Planet Waves
Scenes from everyday life:
the Planet Waves covers

Planet Waves :: World News, Photos, Astrology, Horoscopes, Daily Blog

Scenes from everyday life: the Planet Waves covers
Sidewalk café, New York City. Photo by Eric Francis.
DAILY PHOTOS on Planet Waves depict quotidian existence, whether it occurs on a city street or cornfield. Spirit's instructions for the page are to depict peaceful human reality, as if illustrating the scenes of our lives for a future record, or a fun mirror of now. Geographic diversity is a theme, which is a metatheme of what we all have in common. What exactly don't you recognize? Very little, despite covers coming from probably a dozen countries. We are one familiar family.

Eric is involved in a studio project called Book of Blue, and these photos are used occasionally. Those are all those pictures of women looking in mirrors. In case the psychological value is lost on anyone, the theme here is self-awareness. That's another way of saying it's about healing this debilitating "self-consciousness" that we often experience, and learning to look freely at ourselves. The project looks almost exclusively through the eyes of women. The male ego is decidedly less self-critical than the female one, and the pictures are dedicated both to easing that self-inflicted judgment and Eric's fascination with women. (For those who write in asking where the older women are, you are cordially invited to be photographed!)

As for Planet Waves covers being a kind of cosmic future record, wouldn't that be fun? It's a cool scenario, to imagine and play with the idea that we're beaming a visual record of our world to those who are alive 600 years in the future, maybe even ourselves. What is it really like to be about now, in the best sense? How beautiful is it right where you are? How do you feel about being incarnated at this time?

That's the idea behind "Scenes from Everyday Life."

We also use pictures fairly regularly from Post Secret and the Memory Hole.

Postscript, the fun with photography is that it gives you a constant excuse to look for and actually find beauty anywhere. What photography also teaches us is that beauty can be multiplied freely.

Thanks for checking out our covers. We'll see you there.

All of our cover galleries going back to 2005 (since the advent of the daily photo) are kept here. Many additional photographs by Danielle Voirin are on her website and her Flickr page.

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