I’ve just finished Patti Smith’s latest dream-like memoir, M Train. As always, her writing transports me, and I am particularly captivated by her Polaroid photos, I find them very affecting. Years ago I read a reviewer on Amazon criticize her photos because they were “blurry” and “black and white”.  To that I would add “grainy” and of course words like “evocative” and “laden with meaning”. 

This photo of course is one of my own, and taken with an iPhone, not an old Land camera, but as I mused my way through the murk of the historic Old Chapel Hill Cemetary, I was struck by how such casually ignored places as a burial site in the middle of a campus can transmit so much emotion.  And that such places, when observed, can teach us something artistically.