Social Commentary

We talked with each other for twelve years. To be honest, I did most of the talking, he did most of the listening. I knew he was actively engaged because he would cock his head slightly, just so, and look at me unblinkingly with his warm, beautiful brown eyes. We started at a conversational run, no baby talk. From the beginning it was all about politics, international relations, war, peace and the logistics of nutrition. The latter, I admit, was more to his liking, and I never managed to discover whether he was indeed a Keynesian, as I am. Now, in hindsight, I think he was secretly Friedmanesque, but wanted to keep the peace between us. A true democrat with both upper and lower case D/ds, he socialized with everyone, irrespective of race, creed, breed or nationality. Because of that he mastered many languages, and sometimes I would see him stand on and closely study Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle. A favorite literary pastime was listening raptly to my readings out loud of John McPhee’s essays in The New Yorker. This was no great surprise. He had earned his CD (Companion Dog) and CDX (Companion Dog Excellent) degrees cum laude, and won the Dog World Award for Canine Excellence. They didn’t know the half of it. We liked each other’s company a lot, and did many things together: walks in the woods, running on the beach, cuddling together for warmth on cold days, sometimes falling asleep on the living room rug. We’d stop by at Baskin-Robbins, I for blueberry cheesecake in a cone, he for vanilla in a cup. He refused the plastic spoon. He was quite fashion conscious. When I changed from my city shoes to hiking boots, he would demonstrate immense pleasure. If I also reached for the case that held my shotgun, he would ululate his ecstasy with as great a precision of pitch and brio as the soprano section of the Contra Costa Chorale. Though usually fearless, the onset of thunderstorms had him racing to my bed, scrambling under the covers, trembling until my embraces and caresses calmed him, and we both fell asleep. We even took turns in saving each other from serious threat. Using a silent hand signal, I once stopped him from running toward me across a park road just as a maintenance vehicle was approaching. He even dropped his favorite toy, a pine cone, and just lay there waiting for the “come” signal, an inward sweep of my extended right arm. On a very foggy, lonely night at the San Francisco Marina, I just barely saw a figure approaching us, perhaps someone with ill intent. On my almost inaudible whisper, “speak,” he growled and barked so viciously that the figure disappeared into the mist. Then he turned to me, anxious to receive the customary praise. I don’t remember what our last conversation was about, but I knew the end was near for him. Petting, holding, feeling that warm tongue, were the last gestures. This portrait of Goldlegend’s Midas Touch – Midas – remains on the eastern wall of my study decades after his death. I know that “man’s best friend” is a cliché, but every day I’m reminded of my once very best friend, so grateful for those twelve years. In my teens, I accompanied my parents on three ocean cruises. On the last, aboard the beautiful Lloyd-Triestino liner Africa, I shared my cabin with a taciturn Englishman who occupied many of his hours reading books about dogs. I found that deeply eccentric, until I acquired my own library on dog breeds and canine psychology. For a time I had a lively correspondence with Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, author of Man Meets Dog. My daughters Judy and Ruth became goldenretrieveraholics years ago, and still seem to be accommodating their addiction. Much more recently, my younger daughter presented me with a very fine granddog, Lily. Lily is exceptionally beautiful, though I think she may be quite fickle. When here, she and I adore each other, and kiss frequently. It finally dawned on me that, when not here, she may well be indulging in similar intimacies with others. She’s very intelligent, and I fancy that, late into the night, when her human siblings have gone to sleep, Lily is studying The Economist’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital. We’ll get to discuss it during her next visit. I shall always miss Midas, but Lily’s attentions are very consoling. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

