Restaurants line the perimeter of the park at Scottsdale’s Civic Center Mall. As I passed this one, I noticed a waiter intent on making his establishment’s front door free of all fingerprints. He scrubs away, entirely oblivious to those female legs incongruously hanging over his shoulder in upper right background. Her shoes seem ready to slip from her feet. Our eyes flow through the glass panels marking the boundary of the restaurant’s patio. They all point towards the action of the waiter and those strange legs in the background. He uses a blue rag to polish the door, a perfect color match for the blue edges of the rhythmically repeating glass panels. The incongruity here is at the heart of the image, largely due to those dangling legs. They actually belong to a full- sized sculpture of a woman sitting on a partial wall inside the restaurant. Without the legs, this picture would just be a nice photo of a waiter at work. With them, our imagination sees a scene right out of a dream.

The lush green lawns and trees of this park are regularly bathed in sprays of water that periodically erupt from sprinklers set into the ground. I use a telephoto focal length to create this layered image – anchored by a dappled green foreground. A slight hill framed by two large trees blocks the lower half of a woman walking just behind it. She leads a small child, whose head can just barely be seen to the right of the left hand tree. The six trees behind them fill the background with green leaves that cover half the frame. But the keys to the image are the two sprinklers that bathe the scene in droplets of water, creating a misty atmosphere as they dampen the scene. The incongruously casual attitude of the woman suggests that she somehow manages to elude a soaking.

This unique park fountain offers welcome relief from the heat of an Arizona summer. I found this youngster dodging its jets -- she virtually dances between the spouts. I used a fast shutter speed (1/640th of a second) to stop her action as she balanced herself on one toe – her fingers extended as if she was daring them to soak her. I shot into the sun to abstract her. Instead of describing her appearance and joyful expression, I reduce her to a virtual silhouette, eliminating her identity, and turning her into a symbol of childhood exuberance.

Robert Indiana’s ubiquitous “Love” sculpture provides suitable context for this shot of a visitor taking a call while perched precisely at one end of a picnic table. I use my frame to abstract the sculpture – revealing only enough of it to identify the work. This picture is about contrast in scale. The towering trees that shade the park, and the huge letters of the sculpture, dwarf the distant figure at the picnic table. His legs rhythmically repeat the angles of the letter “V” in the sculpture – it was this geometry that initially drew my attention to what becomes an incongruous juxtaposition of man and sculpture.

During one of my two-hour walks through the park, I came upon a number of Native American artisans displaying their art and craft. I was drawn to the contrasting designs and colors on two pieces of pottery, and use the macro setting on my camera to bring my lens within inches of them, juxtaposing design and color as intimately as possible. I focus on the edge of the left pot – everything else in this image is softly suggested instead of sharply defined. I use my frame to eliminate the shapes of the pots, leaving only the colors and designs as contrasting elements. The result: a symbolic abstract of Southwestern Indian Art, and a thematic introduction to the two images to follow in this gallery.

There are many ways to express the beauty of dance with a camera. We can blur action (as I did in my image of Russian folk dancers at: http://www.pbase.com/image/20798795) or we can stop action as I do in this shot of a Native American dancer in mid-performance. What tell us that he is dancing is not his arms or feet, but the slight blur in the feathers that float above his head. This abstracted approach works as an expression of a dance performance because of the emphasis on costume, color, and facial expression. It seems as if he has danced himself into a trance -- his eyes are shut, mouth open, and his face is framed in the vivid primary colors of his costume. The rest is left to our imaginations.