Posted in Uncategorized, tagged photo, photography, postaday on November 26, 2013| 2 Comments »
Thanksgiving wreath on the Christian Science church. Berries at the Old Cow Pasture.
One-man band playing “Nowhere Man” yesterday at Porter Square subway stop in Cambridge. Park Street station vendor.
Carrie Nation, the Museum of African American History, and Fill-a-Buster on Beacon Hill.
And last but not least, the building that once housed the publishers Ticknor and Fields, the American publishers for Charles Dickens. It may say Chipotle, but I know better.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged boston, claremont elks, concord, massachusetts, new england, new hampshire, northern avenue bridge, photography, photos, postaday, rhode island, Vermont on November 11, 2013| 2 Comments »
The word is we are to expect a dusting of snow tomorrow. So before I start taking winter photographs, I think I will round up a few from balmier days.
What are these pictures of? you ask.
In Concord: mysterious blue flowers (I need to ask MisterSmartyPlants.com about them), a French style house, and a flower box at the second-floor shop called Nesting.
In Boston: An autumnal plant display on Congress Street and another on the Northern Avenue bridge overlooking Boston Harbor.
In Vermont: an all-you-can-eat breakfast inn.
In Claremont, New Hampshire: The Elks’ elk.
In Rhode Island: The Assistant Bicycle Inspector.
Now if I only had recent photos of Maine and Connecticut, I would have New England covered. Maybe next summer.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged canada, jay peak, Lake Memphremagog, newport, photo, photography, postaday, Troy general store, Vermont on September 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Here are a few pictures from my trip. I don’t think they do justice to the breathtaking Vermont scenery, but you get the idea. Memphremagog, a large lake on the border of Canada, is beautiful. We got a ride on the riverboat pictured here and sat up in the wheelhouse with the captain.
The chalet-like building is at Jay Peak resort.
If you should ever happen to pass the Troy General Store, I can tell you that the coffee is 49 cents. Very good, too.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, fencephotovillenyc.org, greenway, ilona szwarc, photography, postaday, public art, the fence on August 3, 2013| 2 Comments »
Along the Greenway, there is a changing array of public art. This photographic display was borrowed from New York City. The themes are Home, Streets, Creatures, Play, and People. The artists are all topnotch, but the location — set way back from the sidewalk and alongside a superhighway — makes me think that not many people are going to take a good look at it.
Ilona Szwarc entered this one in People/Rodeo Girls.
The artist says, “Rodeo Girls is an ongoing portrait project about young girls from Texas who compete in rodeos. These individuals have a fundamentally different idea about their femininity and a contrasting attitude towards gender roles. … They grow up according to a male archetype and I am examining how their lives and identities are shaped by their surroundings. The photographs celebrate the beauty of the terrain and the idiosyncrasies of this old fashioned American tradition, which is recently vanishing.”
The Fence is “a summer-long, outdoor photographic exhibition that explores the essence of community across cultural boundaries and geographical lines. The Fence is a site-specific exhibition stretching over 1000ft in length, culled from a call for submissions; we asked our community of photographers across the globe to respond to the question – ‘what makes up a community?’ ” More at the project’s website, here.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged artist, clouds, haverhill, photography, photos, postaday, rainbow, sharon silverman arts, sky on July 23, 2013| 6 Comments »
Wish I could have captured the transformation of the sky over Boston about 4:30 this afternoon. It was like a sci-fi flic of a force from outer space taking over the world in one fell swoop. One minute the sky outside my window was all blue sunshine and puffy white clouds — the next, an ominous dark front was racing out of the northeast and eating everything in its path.
I would have liked a picture to contribute to Sharon Silverman’s art installation. She is building one in December and needs sky photos in a 4″x6″ print form (only sky, no buildings or trees or anything else in the picture): Sharon Silverman, P.O. Box 1212, Haverhill, MA 01831, silvermanarts@comcast.net.
Sharon says, “Remember to put your name and address on a separate piece of paper so that you can be added to the list of artists who are contributing their work to this project.” It sounded like a rare chance to be an “artist.”
