MR. LINCOLN’S VIEW

JULY 3, 2026

                                                               MR. LINCOLN'S VIEW 1984

This week I’d like to take a quick look at another image included in my new book, “Urban Fragments”, which collects images captured in many cities around the world over the past fifty years.

As near as I can tell, this image was captured in 1984 when another unqualified and impeachable President occupied the White House. Fran had recently taken classes from the White House Pastry Chef, who in a very obscure sidebar to Iran-Contra, had supposedly baked surreptitious items into several cakes. I’m not making this up - ask the Google.

So recent events have made this image as timely as well as timeless. The reflecting pool was just a place to walk around the Mall during yet another too-hot summer. It took forty-two years before it became yet another casualty of our nation’s divisions. The present-day controversy includes all of the usual comedic/tragic elements - an unbelievable cast of characters, blowhard calls to action, complete incompetence, and an underlying whiff of corruption smellier than the pool itself. In my house we refer to a new law of thermodynamics - “Everything Trump Touches Turns to Shit”, which seems to summarize the entire reflecting pool debacle.

This image thus comes from what we call a “simpler time” which of course was as complicated  as all get out. What I tried to capture here was a long-range view that shows the relationship between the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building as seen from the Lincoln Memorial. The Reflecting Pool does it’s job in multiplying the Monument’s image for the photographer.

Black and White can be nostalgic, but it also can simplify the natural world to show what really is important - the relationship between different symbols of our nation’s past rather than the temporary colors of a too-still body of water. In this view Washington’s beauty is unsullied by politics, heat and humidity, and idiotic debates about color - it’s the reflection, in glorious black and white, that really matters.