Seeking Warmth.

My workspace.

In a few weeks I’ll publish an essay featuring the daily light and shadow of my home studio. I love the photographs the sunshine and window frames print on my walls every day, but in the winter time I also love the warmth the sunlight provides.

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The internet is filled with the work of photographers who often begin their careers publishing self-portraits. Many of the most successful Instagram photographers focus the camera on themselves.

Beginning in 1905, Anne Brigman may have been the first American woman to express her artistic vision by hiking into the Sierra Nevada mountains to make nude self-portraits. The photos have an other-worldly quality.

A retrospective of her work runs through January 27 at the Nevada Art Museum in Reno. The New York Times published a story this week on Brigman and her influence on her better known peers in the art world of the early 1900’s.

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The black and white photography of Ansel Adams is on display in a special exhibit this month and next (through February 24) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here’s a review published in the Washington Post.

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Finally this week, there is the question of how to see a subject with fresh eyes when the world has seen it before and when it has been photographed before and made famous before by another photographer.

As in the case of Philadelphia Inquirer photographer David Maialetti, who has just published a book of black and white photographs of the Italian town of Luzzara. The town has been captured previously, most notably by Paul Strand in the 1950’s.