I have quite a few sky pictures, but could round up only two for Sharon that didn’t have anything else in them. (Maybe only one, since a bird showed up in a print.)
Here are a few recent sky photos — two that are just sky.
And check my previous post on ForSpaciousSkies.com.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ethan gilsdorf, fiddle oak, little folk, photography, postaday, snugg project, zev hoover on July 18, 2013| 5 Comments »
The Internet is proof of the idea that “one and one and 50 make a million.” A handful of people can see something cool, and before you know it, that something has gone viral.
The Boston Globe had a story last month about a 14-year-old boy who likes to photograph imaginative miniature scenarios, just for fun. Now he has fans from all over.
Ethan Gilsdorf writes about “Zev Hoover’s fanciful photographic take on reality. His arresting images evoke a wonderland of imaginary environments, built from f-stops and pixels, and hinting at characters with secret stories to tell.
“Hoover’s work, which he posts on the photo sharing site Flickr using the handle ‘Fiddle Oak’ (a play on ‘Little Folk’), has caught fire across the Internet. He has been profiled in the media and on design and photography blogs. …
“One post touting his ‘surreal photo manipulations’ has received 108,000 Facebook likes. …
“His series of ‘Little Folk/Fiddle Oak’ images began during a walk in the woods with sister, Aliza. He remembers thinking, ‘Oh, wouldn’t little people be cool?’ Crouching near the ground, he imagined seeing the world from their perspective. He felt the miniature genre had never been done in photography — ‘at least not very well.’
“ ‘There’s a fine line to walk between having it be too abstract and having it be too cheesy-obvious,’ he said. …
” ‘Fiddle Oak’ is not his first photography endeavor. When he was 10, Hoover embarked on ‘The Snugg Project,’ taking a photo of his teddy bear in unique, whimsical settings for 365 consecutive days. ‘It became a little like work,’ his father said, ‘but made him be creative every single day.’ Some of the pictures were displayed at J.P. Licks ice cream shops.”
More.
Photo: Zev Hoover
One of the “Fiddle Oak” pictures.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged imaginary animals, photography, postaday on July 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »
For a while there, my 3-year-old grandson was really into elephants. That was the result of a bedtime story John invented about a lost elephant in the cemetery at the end of his street.
Even though he is more into lions at the moment, I have been taking random elephant-related pictures for him, like the one on the Chinatown mural I posted a couple weeks back.
I hope he gets to see the elephant in front of the school in Rhode Island. It’s made from wood that Hurricane Sandy threw on the shore. I took a picture.
On the same morning I took a picture of an elephant spirit trapped in a tree. He had probably been unhappy foraging on a small island but seems to be doing well in his current metamorphosis. He is quite serene, watching cars and walkers pass by on Payne Road, keeping his eye on things. Asakiyume may be able to provide more details of his backstory. She has a better imagination for menageries in the wild.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Boston Harbor, dog and chickadee, gillette, louise peterson, photo, photography, postaday, sculptor, turtle picture on June 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Fearless little bird on the back of a dog.
Grandson checking out playground, turtle deciding not to cross the road after all, Suzanne’s Mom taking pictures in Concord and around Boston Harbor.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alabama, baffler, Christine Haughney, fortune magazine, irvin fields, James Agee, john summers, literature, melville house, photography, poor, postaday, poverty, sharecroppers, the Depression, Walker Evans on June 7, 2013| 4 Comments »
You have heard of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Depression era book on poverty in the South by James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. The forerunner was an article assigned by Fortune magazine to a young Agee but never published. This past Tuesday it was published as a book.
There are a couple aspacts to Christine Haughney’s NY Times story on the new book that intrigue me. One is the image of a young Agee moved by the plight of the sharecroppers and indignant at the magazine’s apparent exploitation of them.
The other is how the original subjects, and later, their children, were embarrassed and didn’t want names used, but the grandchildren are able to see the beauty in their forebears.