On the Saturday before Rosh Hashanah in 1946, before my eighth birthday, I accompanied my parents to visit my only remaining grandparent, Blume-Devorah Westermann-Shevelev. The others had all died in Latvia and Lithuania before I was born. We lived in a flat on the lower slope of Table Mountain, with a view of the city and harbor. My paternal grandmother – bubbe – lived in the vibrant suburb of Sea Point, two or three blocks from the oceanfront, from which one can see Robben Island. It took two bus rides to get to her home, the first down the hill into the center of Cape Town, the second westward to the Sea Point Main Road, a busy commercial avenue. The bus stopped at the corner of St. John’s Road, and we’d alight to walk a block to a very modest four-flat building. We didn’t yet have our first car. Grandmother lived on the left, downstairs, in a tiny two-bedroom unit. She had to put coins in the meter to generate the gas for cooking. I liked standing on a chair to help her with that. The smaller of the two bedrooms was occupied by uncle David, my father’s youngest sibling. The two men hadn’t talked to each other for years and wouldn’t ever again. During our visits, uncle David would sequester himself in his room, and I’d knock to gain entry. I liked him, and in retrospect, given the unexpected direction of my own life, perhaps it was because he sketched so well. He was then the only member of the family with an interest in art and classical music. Years later, when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, I asked each of the brothers what their feud was about. Neither could quite remember, but that wasn’t the point. Anyway, on that Saturday, grandmother gave me her usual treat: a sixpence so I could walk back to the corner of Main Road, and buy a packet of potato chips in which a small twist of paper held the salt. When I returned, the adults (sans uncle David) were conversing in Yiddish. I joined in. It must have been late in the morning, close to noon, when we heard the postman arrive. Grandmother rose to retrieve the mail, and when she came back, her faced reflected foreboding. In her hand, among other items, was an envelope marked with the emblem of the Red Cross. She sat slowly, and clearly without willing, opened it. Inside was another envelope, addressed to her. She recognized the script. During the Second World War, the Red Cross made prodigious efforts to ensure deliveries of foodstuffs and mail to prisoners of war and, when possible, prisoners of the German concentration camps. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, those confined would be permitted to write a very brief censored letter to relatives on the “other side.” By the end of the war, a huge quantity of mail had been accumulated, and now, in the second year of the peace, it was being distributed. The letter was from her first child, my oldest uncle, Moses. It had been written several years earlier, before he was murdered in Majdanek. Moses Shevelev was born, I believe, in 1908. As a young man, he had left the family home in Libau (Lepaja), Latvia, and found his way to Paris, where he attended the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and practiced as an attorney until the German conquest of France. The French authorities, pre-empting their German overlords, rushed to detain and deport Jews. Uncle Moses was put onto a train. The destination was Majdanek, on the edge of the eastern Polish city of Lublin. Unlike other camps, Majdanek was not screened from public view. It was right there, the fence also demarcating the border of Polish farmers’ smallholdings, as it still does. Shots and screams from the camp must surely have penetrated the air, as did the stench from the crematorium. Grandmother, my parents and I sat in silence. She had certainly known – or guessed – that her son was dead. We sat there for a long time. The adults said nothing, and I knew enough not to ask. Just before the war broke out in September 1939, my father and his brother, my uncle Max, also settled in Cape Town, made a determined effort to extract Moses from France. With their considerable diligence, and certainly bribes to officials, the offer of a visa to Madagascar came through. The telegraphed response from uncle Moses lives with me still: “I don’t want to be stranded on a remote island.” Among the small items that have accompanied me to homes on the other side of the world is a photograph made in the early 1920s. It shows four of my grandmother’s five children. David was either an infant or not yet born. Those depicted are, in ascending order of age, Helena, who, as a very young woman emigrated to Palestine, Max with his left hand on a toy wooden horse, my father Jacob (Jack), and Moses. In 1994 that photograph accompanied me to another place: Majdanek. I found a niche in the wall across from the ovens, and photographed the photograph there. Karine and I were doing the research for what would later become my book, Liberating the Ghosts: Photographs and Text from the March of the Living. (LensWork:1996). The book is dedicated to two men: my uncle, and a French Huguenot called Daniel Trocmé. Both were murdered in Majdanek. On Easter Monday, 1994, we took a short bus ride to the camp, and found ourselves alone in that vast, cold, depressing place. Taking shelter in one of the huts, we lit two votive candles on the concrete floor. One was for uncle Moses. The other was in memory of Daniel Trocmé, from the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Karine had lived as a child. Daniel ran a children’s home in which he’d hidden Jewish … Read more

