Posted in Uncategorized, tagged architecture, photo, photograph, photography on January 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes a new perspective is called for. This is the hallway staircase, from below.
It’s a little weird how I discovered this might make a good shot.
Normally I do my back exercises in the dining room on a yoga mat, but because I hoped to catch the trash and recycling guys and give them their New Year’s envelope, I did the exercises in the hall where I could hear if a truck stopped. Hence.
P.S. I caught them.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ahmadinejad, arab spring, Good Men Project magazine, green revolution, iran election, israeli, jerusalem, June 20 2009, noam galai, photo, photographer, photography, Rachel Kadish, Utne, Utne Reader on November 28, 2011| 2 Comments »
My sister buys a subscription to the Utne Reader even though you can read much of it online. She loves the variety of articles it reprints and thinks she should support the effort.
At Thanksgiving she told us about an article Rachel Kadish wrote that originally appeared in The Good Men Project Magazine. It’s about Kadish’s Israeli cousin, Noam Galai, and a photo he took of himself screaming up at the sky. It’s about how the photo struck a chord with Iranians and with Arabs working to overthrow oppressive regimes and how they used the photo widely, knowing nothing about the photographer.
Rachel Kadish writes that people originally lifted the photo from Flickr, and soon it went viral. “Shortly after Noam began investigating the spread of his scream photograph around the globe, he discovered something completely unexpected. Images of his face were turning up graffitied on walls in Tehran. In Tabriz City.
“His portrait, it turned out, had been picked up by some antigovernment protesters in Iran. In the year following the Green Movement’s first open clashes with Ahmadinejad’s government—a violent [June 2009] confrontation watched anxiously by the world—images of Noam’s face were reproduced by activist graffiti artists, sometimes veiled in red-painted blood. His anonymous face was rendered by anonymous Iranians on metal fuse-boxes and walls, alone or amid a crowd of other spray-painted images: part of a mute but vociferous message dangerous to utter aloud. …
“When Noam learned that his self-portrait was being used by anti-Ahmadinejad protesters, he emailed some of the Iranian graffiti artists through Flickr, where they’d posted images of their work under aliases.
“ ‘I told them, “It’s me. It’s cool. I’ll be happy to see more of what you do.’ ” ‘
“One of the Iranian graffiti artists wrote back. It was a two-line exchange.
“ ‘He was cool,’ Noam said. ‘He was “Nice to meet you, I like your picture.” I didn’t tell him I’m from Jerusalem.’ ”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, artist, banksy, gwarlingo, michelle aldredge, photo, photographer, photography, sinkachu, street art on November 16, 2011| 2 Comments »
Michelle Aldredge once again introduces me to an artist I knew nothing about. Check out her wonderful post about the artist Slinkachu at her blog, Gwarlingo.
Like Banksy, Slinkachu is part of the London street art scene, Aldredge writes, but “is everything Banksy is not — subtle, empathic, poignant, contemplative.”
I won’t try to replicate her post but will just mention that I especially like “The House of God” and “Dreams of Packing it All In.”
The photos are copyrighted by Slinkachu. If he doesn’t consider this “fair use,” I can take them down.
Update: He is in NYC until tomorrow, Oct. 7, 2012. Read up, here.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged american wing, art, Arthur Dove, artist, boston, Calder mobiles, Charles Sheeler, contemporary art, dale chihuly, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marsden Hartley, museum, museum of fine arts, photography, Weegie on November 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »
My workplace closes down on Veterans Day, so today my husband and I finally got a chance to visit the new Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts.
I didn’t realize that people bring cameras to museums now and take pictures of whatever they like. Is that allowed? For this post, I wanted to use a particular painting I saw today, but after trying the MFA site and searching the Internet, all I could find was a bootlegged photo for sale at Flickr. Fortunately, I did buy an MFA postcard that I was able to photograph at home.
This is a Louis Comfort Tiffany-designed stained glass window of parakeets and a goldfish bowl. 
My favorite floor was the third, though. There we saw some great 20th Century art: Calder mobiles, a Jackson Pollock, works by Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, the photographer Weegie, and more. Although the MFA also has a new gallery of contemporary art in a different part of the building, I liked the selections on the third floor of the Americas wing best.
At lunch we ate in the new dining area, a large, beautiful space that combines both classical and modern styles comfortably and features a tall, green, glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly.
