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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Kiev Subway Dancing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My husband heard that the Kiev subway is a popular place for older Russians and Ukrainians to go dancing. So I Googled around a bit and found stories at Odd Stuff Magazine, here, and the Daily Mail, here. And a video at YouTube. In today’s world, you can’t keep a good story down.

At the Daily Mail (which seems to favor bullet points) Helen Lawson writes, “Saturday night fever: The subway where Kiev’s pensioners dance and find love.

  •     The dancers cannot afford to pay for a venue so they use a metro subway
  •     The group meets every Saturday at 7 pm to socialise and dance
  •     About 20 couples are known to have met thanks to the meet-ups
  •     Reuters photographer Gleb Garanich documented the weekly gatherings

At Odd Stuff, photographer Garanichev Hleb (is that the same Reuters guy?) asks the subjects of his photos about the dance scene. “Milevsky Nicholas was born in 1938 and Natalia Stolyarchuk born in 1955 met at these dances and has since moved in together. This is one of the 20 couples who met at these clubs. ..

“Despite his age, both retired and still work together earn about 4,000 hryvnia per month. …

“These people do not communicate in social networks, but still remember all the holidays of childhood and youth, when put on the table, to visit friends and neighbors come, everywhere sounded cheerful sounds of accordion.” More.

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Walking Around and Clicking

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

A few random pictures from my window, from walks, from train travel.

I am struggling to understand my new camera. It speaks in code.

wintry angles

MBTA geometry

Chas St Jail luxury

Concord Art Assoc

reach higher

antique shop

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Super Grandma!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2013| 2 Comments »

William Wegman is known for photographs of his weimaraners dressed as humans and posing like humans. (See funny video.) Sacha Goldberger, a 44-year-old French photographer, has his own unique subject: his 93-year-old grandmother, dressed as a superhuman and demonstrating how to be one.

Judith Graham writes about the dynamic duo in a New York Times blog post, “The New Old Age: Caregiving, Laced with Humor.”

“Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.

“ ‘I was very depressed because I lived for working,’ she told me in our Skype conversation.

“Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a ‘Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor,’ and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man’s relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas? …

“ ‘It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored,’ said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. ‘Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together.’ …

“People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.” More.

One of Goldberger’s books is Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother. I features a broad array of Mamika’s personae.

Note this Frederika quote: “I like everything that my grandson does.”

That’s how I feel about my grandchildren.

Photograph: Sacha Goldberger

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Going into Farming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2013| 4 Comments »

Every couple weeks, it seems, I read another story about young people taking up farming. It is not an easy thing to do.

This photographer couple is getting started by attending Farm School in Athol, Mass. They also are recording their progress on a website called Plough & Stars.

“Dina Rudick has worked as a staff photographer and videographer for the Boston Globe for 10 years. … Dina is also an adjunct faculty member at Boston University’s School of Journalism and has worked as a media consultant and media trainer … Her work can be seen at www.dinarudick.com.

“Erik Jacobs is also an award winning photographer …  A selection of his editorial work can be seen at www.JacobsPhotographic.us.

“Together, Erik and Dina also run a boutique video production company called Anthem Multimedia.”

But they want to be farmers.

Here is a bit of their blogging about Farm School:

“We’re six weeks into life at Maggie’s and already we’ve established steady working relationships with the all animals on our farm.  We lead cows to fresh pasture daily and pull fresh eggs out from under broody hens.  We try to our best to keep the peace with Mr. Marbles the pushy ram and I’ve even grown accustomed to the regular mouse fiestas inside my bedroom walls.” You can follow their adventures here.

A blog is not exactly run of the mill when written by award-winning photographers. Their pictures are fantastic.

P.S. Here is a past post I wrote on the young-farmer trend.

Photograph at http://ploughandstarsproject.com/we-are/

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Leaping for Joy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 21, 2012| 4 Comments »

Everyone is getting ready for Thanksgiving around here. John’s family has left for Syracuse to join culinary forces with my daughter-in-law’s family. My husband and I just arrived in Providence, where we will celebrate with Suzanne, Erik, my sister, and my brother-in-law.

Big cooking starts early tomorrow. But I already made the From Scratch Club’s cranberry sauce that was such a hit last year. (I found it on their WordPress blog.)

So as not to repeat myself too much, I am just going to share a link John sent me that captures the leaping-for-joy spirit that should be the essence of a holiday that is basically about eating a lot of food with people you like. And then maybe taking a nap and dreaming you are flying.

Check out the wonderful pictures at http://imgur.com/a/NAwjl

This is just one.

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A Weekend in Fall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 22, 2012| 2 Comments »

The fall color is the same pretty much every year, and yet it’s always amazing.

I walked around Concord and Cambridge, parked near a West Concord brook to go to the street fair (where a woman at Dabblers reminded me how to cast off in knitting), and hung out with an entertaining two-year-old.

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Mysteries from My Walk

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Here are new pictures. They invite questions.

Who lives in the small house? Is the hole in the wall an entrance or an escape route? Why are the tree trunks yellow? Who put a new house number on an overgrown foundation? And where has that car been?

Hypotheses welcome.

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Wandering

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2012| 2 Comments »

Photos from my wanderings in Boston and Cambridge are piling up.

Can you identify the flower from the Greenway’s demonstration garden? It seems to be blotting out the mural in Dewey Square.

How about the approach to the Longfellow Bridge on the Kendall Square side of the Charles? Early in the morning, it looks like an ancient tomb.

I took the photo of City Hall for my only friend who thinks modernism is beautiful.

The Oyster House is a landmark.

And the Manichean clock is at Northeastern University. (You do, of course, remember the Manichean Heresy, which posited good and evil as equal forces?) Comments welcome.

