Hope dissolved.

Degas had a good crack at it in 1876. As the most photographic of painters, he showed life without hope, the pair deep in their cups, drinking ill distilled absinthe en route to blindness and death. And then there’s that wide-angle vision of his, with the signed knife in the foreground.

Until this time just about every painter saw though a 50mm lens, with the possible exception of the incomparable Paolo Uccello (1397 – 1475, quite an innings) whose Battle of San Romano was very much seen through a 21mm. Fortunate Europeans can see this work in the National Gallery, the Uffizi or the Louvre, but without a shadow of a doubt the one in London is a standout, one of the true materpieces of Western art. High time someone in America bought it …. a rounding error for a tech IPO windfall. I so miss standing close to the canvas completely subsumed by the action. After all, it would be a challenge to sanity to return to rain and Ivan saturated London.

I had a go at the same theme recently, at the oldest drinking spot in South Beach, SF, The Saloon, a survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fire. The default beer here, Pabst Blue Ribbon, is arguably worse than badly distilled absinthe. I asked the barman for permission to take pictures yet this image was completely unposed. ‘L’Absinthe’ flashed through my mind as I pressed the button. Degas pioneered the technique of cutting people off at the edge of the frame, one devolved from his photography. I just copied that. This is from the full frame, no cropping.

Nikon D3x, 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G at f/2 (a loaner, before I finally got a 35/1.4 Sigma which actually focused properly. Decent lens, the Nikkor, focuses well, but no Siggy when it comes to resolution wide open). That said, the 18″ x 24″ print of this little drama on my wall is simply a showstopper, with especially lovely rendering of color. You will not go wrong with the 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G, though it costs an arm and a leg.