In January 1947 my father’s pride and joy arrived. His only child was then eight years old. The brand new 1946 Chevrolet Fleetmaster, grey with a blue top, had been transported to Cape Town by rail from South West Africa (formerly German West Africa, now Namibia) where my mother’s only surviving brother, uncle Abe, owned a dealership. The license plate read OT414, the letters being an abbreviation for Otjiwarongo, an inland town a thousand miles north. It became urgent to find a garage. There was none at our flat. So my Dad found one for rent about half a mile away, and the car sat there, in solitary splendor except when my parents and I walked over and opened the padlock on the garage doors. We gazed reverently at this glossy monster, touching the sleek surface (but only after wiping our hands), and sat inside with a magnificent sense of ownership, breathing that special smell, the scent of future prosperity. We told the neighbors, of course, especially those who had no car of their own, and invited them to viewings. Many of them were refugees from the recent European catastrophe, and they obliged by voicing their admiration in Yiddish superlatives. It was as though Tevye had bought a new cow. That lovely summer was so full of promise, though shaded by the memory of horrors that had left many members of my and other families murdered in “camps.” No longer were the streets of Cape Town populated by men in army and navy uniforms. No longer did my uncle Max, who served in the Home Guard, leave his helmet, gas mask, rifle and bayonet in my bedroom when he came visiting. No longer was there a minute of silence throughout the city when the noon gun, triggered by an electrical impulse from the national observatory, went off on Signal Hill. No longer did we have to draw blackout drapes each night. No longer was the port out of bounds to everyone except those with official and military permission. Even the armed sentries who guarded the entrance to Simonstown, home of the Royal Navy base, disappeared. No longer did recently arrived strangers with numbers on their arms come to dine at our table. We were all both joyous and struggling with the prospect of peace. The Chevy was a significant investment in the future, as was our new radio and phonograph combination. It was a Romeo, named after its manufacturer, Captain Romeo Buttolo, an Italian naval officer interned as an enemy alien early in the war. Captain Buttolo came to our home and installed it personally. In this kosher Jewish household, the first 78 rpm record had Beniamino Gigli singing Ave Maria on the obverse, and Agnus Dei on the reverse. I played it daily for months, turning Gigli’s solo into a tenor-soprano duet. Neither of my parents could drive. My mother never did, largely because my father wouldn’t trust her with the family chariot. My father only learned to drive about eight years later, and then became a nervous, uncertain driver. So my parents took advantage of their tentative step into the middle class, and of South Africa’s racial situation, to hire a Cape Colored driver. His name was Martin Pretorius. Martin was a gentle man as well as a really good driver. We enjoyed each other’s company and our burgeoning conspiratorial relationship – once I dissuaded him from calling me “Young Master” – an embarrassingly obsequious Victorian custom imposed upon servants. He would explain the workings of a car to me, and also tell me a little of his life and the constant struggle to survive. Aside from his chauffeur duties, my father insisted on having the car immaculately clean at all times, so sometimes, without my parents’ knowledge, I would help wash and wax our status symbol, and that gave me more time with him. One of Martin’s early tasks, in February 1947, was to drive the family to Kirstenbosch, the spectacular botanical gardens in the southern suburbs. There, after a long walk on gravel paths, my parents and I sat on the verandah of the restaurant, looking out on the gardens, and consuming our tea, with warm scones under clotted cream and strawberry jam. On the way home, a strange sight awaited us along Rhodes Drive. Crowds were gathering beside the road, and further along there were lines of policemen in white gloves. Cars ahead of us were waved through, as we eventually were, but those behind us were held back. As we passed by, with our new, polished chauffeur-driven Chevrolet, people cheered and waved Union Jack flags. Apparently, a mile or so behind us, heading in the same direction, was a convoy carrying the visiting Royal Family, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. When I realized what was going on, I became quite princely, waving to the crowds with that peculiar gesture of the King’s, rotating my right hand counterclockwise from the wrist. Seated in the rear, my parents were not amused. Martin