Horrible storytellers, like me, rely on images to tell our tales, both ordinary and extraordinary. Typically, the best spoken stories involve uncommon events: strange encounters with the homeless or rescuing an outrageously drunken friend from his demise. But what about the ordinary, the everyday moments that lack the intrigue of the unusual? Are those stories not worth telling?

The stories that stay with me are composed of the quiet moments that can easily pass us by, and which are, incidentally, the hardest to describe in words. For example, the glance lovers exchange when no one is looking or the expression on someone’s face as they view the earth from 30,000 feet for the first time. I realize the impossibility of capturing every single ordinary moment and that catching those real moments is innately challenging, but it is that struggle which makes those stolen images so much more powerful.

Three views of Bernini's David

Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for that monstrous marriage.

I knew Gianlorenzo Bernini was a great sculptor — one doesn’t escape Rome without being marked by that belief, especially if one’s rooms are situated across from the Ponte St. Angelo, bedecked as it is with 12 life-size marble angels of his making — and I knew he was devout (see: St. Theresa in Ecstasy), but this David bothered me. Not for the reason Donatello’s David does: the effeminate and small boy an imp gloating over a victory not his, and not for the reason that Michelangelo’s impression of classical perfection used to do. I was irritated that the hands hanging lazily about his body seemed lazy themselves, out of all proportion with an otherwise perfect rendering, until I realized that they’re too big because they’re God’s hands about to sling the shot, not his, and outsized because outsourced, appropriately. But Bernini’s David has a more difficult formal problem, that wouldn’t let me walk away from it to find all the other treasure in that great collection in the Borghese gardens.

He seems hunched. He’s built like an athlete, like a contender at a Greek games, but is poised nothing like one. I’ve spent considerable time imitating his stance, drawing suspicious looks from museum security guards, as I try to figure out how a move like that would work. He’s bent as though he’ll fling the stone backhanded across his body using only his tricep, or perhaps over his head, using only the shoulder muscle as projection: either way, these are two of the weakest muscles in the male upper body. Put your back into it, I think. Get your torso involved. He looks like the very antithesis of the discus thrower for whom nothing is at stake but a gold medal or an amophora of oil. Here David is, with Israel’s reputation, the lives of his family, and even his God’s good name on the line, and he’s looking like he couldn’t even skip a stone across a pond, let alone knock out a heavyweight.

The biblical account has it that he’d practiced. When his father, Jesse, outfits the boy with battle-gear, young David puts them off, saying “I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them” (1 Sam 17:39b).  Apparently, he’d even warded off lions and bears with his little slingshot, which, to put it lightly, takes some doing (34-35). Bernini has it that he hasn’t.

Any farm boy knows how to throw stones. My brother and I could hit any tree in our yard at a distance of 30 paces (measured albeit in the steps of 11-year-old’s) 4 out of 5 times, consistently. When I was 13, I decided that a man should know how to throw a knife so that it would stick in the tree like an arrow. The problem was that I was 13, and my mother didn’t let us play with knives. So I improvised. Finding a razor blade (who knows where?), I split a  stick and fastened it to the end with twine. Presto: throwing knife. I enlisted my brother, and we spent the afternoon — it must have been summer: why does it seem there was time for anything then? — making a target.

I got to go first since it was my idea and I was older. I grasped the make-shift blade-side like I’d probably seen in an action movie I was too young to have been watching, took the carefullest aim I could, centered my breathing, and let it fly. I didn’t really feel anything, but by the time my knife reached the target (I missed), blood was covering my forearm and dripping down my elbow.

As is typical (I have since come to find) of young boys, my first thought was not I wonder if there’s an artery in my hand that’ll bleed me to death (there is), nor was it to wonder if one of those shots I got was for tetanus (they weren’t), nor even Will it scar (it does), but, Oh man, now Mom’s gonna find out and we’re gonna get in trouble. Despite the blood ruining my T-shirt and cotton shorts, it was my brother’s first thought, too.

I mention this story because I’m writing these impressions with a pencil held against that scar over twenty years later, and because this sculpture makes me nervous. Every kid hates the admonition, and statistically I still think it strains credibility to believe you’ll actually put someone’s eye out, but I think this David just might, and it won’t be Goliath’s. Even though I know the outcome of the story as well as I know anything, I worry, seeing him there: for his mother, for his sheep, for God’s people. His face looks determined, even angry compared with Michelangelo’s cool defiance, or Donatello’s wry, self-satisfied smile, but his anger doesn’t look controlled. It’s the sort of bit-lip, screwed brow, clenched teeth that seems to help at the time, but that isn’t actually a good idea, if you want to win a fight. I think it’s a good thing the Olympian gods were around to save Daphne, fleeing in the next room, because if she had someone like this to defend her, Apollo would’ve had his way, and we wouldn’t have any poetry.

But if I could sling a stone better than this shepherd, and even, despite his neoclassical musculature, take him in a fight, he’s still a better candidate for saving Israel than I would’ve been because his faith is bigger than mine. “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin,” shouts the young, ill-equipped boy, “but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head” (v. 45-46). David’s body is one machine, a man full of God’s might — of faith so strong he can wield it like a sword.

I think this is Bernini’s point: he’s not coiled around the column of his torso — spring-loaded and ready to fire — because God’s strength is different from man’s. He has thrust out his jaw, and bothered gathering the stones, and turned, though he doesn’t know what he’s doing, as if in wind-up because he has to do something, but he knows better than I can usually remember that God is the one who puts it through the uprights, between the eyes. The thing about that stone is that he could’ve dropped it, or even thrown it in the wrong direction and it still would’ve gone winging like a bullet into the forehead of the Philistine champion, because while he’s setting the stage for a blessing, God is the one who delivers it.