Writes Haughney, “In 1936 Fortune magazine’s editors assigned a relatively unknown and disgruntled staff writer named James Agee to travel to Alabama for the summer and chronicle the lives of sharecroppers. When Agee returned, he was inspired by the subjects he had met and lived with, but frustrated by the limitations of the magazine format. His subjects, he argued, warranted far more than an article.
“What readers have known for decades is that Agee used his reporting material to create his 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a literary description of abject poverty in the South, accompanied by starkly haunting Walker Evans photographs.
“The original magazine article was never published, as Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families. In the early pages of Famous Men, he wrote that it was obscene for a commercial enterprise to ‘pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.’ What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
“Melville House [is publishing] Agee’s original, unprinted 30,000-word article in book form, under the title Cotton Tenants: Three Families. The publication gives Agee fans a glimpse of an early draft of what became a seminal work of American literature.
” ‘With the book, we have a much better map of him writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ said John Summers, who edited Cotton Tenants and printed an excerpt from the article in a literary journal he edits, The Baffler. …
“Irvin Fields, whose grandfather Bud Fields was featured in the book, said he didn’t mind that the names were now being published.
“ ‘It makes me appreciate my relatives for bearing up under those circumstances and making me appreciate what I’ve got today.’ ” More.
A photo by Walker Evans, from “Cotton Tenants: Three Families,” via Library of Congress
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 3G, culture, David Guttenfelder, Kim Jung Il, Nina Porzucki, north korea, photo, photographer, photography, postaday, soundcloud on June 5, 2013| 4 Comments »
After seeing a beautifully composed NY Times photo of people walking by bluish and rose-colored buildings in a nearly empty North Korea street, I began following the photographer on twitter, @dguttenfelder.
David Guttenfelder is one of the few Western photographers in North Korea. He was there when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright met with the previous ruler, Kim Jung Il. He takes pictures for media outlets and for his own amusement. His Instagram pictures of “artifacts” like a frilly computer screen cover and visitor handbooks can be hilarious or creepy.
Nina Porzucki had a lovely piece about Guttenfelder at Public Radio International’s “The World,” here. If you go to the PRI site, you have your choice of reading the transcript or listening to the report via SoundCloud.
The photographer tells Porzucki, “Over the years, every time I’ve gone back I’ve had more access, I’ve seen more. I’ve actually met people, I’ve seen real things.
“And I had this transformation. I kind of feel like that’s what I’m trying to do with my photography, is to take people who see my pictures through the same process. When they opened up the 3G local network and suddenly I could post pictures or tweet from the streets, from North Korea, that was more revolutionary than it would be anywhere else in the world, for sure. It’s sort of anything goes. I can just stop and take pictures of all these little mundane things in life that aren’t really so-called ‘newsworthy.’
“These are the things you run past on your way to covering the news. You know, a picture of bar snacks or a little yellow computer cover over a computer terminal, and none of them are great pictures the way photographers describe great pictures, ‘Oh, that’s a great picture.’ …
“It has as big of an impact probably as my professional daily newspaper work does. … I know that I’m not photographing anywhere near everything that’s going on in the country, especially the darkest things. But this is a long-term project, and we’re pushing to do as much as we can. If I’m not there, the only pictures that we’re getting out of Korea are distributed by Korean Central News Agency, where propagandist is not a dirty word.” More.
Photo of North Korea: David Guttenfelder, AP
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brunch, flowers, forsythia, grandchildren, olga's, photography, photos, postaday, providence, shadows, spring on May 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »
This morning as my almost-three-year-old grandson was “fixing” the downspout with a pair of pliers, I passed along what I like about spring.
You don’t have to put on coats and scarves and boots and hats and mittens every time you go out. It’s warm and sunny. There are lots of flowers. The flowers smell good.
He didn’t say much, probably because he had already gotten me to smell a large, red tulip, and he was focused on his work.
Here are some spring pictures. Look closely to see the mural of a rabbit in the shadows at Olga’s, where our one-year-old grandson escorted us for brunch.
