A Very Large Statue
Tag: statue
Beaney House of Art and Knowledge
Back in the High Street, we visited the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge. While in America we tend to revere the Magna Carta (statues of them above) for expanding the rights of the people, in fact, the Barons were wresting power from the King with no regard for the ‘people,’ beyond their own right to exploit them.
Once again, I confronted a museum mirror, this one with a sign encouraging photography adjacent. What else could I do? Click any of the pictures to see them all big.
Woking Man
Another of Sean Henry’s statues in Woking.
Sean Henry Sculptures
These sculptures by Sean Henry appear all over Woking.
Photo, Sculpture and Painting
In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.
Joie de Vivre
In the harsh midday light, I thought this might make a decent, high contrast, black & white image, if rather pedestrian.
Guildford
One weekend we took the bus to Guildford a larger town nearby with a vibrant, pedestrian shopping district, an ancient castle ruin, and more. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
Mayor Dr. Mack
Zen Alley
Fountain
End of US 80 Tybee Island Korean War Veterans’ Memorial Highway
Statue at Dusk
Bird Girl Irony
This “bird girl” statue used to be in the Bonaventure cemetery when it was photographed by Jack Leigh and used on the cover of the hugely popular book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt.
As a result of it’s fame, the grave site was overrun with tourists so the statue was removed and now stands in a room at the Telfair Academy in Savannah in front of a wall-sized mural of the cemetery background so you can take a photograph of it just like the one on the cover of the book.
Loves Labor Lost
Teaching the Controversy
The plaque says, “Addressing the Statue,” and notes that while some love the historic statue, others abhor the clear subservient stance of the Native and African American.
In fact, the plaque does not so much address the statue’s problematic nature as leverage it to invite visitors to enter the museum “to learn more,” one of the natural long-term outcomes of Ronald Reagan’s charge to mediate everything in the marketplace.
A few months ago the statue was surrounded by stanchions to keep anti-racists at bay. Evidently the Museum has calculated that zealousness to have abated.
Correcting our Herstory
Women’s Rights Pioneers
Took a walk last weekend to see the first statue of (real) women in Central Park, poignantly a point of tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Danny’s
Caesar?
The Edge District, St Petersburg, Florida
Baluster collection
Tableau
Walking along Central Street in the Edge we noticed an interesting rock sticking up from some palm fronds – it looked like perhaps it had been carved into an animal shape. Hanging over the railing, hunting for the right angle from which to photograph it we were hailed from within a deep garden by Jazzmen who invited us to walk around the building to the back where he took us on a tour of the art park, full of scavenged odds and ends (and no trespassing signs) deposited in nooks and grottoes throughout the lush plot whose owner, Danny, it seemed we were expected to know.
Click any image to see them all enlarged.
Shiva Natarajah
Change of Pace
When I was very young, my parents sometimes treated us to a slide show of their pictures from the early days, mostly before I was born. This was in the days before the Kodak Carousel projector – my parents’ projector took a single slide at a time and as it slid in, the previous one fell out the other side. I haven’t seen those slides in well over 50 years but I recently retrieved a metal slide carrier attaché of them from my mother with about 300 Kodachrome slides, mostly from the mid to late 1950s with a few taken as late as 1964.
My father shot with a Voigtländer Vitessa which he’d bought at the PX when he was in the army in Germany, the poor man’s Leica, which I got from him years later. The pictures appear to begin in Germany, in Stuttgart where I believe he was stationed and, I think, in Frankfurt. Then my parents appear to have returned to his home in London: lots of tourist scenes, street scenes, family shots, before returning to the US for too many pictures of me in my first year and trips to California, Reno, and Yosemite.
This has turned into quite the project. The slide scanning software that came with my old Epson scanner no longer works on a current Mac and Espon has declined to update it. So first I had to research and try out various pieces of software that claimed to work with my scanner and recognize color positive transparencies. Next I had to figure out how to make it recognize my slide carrier and record 4 separate high-resolution TIFF scans. Then I was able to start scanning. It took 28 minutes to scan 4 slides, so all 300 slides took some time. Then I had to load them into Lightroom and make sure they were all turned the right way around. Next comes some basic straightening, cropping, exposure control, color correction and so forth. The final step is a truly massive amount of retouching. Although I used an air-gun to clean all the slides before scanning, they remain coated in a remarkable collection of stains, dust and small hairs rendering some of them almost unbearable to look at.
Tomorrow my mother comes over to help me identify who is in all these pictures and where they were taken.
Let’s start in London:
The Buddha Hidden Within
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