Photo Shoot

I wrote, a while ago, about all the babble that goes through my brain when a camera is pointed in my direction.  I am not, within, what I am without.  Do any of us achieve that perfect correspondence?

But for the recent Pennsylvania Gazette story about the life I've lived through books, I was invited to a enter the cinematic world of Chris Crisman, another Penn grad who has made it his business to appease and to ease and (somehow in the midst of it all) to make art.  You would never know it, by looking at this shot, but the lens was so close to my face when this picture was made that I suspected Chris of doing a study on the tangle of my eyelashes.  (Lancome, next time, I was thinking to myself.  And also:  I wish I'd gone to bed last night.)

Clearly, though, Chris knows what he is doing, and I share this outtake from the shoot today because Chris made Memorial Hall, a Centennial-era building, the true and deserving subject of his shot.  It's a beautiful place, newly and justly restored, and can't you just picture it back in 1876—the crowds massing in the high heat of summer, eager for the art within?