Seattle Times/P-I, August 17, 2008 Art Straight Up, Hold the Olive by Sheila Farr Photo of Picture of the Day 572 screenshot printout installation at McLeod Residence used to illustrate feature story on trend of art galleries with lounge/bars attached. Seattle Times photo by Erika Schultz

This picture of Central Park, taken by Robert Zverina, has become my favorite image of New York. When I lived on West 86th Street, I used to walk through the park to the East side, and the walk would remind me that even in that gray and gritty city there were soft and beautiful places, but when I moved to Brooklyn, I soon forgot about Central Park and its particular magic. This photograph, like so many others of Robert's, brings back memories directly associated with the picture itself, and finally retrieves a veritable cascade of memories, touched off, I think, by the beauty of the image, a beauty that manages to call to many other partly buried images of beauty that I recognize as soon as they return, and which I realize I have missed before they were brought back by the picture.

This is only one of the pictures of Robert Zverina's that I admire and have hung all over the walls of my house. At first, I admired photographs which were formally beautiful as well as affecting. Invariably, these pictures were surprising as well. One photograph, titled "The Day That Just Kept Getting Better," is a picture of a field with mountains in the background, and the field itself is filled with bathtubs that look, in this picture, as if they themselves were some kind of strange, grazing animals.

No one can walk around in New York without noticing the fire escapes that cover the walls of the smaller apartment buildings, but I doubt that anyone pays much attention to them. This picture, with its design made up by the fire escapes, somehow finds beauty in these old and rusted and constantly repainted metal exoskeletons. I cannot look at this picture without being reminded of family stories which revolved around events taking place on these fire escapes in a time before air conditioners, in a time when mothers went to work and left their children locked in the apartment, and the children came out onto the fire escape when their mother's called, and threw down the key to their apartment, first having wrapped it in a piece of paper.

There is something in his photographs that speaks of the amazing beauty which is accidental beauty, there for the seizing by anyone who can see it, and anyone who is generous enough to record it for others. There are photographs of objects reflected in puddles, in the hoods of cars, objects which then become distorted and entirely new and unfamiliar. Some of these images are stunningly beautiful. Others, like the photograph of one person painting a wall while someone else looks on, somehow become emblematic of much larger spheres of activity, as if, should you look at them long enough, they come to stand for all human striving. These pictures speak for themselves, of themselves, and of many things beyond themselves. The woman's nude body, striped by bands of light so that she seems to become part tiger, is such a photograph. Human nature slides into something deeper and wilder here; it becomes, to me, a profound photo.

Robert's website, which has been growing for two years, is now a world of its own. Every day, there is a new picture and a new piece of prose. This site with its new picture becomes so addicting that on days when for some reason there is no new photo, I find myself terribly disappointed, as if I had been promised something to which I was looking forward and found only an empty box. Here he has endless photographs, each accompanied by a text. The cumulative effect of travelling through this remarkable maze of a website is something between reading a novel and seeing a film. Gradually, the lives of people who are young in New York today begins to emerge, the life of the author of the site representing his own life, as well as the life of a good number of his generation: the way those young people live now, as someone or other once put it.

The website chronicles his love affairs, his travels to Prague, the illness of his mother, his time spent with friends, the climbing of a mountain that nearly killed him, trips across country by train. Here there are many pictures that are truly accidental, little splinters of life--a friend's toes, an odd shot of a dog's owner, glimpses of what was going on at the time. These photos are entirely unlike the "formal" ones, like Central Park Blue, and on their own they might have trouble justifying themselves. But in this remarkable website, each of these splinters begins to move in the mind, as if, out of the corner of your eye, you were seeing a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself. "Here we are, and there we are," as Eeyore used to say.

I love these pictures, and it is a pleasure to have some of them here.

Contact Robert if you have anything to say about them. He writes hilarious e-mails.

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