Words | Pictures

Writing paired with photography. Often beginning with a walk, sometimes ending somewhere else entirely.

BRUCE HARRIS 5/13/25 BRUCE HARRIS 5/13/25

Dialogue

The father who can’t believe he is a father

who is never this old in any real imagined future

whose body is never failing

whose mind is never fogged

who conceives of this circumstance of age

but doesn’t know how to feel it until he does

BRUCE HARRIS 2/27/25 BRUCE HARRIS 2/27/25

Bridge Over the Ravine

Not far from the house I live in is the house where I spent much of my childhood. Down the street, a road dead-ends at an old bridge, still open for pedestrians and cyclists. It crosses an ancient ravine—wide for suburban Chicago—with a narrow ribbon of creek winding through woods at its bottom until it meets the open waters of Lake Michigan.

BRUCE HARRIS 1/22/25 BRUCE HARRIS 1/22/25

Wintering

…Dry leaves rattle. Something scurries in the browned reeds. The camera raises, but that 'something' is no more. Late again. Not that it matters. If I've mastered any art in digital photography, it's the art of being late. A second is all it takes and I'm left with what I usually see, which isn't what I could have sworn I saw…

BRUCE HARRIS 1/14/25 BRUCE HARRIS 1/14/25

Amateur

What seems simple rarely is

Take for example the pond in the preserve

It’s a layer of algae

a mirror of sorts reflecting nothing

Thick and reptilian

surrounded by ancient autumn grass

I stand on a plank of walkway

cutting its soft corner..

BRUCE HARRIS 12/23/24 BRUCE HARRIS 12/23/24

Coming To Shore

It was almost two years ago at a Christmas Eve party in 2022. I'm not the antisocial type, but I found myself looking for a breather from friendly chatter with the people I had just met, nice and welcoming as they were. My thumb was flicking through world events in that desensitized scan so many of us experience. 'Honey, I'll be back; I'm going for an evening scroll...'

That's when some article mentioning ChatGPT and the concept of a large language model caused my eyes to widen. The little man that lives behind my retinas, his day job working the refrigerator when its door shuts, scurried to grab his padded mallet, and hit the rusted tin thing that happens to be my gong-like brain. 'Hey dummy! Yeah, you, pay attention to this!”