giggled. During the summer vacation at the end of 1951, as I was getting ready to transition from elementary to high school, from short pants to long pants, we would, especially on weekends, be driven to the Indian Ocean beach resort of Muizenberg, so heavily populated by members of the Jewish community that it was occasionally called “Jewsenberg,” though not always with benevolence. It was a beautiful small town from an earlier age, its gorgeous beaches welcoming the rhythms of the warm breakers. On one such Sunday, along the road to the beach, traffic was slowed by a donkey-drawn cart filled with fruit and vegetables, driven by a black man on his way to market. With oncoming traffic, it became a challenge to pass the cart, and finally we got the chance. Martin had just moments to execute the maneuver, and, as he did so, the front left fender scraped the wooden cart. The pride and joy … Read more

In 1964, the United States Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, had two Fourth of July parties. One was for people of all ethnicities. The other was a reception for government officials, “sanitized” for whites only. Invited to attend, I declined, repelled by this American tolerance of apartheid. A few days later, I visited the Embassy to talk with Public Affairs Officer Dr. Argus J. Tresidder about my upcoming departure to the United States as a Fulbright grantee. When I told him of my annoyance with how the Embassy had behaved on the Fourth, he suggested I express my views to Ambassador Joseph Satterthwaite. From the smile on his face, I could see that he fully expected me to accept the challenge. He was right. Growing up in South Africa, and having worked for the heroine of the parliamentary opposition, Helen Suzman, MP, had been excellent training for speaking truth to power. I followed Argus to the Ambassador’s office and made my opinion of His Excellency’s shameful conduct quite clear, in notably undiplomatic language. Argus, still smiling, escorted me back to his office before the Ambassador could recover. In early December of that year, I returned to my birth city, Cape Town, to say goodbye to my parents before leaving for my new American life. In the evenings we walked together on the Sea Point beachfront, looking out across the water to a clearly visible Robben Island, where, six months earlier, a “terrorist” by the name of Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned. It had been an interesting year. Two days before the Fourth of July, President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Returning to Pretoria, I walked across town to the great terrace of the Union Buildings to pause there and say farewell to my country. I could never have imagined that, thirty years later, a liberated Nelson Mandela would be inaugurated as his country’s President on that very spot, and that in 2012 South Africa’s currency would feature his portrait. On the tenth anniversary of my departure from South Africa I became an American citizen. In the course of those years I read widely in American history, while also witnessing the experience of the Civil Rights Movement. This year I shall be celebrating my forty-eighth in-country Fourth of July. While many of my compatriots will be watching fireworks displays and people dressed in eighteenth-century costume re-enacting scenes of the time, the day will mean something else to me. I was born and raised within the British Commonwealth, and have family and close friends in England. My visits to Britain have been delightful, and I do not hold any grudges against King George III or his descendants. For me, our Independence is not so much about the past, but about the continuing dynamic of our country. It’s about becoming independent of all forms of prejudice, discrimination and anti-science foolishness. It’s not only about following the trajectory of our Founding Fathers and their astonishing brilliance, but about holding dear the lessons of a continuing momentum for extending civil rights. It’s about recognizing that this country, and indeed no country, can afford to continue “traditional” attitudes to minorities, women and gays. It’s to value not only Jefferson and Franklin, but also Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and the pioneers of gay and women’s rights. It’s to celebrate that previously excluded groups now include high government, business and academic figures. It’s to rejoice in the courage of Lily Ledbetter’s struggle for equal pay; Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case; and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. The arc of our Independence continues to move forward, perhaps more slowly than some would like, but nevertheless it moves. Just days ago, our black President addressed Africa’s future in a speech at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town. A thousand miles to the north, one of his heroes and mine, Nelson Mandela, lies in a