Photographs I especially admire

I looked through my Flickr Favorites, hunting for a not-too-large set of Broot's photos to designate as my Most Favorites, and came up with these 14. I'm not sure that it's possible to isolate some aspect of these that I could call a "style", but one thing most of them have in common is the fact that I was there and simply didn't even see what she captured so beautifully. Numbers 8 and 9 ("Urban Melt" and "Club 47") are the oldest, from about 1964, and illustrate the power of seeing and capturing that she had developed 50-some years ago. The first in the set ("Leaves in the wind") is the most recent, from just a few days ago when we visited a pond with cattails. My photos from that trip are OK, but they're basically pictures of cattails, nothing memorable. I simply wasn't looking at their reflections in the water. And so it goes with the others: there's a balance, an integrity in the composition, and an elegance of processing. Most of them have the quality of "I've never seen anything like that", which amounts to a unique vision that I'm extraordinarily fortunate to share a life with. And they just keep coming...

(I took several at this same location, in the cemetery at Montparnasse, but it didn't occur to me to compose with reflections of the trees, or to frame so evocatively)