Staircase

Centre for British Photography, London

Galleries and museums, because of their preference for white walls and a kind of deluxe starkness, often provide geometric black and white still life opportunities. I’ve often photographed corners, nooks, and chairs in such places.

Kitchen, Night

Farnham, UK

I was struck by the shadows and light on the cabinet doors of the kitchen, so I got the tripod and took a few shots at different distances. This one is a 26-second exposure so I’m guessing the motion blur is coming from the actual shutter press (no mirror flapping on my Fuji).

Al Zoe Leonard: Al río

The day after we went to Paris Photo we went to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and got tickets to the Zoe Leonard exhibit, Al río / To the River, recommended by classmates who had seen it the day before. It’s an immense show that goes on and on for rooms and rooms, vast expanses of white space, perhaps conveyed by the images above. We arrived late morning and were, initially, the only ones there, other than the guards. I was almost more impressed at the opportunity to wander through the vast, empty white space of the museum (reminiscent of my trips to NY’s Metropolitan as a kid, when it was often so empty you could go bowling without disturbing anyone) than I was by the photographs.

The images look at the US/Mexico border area, as loosely defined by the Rio Grande/Bravo. On each wall is a series of pictures, looking at a particular scene, over the course of time (seconds, or minutes, I would guess). Some of these are very affecting; cumulatively, they certainly are. But I was unable to guess at the reason for some of them. One entire room was dedicated to pictures of the swirling water taken, perhaps, over the side of a bridge. While they are far from identical, they are all the same. Another follows a man on horse from a distance, behind, as he travels a short way. The final room is a series of color pictures of a laptop showing security footage of people crossing a barbed-wire-surrounded bridge. No indication of whether this is a public website, or if she’d been granted access to a security control room. Beyond the brochure materials about the exhibit (shown at the link above) there are no placards, captions or other text to explain what you’re looking at or why – which is, in itself, a kind of statement, I suppose. I confess, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Of course, the same might be said of my series of images of the exhibit.

As always, click any image to see them all full-size.

Kerry Bog Village

Kerry, Ireland

I’m not sure how historical this bog village really was. Each hut in the collection was stuffed to the rafters with old, decrepit stuff but I’m not fully persuaded they were all of the era they purported to be. A lot of it just looked to be old junk, but not necessarily of the claimed 18th-19th century.

Collections

One day in February 2004, out of sheer boredom, I went around the apartment with the Dimage A-1, still shooting jpegs and photographed collections of things. Occasionally, I suffer a brief twinge of nostalgia for collections of stuff, in serried ranks on the wall, but mostly I’m glad they’ve all been digitized and streamed. Only the books remain, and perhaps the CDs are moldering somewhere in a box.

The Lovely Margaret

Brooklyn, New York

The Brooklyn furniture store, back in January 2004, and mentioned in my last post, was big on screens and nets and meshes of all types. I photographed the whole family through some screen or other, directly as jpegs on the Dimage A-1.