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Looking at Leaves

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 22, 2012| 3 Comments »

Today I’m sorting through pictures I’ve been taking of leaves. I think I can identify most of them, although I will have to check in with plant-identification site MisterSmartyPlants for the soft needles (larch?).

I’m especially fond of the lacy ginkgo leaf. The purple leaf I believe to be smoke tree. The thistle leaf says, “Approach at your own risk.” The wild grape clusters are a giveaway for the broad leaves drooping over the pond.

By the way, if you like identifying plants, it’s fun to see how many you can help people with at MisterSmartyPlants.

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Photographs Printed on Growing Grass

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

When I saw the headline at Wired, it didn’t really compute.

“Artists Create Portraits on Live Grass.” What? I don’t get it. Did the artists set up easels and paint with oils? Did they paint directly on the grass?

Writer-photographer Jakob Schiller explains.

“It all started, as these things sometimes do, by accident. In 1990, before they worked in photography, [Heather] Ackroyd and [Dan] Harvey created an art installation that covered an entire room with grass. As part of the art piece they had left a ladder leaning against a wall and when they went to remove it they saw that the ubiquitous and fast-growing plant had been imprinted with the shadow. The grass had stayed yellow where the ladder had prevented it from receiving any light.

“ ‘We didn’t know straight away what we were looking at, but we knew that we had observed something important,’ Ackroyd says.

“They began playing with the idea of manipulating the light that hits grass and by the next year were projecting light through an old 35mm Kodak projector onto a swath of grass on the wall.”

What to think as the grass withers and dies? It’s kind of a Dorian Gray scenario.

Read more about the project at Wired‘s Raw File, here.

Photograph: Ackroyd & Harvey.
Myles, Basia, Nath and Alesha, The Big Chill Festival, Eastnor Castle, between the Cotswolds and the Welsh Marches. 2007

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Giants’ Marshmallows

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

I believe these marshmallows are used as  prizes in the giants’ midnight games of dodge ball. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Other photographs of summer are less cryptic.

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Sand and Cameras

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2012| 2 Comments »

No doubt I would have grown up to be a photographer if the Brownie cameras and box cameras I used as a child had not gotten sand in them. After at least a week of high anticipation, the film kept coming back black. Very discouraging. All the effort I had put into creating little still-life scenes with dolls and sea shells — wasted!

So a word to the wise, if you take a camera to the beach, protect it.

I got a few pictures on this lovely June day, but I fear they lack the artistry that surely would have been evident had sand not mysteriously worked its way into all cameras in my youth.

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Fort Point Channel Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2012| 2 Comments »

I learned about an unusual artist today because I was following @FortPointArts on twitter. Her name is Heidi Kayser, and just when I no longer have an office with a view of Fort Point Channel, she has launched an art project on the water. Sigh.

Anyway, I went to her website and poked around. This blog entry from 2011 is a typically amusing one, and I think one of my readers may want to try the experiment:

“Sarah Rushford arrived today and we got right to work … The mission, as we chose to accept it, was to construct some sort of wearable platforms to hold the cameras on the back of my legs. Wonderful engineers that we are, Sarah and I  ingeniously came up with [contraptions] made of CD cases, zip ties, rubber bands, twine and alligator clips. …

“Sarah filmed me tramping across the beach. I filmed my ankles tramping across the beach. It was very surprisingly difficult to walk wearing the cameras — I couldn’t extend my knees very much, so finding balance in soft sand proved challenging but oddly meditative. My attention had to be focused on every step, otherwise I’d fall and damage the cameras.

“When we were nearly finished, the curious beach-goers who had been pretending to ignore me as I walked steadily and weirdly by them, came up to us and asked what we were doing.” Read more.

Photograph: Sarah Rushford

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Longer-form Web Writing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Jonathan Harris sounds like a kindred spirit. Of course, he’s a real photographer, and I’m not. But back in August 2010, he decided to take a photo every day of something that interests him and write a short piece about it for the web.

He made that decision on his birthday, writes Jennifer Preston in the NY Times.

“For the next 440 days, Mr. Harris, 32, a noted artist and digital technologist, whose work has been widely exhibited from MoMA to the Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, carried out his project. It has evolved into a new Web site he founded, called Cowbird — a social network that has attracted more than 7,000 people since it began last December, including award-winning photographers and writers. Mr. Harris said it is a place for slow, long-form storytelling, the ‘opposite of Twitter and Facebook .’ ” Read more.

The reason I say that he’s a kindred spirit is not just that he writes something longer than one would write on Twitter or Facebook, but because he makes a point of finding something that interests him and then writes about it for the length the topic requires.

When Suzanne and Erik said I could write about anything that interests me in the Luna & Stella blog, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that. Not sure how many of you go the birthstone-jewelry company from this blog, which probably doesn’t work like a regular business blog, but at least you know what Suzanne’s Mom is like and a bit about Suzanne and Erik and their extended family, too. They think that’s good, because jewelry that starts with birthstones is all about family and other close relationships.

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Cash For Your Warhol

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2012| 2 Comments »

I am psyched. I blogged a while back about UBS banker Geoff Hargadon, who is also a conceptual artist with a crazy sense of humor.

After Brandeis University’s then president made noises about selling the art collection of the Rose Museum, Hargadon put a sign outside on the grass: “Cash For Your Warhol.” It looked like the signs on telephones poles or in abandoned lots that lure the unwary into deals too good to be true.

Hargadon has put his signs up hither and yon, like the street artist Banksy in a way, or Shepard Fairey.

Yesterday I noticed one in the Boston financial district as I waited for the light to change. It’s at the corner of Congress and Franklin streets. I came back today and took a picture. Anyone want to call the number?

 

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