"Vertical Facades"

Quickly becoming my favorite place to photograph: The Mission Inn -- a Southern California enigma -- a place so replete with religious, cultural, political and even architectural contradictions, one can get disoriented conceptualizing the paradoxical possibilities of the historic locale, of which I've hinted at in previous "Dick's Pics" postings in attempts to exploit the incongruities, but should probably elaborate on more straightforwardly in future postings as the history of this hotel and all it has symbolically represented over the years is maddening ... I believe it was Susan Sontag who in an essay asked if photographs could be opinions, and that idea of hers certainly resonates with my motivation and ambitions in taking pictures.  The trick is, of course, being able to take a pic that is so powerful it speaks for itself and then you don't have to write a long-winded paragraph like I'm doing right now trying to explain (and inadequately) what it is you're vainly attempting to do with it!


  Question unrelated to the pic (though I'd love to take the pic that could clearly answer the question I'm about to ask, and answer it in the negative, which is the positively truthful answer as I see it): Would a pregnant Mary and her husband, Joseph, riding into Riverside, CA, on a donkey, not all that impossibly unreal a scene considering the gaudy, Cinderella-like horse-drawn carriages that regularly orbit the Mission Inn's spectacularly lighted facades and perimeters every Christmas season, been welcomed as guests at the upscale hotel, originally constructed and so named in recognition of the mission of that child about to be born to them?