The food was very good.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 1930s, 1940s, berlin, casagrande, chlie, depression, downturn, farm security administration, financial crisis, fsa, great depression, gwarlingo, jack whinery, library of congress, long night of museums, meltdown, michelle aldredge, office of war information, owi, photograph, photographer, photography, poem, poet, poetry, poetry bombing, poetry rain, recession on September 30, 2011| 2 Comments »
I really like Michelle Aldredge’s blog on writing and the arts, Gwarlingo. (The word gwarlingo, Aldredge says, is Welsh for the rushing sound a grandfather clock makes before striking, “the movement before the moment.”)
See my post about Gwarlingo and artistic Japanese manhole covers here.
This week Aldredge wrote that she had recently “stumbled across a small online collection of rare color images taken by photographers from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. The … photograph of Jack Whinery and his family was so remarkable and surprising that I immediately began exploring the online archive of the Library of Congress, which owns the images. The 1,610 Kodachrome transparencies were produced by FSA and OWI photographers like John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, and Russell Lee. They are less well known and far less extensive than their black and white images, but their rarity only increases their impact.”
Check out the America in Transition photos.
*Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress*
Another great Gwarlingo post was on poetry bombing.
“Since 2001,” writes Aldredge, “the Chilean art collective Casagrande has been staging ‘Poetry Rain’ projects in cities like Warsaw, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Dubrovnik, and Guernica – all cities that have suffered aerial bombings in their history. The most recent event took place in Berlin in 2010 and was part of the Long Night of Museums. Crowds of thousands gathered in the city’s Lustgarten as 100,000 poems rained down from the sky.” Read more here.
I also found a happy video.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Hoyte van Hoytema, international, Joris van Hoytema, Luna & Stella, madrid, Marcel Geenevasen, murdoch, online, photo, photo sharing, photograph, photographer, photography, woophy, wsj on September 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »
I would like to tell you about Woophy, the international photo-sharing site. One of many great things about Woophy is its home page, which features a map of the world with each photo’s location. Do click on it.
I have uploaded photos to Woophy off and on since first reading about it in the Wall Street Journal. (That was when I was still reading the WSJ, which used to be full of great articles. I was one of the 170 people who cancelled their subscriptions the day Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. I know this because the WSJ wrote the next day that 170 subscribers out of 1.7 milion had cancelled.)
Woophy has always been managed by unpaid volunteers, and in recent years they struggled to keep up with the work. Loyalists worldwide helped out. Now Woophy has crossed a threshold and has partnered with a travel company. I’m glad because I would like to see it survive. I particularly enjoyed getting comments from far-away places whenever I posted a picture.
Here’s Wikipedia’s description: “Woophy (World of photography) is a photo sharing website and an online community where members can put their photos on a world map. Founded in 2005 by Joris van Hoytema, Hoyte van Hoytema and Marcel Geenevasen, the site has over 39,300 members and contains around a million photos from over 43,000 cities and villages in the world. Most of the uploaded pictures are from surroundings, buildings, nature and problems in the world. Woophy also has an active forum where photographers discuss their photos in a critical way. Woophy now has a finance deal with Eurobookings.com which should enable it to survive through the use of advertising.”
Woophians are planning a meeting in Madrid next spring. See photos of a previous Woophy forum (with music):
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood, food desert, fridge, fruits, mark menjivar, menjivar, michelle obama, nourishing, nutrition, obesity, photo essay, photographer, photography, refrigerator, rural, supervalu, urban, vegetables, wal-mart, walgreens on July 26, 2011| 1 Comment »
I have been reading about Michelle Obama’s latest efforts to encourage good nutrition in childhood.
“Executives from Wal-Mart, Walgreens, SuperValu and other stores joined Michelle Obama at the White House on [July 21] to announce a pledge to open or expand a combined 1,500 stores in communities that have limited access to nutritious food and are designated as ‘food deserts.’
“With the pledges, secured by the Partnership for a Healthier America, which is part of Mrs. Obama’s campaign to reduce childhood obesity, the stores aim to reach 9.5 million of the 23.5 million Americans who live in areas where finding affordable healthy foods can be difficult. In those areas, many people turn to fast food restaurants or convenience stores.” Read the New York Times article here.
On a related note, John sent me a really interesting link from photographer Mark Menjivar, who documents the insides of people’s refrigerators. He includes a one-line insight into the person whose food he is photographing. Unsurprisingly, the fridge with the least food in it belongs to a “street advertiser” who lives on a $432 fixed monthly income.
See the fascinating photo essay here.
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