the image is under copyright to their partner company, which does business under various names (I’ll just call them Visions here); that I have violated these rights; and, cutting to the chase, that I must now pay a claim for illegal use of the image or be subject to lawsuit. The claim amount is nowhere stated. CA provides a URL for paying the claim. I am not rising to the bait.
Checking out the Visions company …, I see that it’s a botanical image database (apparently very large), providing images for advertising and other commercial uses.
… On some previous occasions, I have been notified that some image I used in a posting was under copyright, and had the choice of removing it from the posting or paying a fee. Since I live on a small fixed income and provide my writings for free (and in fact pay to have my postings free of ads), I can’t afford such fees and so just delete the images. (More recently, images mostly come with statements about their copyright status; I’m then increasingly unable to find usable images to illustrate many ordinary things.) But CA offers me no such choice; I have already broken the law and must now pay up.
I am not compliant.
The view from the troubled fringes
October 5, 2025From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:
[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start
Today’s scam
September 29, 2025It was already a difficult day, and then in my mail:
To whom it may concern at Arnold Zwicky’s Blog,
Copyright Agent US, Inc. works with professional photographers and leading image agencies across the globe to protect their copyrights on the internet.
We hereby draw your attention to an image used on the following link: [https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/06/26/from-south-america]/ (herein after the “Image”). [this is my 5/26/2012 posting “From South America”, with pictures of a flowering Jacaranda mimosifolia tree in South Pasadena CA and a florist’s assortment of Alstroemeria cultivars in various colors (both originally found on Wikipedia, I believe, but that was 13 years ago)]
Our Partner, Visions Video & Photography, holds the rights to represent the Image in question and they are unable to find a license purchased under your company’s name or domain. Accordingly, we are contacting you to ensure that the appropriate license was obtained. It is possible that you have acquired the correct license for the Image, for example, from the photographer themselves or your creative agency under a written sub-contract. If that is the case here, we ask that you provide evidence of proper licensure to allow us to review your case.
Infringement is unauthorized use of intellectual property. In essence, it deprives the rights holder of the benefit of their original creation. If no evidence that a license was purchased is provided, then a payment claim would be required to resolve and compensate for the illegal use of the Image. This will also avoid the need for judicial intervention if the matter is not resolved.
You can log in directly and pay this claim here: [URL]
To Survive on This Shore
September 27, 2025From one of my crew of transgender friends, family, students, and colleagues, a pointer to the book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag, 2018):
(#1) Cover of the book; from photographer Jess T. Dugan’s website for the book:Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For over five years, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults. Seeking subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location, they traveled from coast to coast, to big cities and small towns, documenting the life stories of this important but largely underrepresented group of older adults. The featured individuals have a wide variety of life narratives spanning the last ninety years, offering an important historical record of transgender experience and activism in the United States.
The resulting photographs and interviews provide a nuanced view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person and offer a poignant reflection on what it means to live authentically despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
To Survive on This Shore exists as a book, limited-edition portfolio, museum exhibition, and community exhibition. It has also been used extensively in educational initiatives and political campaigns.
From the annals of remarkable commercial names
September 27, 2025Briefly noted. From Randy McDonald on Facebook yesterday, a nighttime-atmospheric photo of the Chew Chew Grill / Chew Chew’s Diner, 186 Carlton St., Toronto ON (open 8 am to 4 pm):
All-day breakfast, hot sandwiches, and burgers in a space with booth seating and train-inspired decor
You get the remarkable name, a kind of ludic trifecta — punning (choo punning on chew), imitative (choo-choo ‘train’), and metonymical (chew in the name of an eating place) — plus the wonderful train mural, especially vivid at night.
A dog and his boy
September 15, 2025Found in a mountain of boxes full of photos from all of my life, this sweet photo that I’m sure I haven’t posted before: of a fine collie (Blaze, by name, according to the note on the back) and Blaze’s boy, who looks like he’s sprung up some in a growth spurt — and his face has left soft childhood and developed fine adult features, though in size S — but hasn’t yet gotten the shot of pubertal testosterone that builds adult muscle mass:
(#1) A boyhood shot, taken ca. 1950, when the boy was 9 or 10
Here he is ca. 1978, plying his adult trade, teaching linguistics:
(#2) Now with a 70s haircut, and now more markedly a man of the south of France (with his mother’s features)Someday he’ll come along
The man I love
And he’ll be big and strong
The man I love
— George and Ira Gershwin
Yes, my leanly muscular man, Jacques Transue, from before all the disastrous things that befell us.
Skyparty
August 21, 2025In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.