In the camera's blink, her bare feet levitate above a brick walkway. Her soaked dress flaps behind her ankles. Beads of rain diffuse the light from a streetlamp nearby. Along with another streetlamp in the distance, a row of masculine oak trees too tall for the frame provide more than just depth. They also suggest a tunnel with a hazy blank future at the end.

On black-and-white film, marked by an existential umbrella that might as well have come from a Magritte painting, the image delivers so much romance, mystery, solitude and timelessness that you might think it has French DNA from "The Beautiful Era" before World War I.

Pardonne-moi. This is inner Houston 35 or so years ago, as the city was about to slide from another economic boom to another economic bust, headlong into a misty shroud of uncertainty.

The photo has never been iconic. But judging from the reaction it got when I posted it on my Facebook page on a recent Throwback Thursday, maybe it should be, can be.

Timothy Bullard was a Houston Chronicle photographer when he took the photo near Rice University on North Boulevard, arguably the city's most beautiful street to this day. Tim was driving a Chronicle-issue vehicle, trolling for odd images that could run in the newspaper as stand-alone story-telling items. He shot only one frame of the woman.

A fan of black-and-white photography since my college years, I came aboard as a Chronicle reporter in 1980 and stayed until 2009. Tim moved to Oregon in 1986 and is a newspaper photo editor there still. But before he left town, this photo was republished in the Chronicle, and I fell in love with it. I got a print of it, had it framed and hung it on the wall of the same house I live in now.

Serendipitously, I used my iPhone to take a photo of the photo and shared it on Facebook. To my surprise, it earned more likes and comments than almost all the photos I have posted there before, including those of family rites of passage, which usually attract the most.

"I would pay a good amount of money for a print of this. It's amazing," a Facebook friend wrote.

Another compared it to a well-known work by the Pointillist painter George Seurat (France, 1859-1891).

"A treasure," a third wrote.

But it's not mine to market or sell. Legally it belongs to the Chronicle. It certainly belongs to Tim's lifelong body of work.

Besides, I'm already enriched. Every day I get to pass by an artistic lesson in — dare I cite a concept in vogue — mindfulness. Many times a day we are surrounded by tragedy, joy, sorrow, beauty and the natural improvisations of a random world. There is a thin line between the mundane and a revelation. All we must do is have the presence of mind to see the unusual elements that every day brings. Photography is a magic bus: It transports us instantly into that state of mindfulness by freezing those moments into lasting eye candy. And for every famous black-and-white photo — Jackie Robinson stealing home on the baseball diamond, an unclothed Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm — there are hundreds of thousands of evocative frames we have either forgotten or never had the chance to celebrate.

Celebrated or not, great photos do not happen accidentally. First, a trained and discerning eye is needed to see poetry — or journalism — in the objects and movements that others might ignore. Second, there's technique. Tim's photo pretty much observes "the rule of thirds" in photography composition. Rather than follow the amateur's instinct to use the middle of the frame to show a woman running in the middle of an esplanade, he "placed" the stranger to the left, leaving the middle to show the haunting strength and majesty of unbending trees. To the right are the ornamental lamps that mark the location as special.

Facebook and Google led me to Tim quickly. Did he remember taking this photo? Did it seem special to its creator at the time? Yes, and mostly, he explained in a phone conversation.

"We" — he and his editor — "called it 'Lady Running In The Rain'," he said.

The photo appeared in the pages of the newspaper partly as an illustration of the day's weather. It was reprinted in a commem0rative collection of the Chronicle photo staff's better work of the year in the newspaper's weekly Sunday magazine. This was when many papers besides The New York Times published Sunday magazines, and when the only way for the Chronicle to spread words and pictures was with ink and paper.

To a degree, Tim has crisp recollections of the scene and circumstance he had frozen in time.

After taking the picture, he drove ahead to explain his interest to the woman and get information for a caption. She was dashing shoeless through a shower because she was late to class at Rice.

But where were her shoes? A backpack, a pen and notebook, a purse? From where was she scampering? What was her name? If Tim ever learned those things that day, he does not know them now. Perhaps a certain woman age 55 or so can explain. Perhaps more than one such woman will now claim to be her. We know that memories are more malleable than photographs.

Months later, Tim saw a printed announcement of the opening of a Houston art-gallery show. To his surprise, it featured a painter's version of his photograph. Someone besides me had spied the photo as something special.

Tim says he had planned to attend the opening and ask the painter some questions, pointed and otherwise. But when the day came, he was out of town on a news assignment. He said he never pursued the matter before leaving Texas.

Alan Bernstein (@AlanBernstein) is a Harris County employee.



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