I’ve already written and published on this blog, on October 19, 2014, a post about the portfolio that includes this image — shortly after I self-published a book of the photos in that series: https://lruss.com/2014/10/19/the-arcane-Machine-new-book-of-photographs-by-l-russ/ What is kinda funny to me is that after naming that book with what was then the name of the series, “The Arcane Machine,” I felt forced to change the portfolio’s name, because I could tell from people’s responses that many of them mistakenly thought that “arcane” meant something like “archaic.”

I couldn’t help but feel that when a reviewer from a certain international online Photography magazine commented that I shouldn’t be writing the way that I was about the portfolio, but should just be happy to have made an old rusty machine look beautiful, he was being unduly (and maddeningly) influenced by his misunderstanding of the word “arcane.” ”Archaic” means “very old or old-fashioned,” but “arcane” means — and I meant — something quite different: ”mysterious, requiring secret knowledge to understand, secret, magical.” Which will tell you why I changed the name of the portfolio and images to “The Machine of Secrets,” and called each individual image a “Verse.” As I’ve said in an artist statement about the collection: It’s not about mechanics, but rather poetry.

I am happy to say, though, that any misunderstanding of my naming or intent hasn’t seemed to impede the positive responses to the photographs: Groups of works from the series (that included this one, Verse 14) have received an Honorable Mention from the International Photography Awards, a Prize Nomination from the international Fine Art Photography Awards, and individual “Verses” have been chosen for exhibition or publication by the Great Britain Museum of American Art, Darkroom Gallery, Praxis Gallery, the A Smith Gallery, Shadow & Light Magazine, and Black Box Gallery.

I hope that the nature and quality of my work, including the images in The Machine of Secrets, entitle me to consider myself a poet still. My joyful knowledge of that art and fervent work to make poems informed my photography from its start, and, as I’ve written many times, I join Ernst Haas in saying that what is most important to me in this other, newer, visual art is “the poetic element.”