Browsing the photography books

Last night and most of today I was listening to Mitsuko Uchida play the piano, thinking how lucky I am to live in a time when I can just stream her genius and not have to save my money and wait for a concert, a record, a tape, or a CD. I noted that the photos on her website (linked above) were made by Richard Avedon, who died in 2004, so not exactly recent. Still, they are so gorgeous (and so is she), why would she ever update them? I wanted to look at more of Avedon’s photos, so I proposed to Margie that we go to Powell’s coffee shop today and look at photography books. 

Once we got to Powell’s Margie remembered that I’d had a birthday recently (sometimes she surprises me by remembering things I assume she has forgotten). She wanted to buy me a book for a belated birthday present, but of course the Avedon books were so expensive it made my eyes water. I gave her a choice of Saul Leiter or Humans of New York. She found some of the Leiter photos a little abstract for her taste, so she she got me HONY. 

“Every one of these photos looks like people I might know,” Margie said. 

I’ll take it to her apartment some day when the weather is not conducive to going out and we can enjoy it some more. Now I’m back to listening to Uchida. She has an 8-disk set of Schubert that lasts eight hours. It’s like sending my ears to heaven for an extended visit.

P.S. For those who wondered, my tattoo is now fully healed and the ink only leaked a little bit on two letters. It never did scab or flake, and I am definitely hoping to get a lotus in a month or two. The artist said it takes a couple of months to "settle in" and become part of your skin, but the healing went faster than I expected and was no trouble at all.