It’s the same story as Elijah and the sacrifices: you gather the firewood; I light it, because ultimately, it’s a story about God’s faithfulness, not about a man or a rock, which I seem to keep forgetting. Or, it’s a story about both, which is my real problem: I keep splitting the world and this story and the art I see into separate modes — God’s work vs. mine, David’s aim vs. God’s, my story vs. David’s, David’s vs. Goliath’s — when really, what’s beautiful about Bernini’s David is that, even if clumsily, he’s gathered all that into himself as God’s agent, and rolled it into a ball the size of a stone whose trajectory was laid at the same time as the foundations of the earth he’s standing on, and so am I.

I was cleaning up my RSS inbox recently and noticed one site in particular had over a thousand unread posts. That caught my attention, as I was pretty sure it wasn’t nearly that high a week before. I started to scroll through the posts and soon realized they were all photographs rather than the usual text or story from this author. On some days the author posted upwards of sixty photos. Given a few weeks at this volume, it’s no wonder there were over a thousand posts waiting for me. While deleting them I looked at each image, even if only for a moment. And something happened. Certain images caught me, stirring an emotion or captivating me. It was akin to casually walking through a museum and suddenly being stunned by a piece of art in such a way that you forget you were walking at all.

Detail of The Invasion by Adolphe William Bouguereau.

We live digitally but often can make claims that the digital realm is the bane of true artistic existence. The flood of information and images and videos on a given day can make any head spin. There is something to be said for standing in the presence of the original, something that can be seen live that isn’t seen otherwise. It is, after all, the same reason most of us value human contact in real space instead of phone calls, text messages, and all the other disconnected connections available. Certainly, another human is an art to behold, live in space and time.

That said, images still have power even on a LED screen. Not all those images in that folder were deleted. I kept some to come back to and explore why I had a response and to let that response play itself out and see where it might lead. Many took me to memories or longings; others gave context to emotions I could not put in words until then.

One of the first was a cropped version of The Invasion by Adolphe William Bouguereau. Only the lower quarter of the image is visible, the grasping cherub on blue, the white wings, almost like a pleading, a divine attempt at detour, one I have experienced numerous times in my life. A cut of a painting that tells a different story when seen in full, wherein it doesn’t seem to be a detour at all but, as the title says, an invasion, like a swarm coming on.

Then there was an image titled Tree House. It gave me a sense as if I just arrived on the scene of a long coming collapse and destruction; the sense of immediacy yet well past time from some other era. It reminds me of the years I spent as a mountaineer guide and would discover strange scenes like this in far remote wildernesses.

Poppy Field by Eliot Porter.

Eliot Porter’s 1970 photo titled Poppy Field first evokes the place where Dorothy and her Oz friends fell listless and sidetracked on their way to the Emerald City. The poppies stand out in such contrast to the rest of the landscape that they almost look painted onto the print afterwards. It also stirs a verse of John McCrae: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses row on row / That mark our place . . . ” The words were written nearly 100 years ago by a Lieutenant Colonel after watching a friend die on the battlefields of the First World War. Poppies, a brilliant marker of the dead among Flanders then, are still worn on this Veteran’s Day, this Remembrance Day so to not break faith with the dead. As McCrae’s poem ends: “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields.”

This leads me to one of my own images taken a few years back on medium format film. It’s titled Faded Glory, as it was taken at sunset on the edge of winter at the Crested Butte Cemetery. An old soldier’s grave in a land too cold for poppies (and maybe even Remembrance), the cross and the flag — symbols both, and both losing much of their intended original meaning as iconic images that have saturated our psyches and so lost their power to speak without words unless captured in a manner unfamiliar.

Pictures still speak though most are lost amongst the noise of so much visual overdose. Like the chatter of a cocktail party, the amount of imagery I encounter in a given day becomes a droning wash, indistinguishable. Still, regardless of medium, when a work of art is excellently crafted by paint or by lens, it will still stop my breath in its subtlety or its screaming beauty. After all, something extraordinary doesn’t beg for attention. It doesn’t need to.

Faded Glory by Kendall Ruth.

As I clean up the “noise” collected over weeks on my RSS reader, those images of beauty, slipped in between the thousands, still grab the attention, the emotion, and memory of my busy and noise-filled world. And maybe they will woo me to the local museum to see more of their kind in the quiet stillness of their presence with only the click-clacking of the security guard’s shoes to break the moment. They, and others like them, check my vision such that the next time I look through a lens, more of my heart sees out into the world around me. Maybe that is what Rodney Smith senses, after all these years and all he has accomplished, that he is still learning what he sees, and can’t bear to claim the name Photographer.

I’m intrigued by how personality plays a major role in who we are; more specifically, I’m interested in how extroverts and introverts live their lives both entwined and separate from one other.  About 68% of the population is ambiverted, which means that most of us have both introverted and extroverted tendencies.  However, I’ve noticed that we the world tend to applaud the people-oriented types, rather than consistently appreciating those who would sometimes rather be alone. In this series, I attempt to capture the small, quiet moments, the bold defining traits, and perhaps even some unexpected quirks of what makes up the at- times- hidden, magnificent world of the introvert.

I found that our differences fascinate me, and yet, our common humanity seems to provoke me even more. This project became an exploration of myself, my interests as a photographer, and the overall beauty of humankind.