I am continuing my Notes on a Blog with some notes on a few blog posts over at www.bryanfarleyphotography.com
On the last blog post of 2015 with Christine and her daughter, despite claiming that I would not use another Oscar Wilde quote, I included two.
The previous year, I started my post with a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Later in the post, I wrote a phrase to describe parental love. I called it "the importance of being Christmas." I still like it.
When I photographed Christine in 2014, I noticed her The Importance of Being Earnest book cover/box. I thought it might be a clue. More than a year ago, I searched for clues EVERYWHERE. I have since learned that I have prosopagnosia (or face blindness). I don't recognize people by their faces. However, in 2014, I just thought that people were intentionally changing identities and appearances like characters in a Wilde story. Now I wonder if Wilde was face blind.
The 2015 Christine and Ava blog post title is an intentional play on the Paul Simon song Mother and Child Reunion. I remembered the song being happier, so throughout the post, I misquote "Kodachrome" a different Paul Simon song. Trains reappeared again this year. (read the previous year's post.) The number two also connected the last four posts. Sometimes the number appeared literally. Sometimes a mother and child made a family. Two wild turkeys crossed the road. We didn't know why. (We didn't take their photo either.)
I photographed another mother and daughter the previous month... but mostly the daughter. Sometimes I include photos like this to document location. I also want to document that the mother was with us, even though we are good friends. I don't know if this is necessary or important, but I do it out of habit I guess. Photographing Haylie was really fun. I have known her mother since we were both in high school (we actually met as kids). I also enjoyed photographing Haylie, because she is photogenic. Many people correctly say that they are not photogenic. I am not. It's strange to come alive when someone points a tool at you, but some people do. Haylie does. It makes photography even more fun.
When I photographed The Women Who Code event, I kept seeing Two's. There was a Giving Tuesday promotion. WHC is a technology organization, so I thought about 2.0 and connecting through technology. I also thought about zeros and ones, but there was this big number 2 on the wall. I think it was produced with a 3D printer.
The final post was for the Epilepsy Gala. I tried to write as little as possible and still say a great deal. The author of the American with Disabilities Act is from Dos Palos, California, a small Central Valley town. When translated from Spanish, Dos Palos means "two sticks." I wanted to emphasize that often people who dance to their own drummer, or who come from unlikely places, transform the world. We often look to the big city for change, even though the outcast often comes to the big city and changes it. Those of us with epilepsy would do well to remember that we can change the world because we are out casts, instead of thinking we can do it despite of our status.
Those of us who are artists might want to remember something similar. I forget who said it, but it was probably some often quoted author referenced in another blog post, "No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
Or she 
and one last image from my archive (my daughter)