Help me identify the sprays of flowery branches? The only one I can say for sure is the yellow forsythia. For the others, I will have to upload the photos at the website of the almost-three-year-old’s dad to get a crowd-sourced identification, Mister Smarty Plants. Do you think the pink spray is quince?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blue, essaouira, Les Matins Bleus, medina, morocco, photo, photographer, photography, postaday, riad, shifting gears on April 30, 2013| 4 Comments »
Judith Ross has a beautifully written and photographed WordPress blog she calls Shifting Gears. Recent posts have covered a visit with her younger son, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.
I was particularly taken with an entry in which Judith captures a luscious blue color that is reiterated all over one picturesque town, on everything from fishing boats to bread baskets.
She writes that one morning, she and her husband and son “climbed into our rental car and headed to Essaouira, a beach town. Much less intense than Marrakech, it was a good place to start our journey. [Our son] has friends there, who are also in the Peace Corps.
“The name of the riad where we stayed, Les Matins Bleus, reflected the town’s color scheme. …
“At the docks you can buy fish directly from the fishermen. Then, back in the medina, stop at the market for vegetables, before taking these purchases to a restaurant where they grill your food to perfection and serve it to you with bread – which also functions as your knife, fork, and spoon.” More.
Photo: Judith A. Ross
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged camera, photo, photography, postaday on April 27, 2013| 2 Comments »
What a beautiful day.
This morning after tai chi chuan, I went with the oldest grandson and his friend to the muffin shop. They each had a corn muffin and gave the lady the money. The friend’s dad pulled the wagon until these not-yet-three-year-olds decided they wanted to pull it themselves. It took cooperation.
In the afternoon the younger grandson stopped by and did a bit of exploring.
Then I took a walk.
Here are a few scenes. (I have no idea why that band sprouted where it did — unless it is tied to the production of The Sound of Music, which opened last night. It does have a rather Alpine look to it.)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Allard Schager, art, boredpanda, design, Oleg Gordienko, panda, photo, photography, Thomas Lamadieu on April 25, 2013| 2 Comments »
I’m so glad Kai put this on Facebook. He linked to photos of beautiful places. But at Bored Panda you can also find a bird that looks like Salvador Dali, a dad who illustrates his kids’ lunch bags every day with cute cartoons. and a do-it-yourself Porsche made of plastic pipes and aluminum foil. Or you can watch a video of an astronaut crying in weightless space.
I thought, “What the heck?”
Here’s a bit of explanation from the About page.
“Boredpanda.com is a highly visual art and design magazine dedicated to showcasing the world’s most creative artworks, offbeat products and everything that’s really weird or wonderful. …
“We got popular among pandas in a very short time, and now we have an average readership of 1 million unique visitors per month generating ~2 million of page impressions. Most of them come from USA, UK and CANADA .
“So, if you have a story, a product or some weird artworks that are cool enough for pandas – it is a perfect opportunity for you to get noticed. Click here and share it with everyone else!” More.
I myself am going to read up on Thomas Lamadieu. “Every time he looks up, Thomas sees a potential canvas where the building rooftops frame the sky. He photographs it and uses the odd sky shapes to create whimsical line drawings.”
Here are two of those beautiful places I mentioned.
Photo: Allard Schager
Tulip fields, the Netherlands
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, clouds, ForSpaciousSkies.com, photo, photography, postaday, providence, seekonk river, skies, sky on April 1, 2013| 2 Comments »
In January I blogged here about ForSpaciousSkies.com and a guy who thinks we would all be a lot better off if we looked at the sky more.
I have to say, he has a point. When we lived on the 18th floor in Minneapolis in the ’90s, we were constantly admiring clouds from our balcony. And now, since reading about Jack Borden’s crusade, I’ve begun to pay attention to the sky again.
I find that looking at clouds for a few minutes in the middle of everything else that is going on can really feel good.
Two of these photos were taken near my house, and one is over the Seekonk River in Providence.
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