hospital while the world waits. I believe the United States Embassy in Pretoria has had only a single Fourth of July party per year for decades now. The arc moves. Before the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers, my American-born francophone wife encountered a French tourist couple on the observation deck. They told her that they admired America’s dynamism, but observed condescendingly “La civilisation ça viendra” – civilization will (eventually) come. They were wrong. Civilization has been evolving here all along, but it is unlike Europe’s more constrained and settled curriculum. In every field of human endeavor, American civilization is a magnificent work in progress. Commemorating the history of our Independence is only the preface to building our future. I have great nostalgia for that future. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

Many, many years ago, in deep midsummer, I journeyed to consult with the wisest of all people, the Oracle of Delphi. The arduous horseback ride north of Athens was quite uncomfortable, especially the last twenty kilometers into the mountains. Arriving at the top of the hill, where the temple is located, I sank to the ground and rested on the cool, shaded marble, drinking copiously from an unglazed amphora of cold water provided by an acolyte. I sat there, quietly and reflectively, for perhaps an hour, before being summoned into the presence of the Oracle. We looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time, and then she asked why I had come. “Well,” I said, “though I’m still a young man, I’ve been wondering what kind of eggonòs I shall have.” That’s Greek for grandson, and of course we were speaking in Greek, but I’ll translate this dialogue into English for your benefit. To my great surprise, she answered my question with another question, strongly suggesting that she too may have been Jewish. “Well, what kind of eggonòs would you like?” I answered “A fine boy, with a very good mind and fluent tongue, and an imagination so grand as to encompass the universe. You see, Ms. Oracle (we were not yet on first name terms), our friend Albert Einstein once wrote that imagination is more important than knowledge. And it wouldn’t hurt if he were also affectionate and handsome.” “You want a lot, don’t you? That’ll cost you an extra hundred drachmas.” So I placed the golden coin on the marble altar, bowed and took my leave. I returned to Athens by nightfall the following day, and had a fine dinner of avgolemono, spanakopita, roast lamb and a full bottle of retsina, which ensured a deep sleep, and, by morning, a considerable headache. I soon forgot about this episode. Decades went by, until, in the autumn of 1999, my son-in-law handed me a small bundle, a baby wrapped in a blanket, and said these poignant words: “Would you like to hold your grandson?” It was, and I knew it then, a moment that would forever change my life. And I want to tell you about that. What does this lad mean to me? I am the South African-born refugee immigrant son of Jewish refugee immigrants from a darkening Europe. Unlike his father’s family, which has longer roots in the United States, my grandson is, on my side of the family, the very first American born to American-born parents, Jon and Ruth. He and his siblings are my own heritage as well as their own future. If they take great care to protect their rights and responsibilities by exercising them well, they will never need to know the pain of leaving their family, their homes, their friends, their country, and having to start all over again. That makes my own early long and difficult effort to secure a future in the United States so much more worthwhile, so much dearer to me. We’re home. An illness prevented me from saying these words at my grandson David’s recent Barmitzvah. This column gives me the opportunity to correct that by writing that I love him and his sisters greatly, and that his beautiful Lithuanian great-grandmother would have been astonished by her great-grandchildren. As part of my education, I was happily exposed to the ancient mythologies of Rome, Greece and both testaments of the Bible. My grandson seems captivated mostly by futuristic mythologies. But he should know that the Oracle of Delphi turned out to be completely right, and surely deserves another hundred drachmas. