Le Petit Prince of Columbia, Maryland

There are books where we have found a piece of ourselves, but even more, that we have rediscovered ourselves when we read them again, years later. Some of these books seem simple at first; a fairy tale, a story easily read. Then, we pass through life, through streets and people, and one morning we wake up with the name of a book on our mind. A book we have read many years ago. We read it in French, in English, in Mandarin. And we look for that book once more.

Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is one of these books. It is philosophical, it is dreamy, it is about love, but mostly it is about responsibility. In short, it is pure Zen.
I re-read that book in French many times, sometimes by pure chance of finding it near me, or after looking for it. The line that has stayed with me is: "Men have forgotten this truth." said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible. forever, for what you have tamed."

I took this picture on a cold, snowy day with a Pentax 1000. The moment I saw the dog getting closer to the young man, I thought about the fox and the Little Prince. And I waited for the millisecond when the "fox" would tell the line above. I am sure that is exactly what it said!

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013

Madrid

A cloudy day in Madrid. I was walking around with my Nikon F3 and did not take pictures for a long while. On rainy and cloudy days people seem in a hurry and often the crowd becomes an amorphous flow of human bodies with no individual characteristics.

Then, I heard almost a howling sound behind me, to my right. I turned and saw this man leafing through a magazine where pictures of Adonis's were shown full page. The howling was perhaps his appreciation of the photos, or could it have been his lament for years gone by? No matter, it was a most unusual moment. I waited till he turned another page to include the picture of a handsome man, then clicked.

It is slightly off-focus because I had opened the lens to 1.4 and did not have much time for framing as he was going through the pages fast!

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013

Kisses and Cities

It is impossible not to stop and notice a tender embrace when walking the streets. The challenge for the photographer is not to be a voyeur, but find the angle to enhance the context of a street picture by including the kiss.
I rarely use any lens other than a 50 mm for 35mm format, although when shot on medium format film (hence 80 mm lens), I can enlarge parts of the negative during darkroom work to the limits of a frame shot with a telephoto lens. In my world of old-time photography, darkroom work is what transforms a picture into a photo worth framing.

I decided to do a small collage of kisses from different cities. My goal was to show a characteristic street kiss representing the mentality of the country. Did I succeed? You decide.

The last picture is a bit of a challenge to decipher at first look. I took it from the cable car going up the mountain at Mont Tremblant. We were passing over expensive summer homes with swimming pools and I saw this couple in a romantic mood, in the middle of the pool. Consider it an aerial picture, and if you look closely going right to left, you will notice the head, shoulders and the arms of the woman. Her legs are reflected under the water. I like this picture for its visual challenge and it made it as the cover of my last poetry book "Aromance: The aroma of romance".

From top to bottom the cities are: Ferrara, Barcelona, Paris, Oporto, Vienna, New York City and Mont Tremblant, Canada.

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013