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, my father would occasionally bring home from the synagogue on Friday nights a person or couple who had survived the Holocaust. In the warm South African summer of 1945-6, I saw a number on a dinner guest’s arm. When I asked him about it, he looked at my mother and she gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, so a child’s question went unanswered. My parents were then, and remained thereafter, quite remarkably silent about the catastrophe. Curiosity was partially satisfied when I began to sing in the choir of the Vredehoek Synagogue, and on the single time I can recall him rolling up his shirtsleeves, I saw a similar number on the arm of the Cantor, Jakob Lichterman, a Polish refugee whose fine lyric tenor voice and sweet temperament remain pleasant memories. I didn’t find out much more until my freshman year at the University of Cape Town, a time of wonderful intellectual opportunity both inside and outside the classrooms. It left me, then as a student, and later as a professor in the United States, with the clear understanding that lecture halls are just a fraction of where learning occurs. I spent much of that year in the basement of UCT’s Jagger Library, reading the newspaper stories of the events from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement in the year of my birth, 1938, to the surrender of German armed forces to Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneberg Heath in May, 1945. Some of my formal academic work was neglected, in favor of an education about the numbers on victims’ arms. Almost a decade after graduation, I introduced a course on race as a factor in international relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’d had good preparation: the son of fugitive European Jews, raised in apartheid South Africa. In 1946, a young American couple from Chicago, Howard and Elsie Schomer, accepted an invitation from Pastor Andre Trocme to help with postwar reconstruction in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village on the plateau west of Lyon. They took their infant daughter Karine along with them, and stayed there for ten years. The story of Le Chambon is now well known. During the years of the Second World War this largely Huguenot village offered refuge, and therefore life, to about five thousand Jews escaping from the predations of the Nazis. In what Philip Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, called “a conspiracy of goodness,” the heroic rescue was presided over by Pastor Trocme and his wife Magda, and the center of it all revolved around the Protestant church, the temple. It is a sacred place for Jews, too, and indeed for all humanity. The story has also been told in the film Weapons Of The Spirit, made by family friend Pierre Sauvage, once one of the rescued children, and by a more recent book, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews In France During The Holocaust, by my friend, Patrick Gerard Henry, Emeritus Professor of French at Whitman College, Oregon. Howard Schomer worked as one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. South Africa and the Soviet Union abstained. In later years he would serve as President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and in 1965 walked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on the bridge at Selma, Alabama. I first encountered my future father-in-law when I saw the documentary footage of the march. I have spent the last twenty-five years largely in the pursuit of photography and writing, and have made thousands of images in the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as many “conceptual-art” pieces constructed for the purpose in my studio. So I’ve decided to nominate one of my own images as my personal icon. Famous artists usually have art historians nominate theirs. For Pablo Picasso, it is probably Guernica, for Marc Chagall, perhaps The Violinist, for Ansel Adams, Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. My latest reading includes Anne-Marie O’Connor’s brilliant volume Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Thus, for Klimt, that is surely his icon. Mine was unexpectedly made in a little village in France. In 2001 I accompanied Dr. Karine Schomer, now my wife, to “her” village. The temple has none of the grandeur associated with the great cathedrals and churches of France. It is, in fact, a simple stone box, but in that box there was, at a time of great need and terrible danger, a spirit of humane commitment far beyond even the words engraved above the doorway, the great injunction from the Newer Testament,“Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres,” Love One Another. I made the accompanying picture of Karine there. The iconography is simple: a relaxed, confident, strong woman, raised in an atmosphere of deep commitment to human rights, before the unyielding square stone geometry of that particular Huguenot church with its heroic congregation. On her right, at face level, I added a worn, painted graffito of the bleu-blanc-rouge, the French flag. It is as worn and scuffed as was the honor of France during the war years. Le Chambon was the village that accomplished so much to rescue that honor. I therefore use two names to identify the picture, and they are both entirely apt: “Aimez-Vous” and “L’honneur de la France.” The picture contains so much that is dearest to me. This is the picture that brings me home to my own values. It is my icon. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.