Paradise

Wow, has it been that long? I've been busy and distracted the last few months and have neglected this blog. So as a way of jump-starting it again, here are a few photos from our trip to the Palm Springs, Calif., area earlier this year. A bit cliche, perhaps. Apparently, they like to build things there, especially walls.

Arkansas Prison Photographs

Bruce Jackson, documentary photographer and filmmaker, currently has an exhibit at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. "Cummins Wide" is a group of photographs Jackson took at Arkansas's Cummins Prison Farm in 1975 with a Widelux camera, which produces a panoramic negative by means of a rotating lens.








Just as interesting is his collection "Mirrors." While in an Arkansas Prison in 1978, Jackson found a drawer full of negatives, prison identification photographs from 1914 to 1937. He has reprinted these negatives, revealing the faces of men, women and children.

The photographs of the men were loose in the drawer; the photographs of the women were in a small brown envelope. Most of the photographs of the men were taken inside, against a wall or a cloth; most of the photographs of the women were taken outside, near a fence, in a wicker chair.

Someone Else With a Shrubbery Fetish?

The latest offering from 20x200 is this photograph by Brad Moore.
















Here's what he has to say about his work:

I grew up in North Orange County and attended school in inland Riverside County. After 25 years I returned, and was fascinated by their simultaneous decline and growth. I see these areas differently from places I have never been. Knowing what was, and now what is influences my approach. I've avoided traditional, documentary-style photography; instead I have photographed select buildings and shrubbery in primarily static, symmetrical compositions, reflecting change, irony and evolution.

Common Ground

I'm digging on Common Ground, a UK initiative linking the arts, rural communities, local identity and traditional land use. They have projects to incorporate sculpture into the landscape and reviving old apple orchards, but the one most relevant here is their Parish Maps project. Residents draw creative maps of the landscapes they know intimately. Read more about the project here.








It reminds me of a project I began last year, mapping all the city's footpaths onto an official street map. The official map pretends at objectivity, when in fact it espouses a worldview in which automobiles are most important, official building are the only ones worth noting, and boundaries (between neighborhoods, cities, etc.) are distinct and real. Footpaths are used by those who don't, or can't afford to, fit into this dominant system. They appropriate the unused spaces--railroad right-of-ways, undeveloped land, abandoned lots--and make them useful. By laying these winding paths over the rigid grid of the map, you get a picture of a ghost society moving below, through and around the official one.

MLK Murals

The great urban photographer and one of my favorites, Camilo Jose Vergara, has an interview on NPR and online exhibit of his photographs of Martin Luther King murals.

Writing about these murals, Vergara says

I believe that they help us understand how people living in poor, segregated urban communities — those about whom Dr. King was most concerned — perceive him and his legacy. They show how inner-city residents use his portrait to feel proud, to sell merchandise, and to develop a sense of security, identity and belonging.

Parting Shots

I'm headed to Palm Springs (actually Beaumont, Calif.) tomorrow morning for a little vacation and to visit Heather's family. Since I won't be posting, I thought I would leave you with something for the meantime.

Ellen Susan, a Savanah, Ga. photographer, has a wonderful project on her "Soldier Portraits" site. She makes portraits of contemporary soldiers using the collodion wet-plate process, an old technique used for some of the most memorable Civil War photos. (Compare Susan's portrait of an army physician Timothy Monahan to the tintype of a Union surgeon Edwin Bentley.) Susan's work picks up the thread of an earlier conversation, forcing us to drop the prideful heroism with which we speak of the present conflict and forcing us to reflect on it with the same quiet horror that we usually reserve for wars that have ended.














Maybe after I get back home, I'll have time to scan and upload some of my own photographs from Civil War reenactments.

Letterpress Documentary

Finally, a post that makes at least a tenuous connection between documentary work and design. Here's a documentary short about a still-functioning letterpress.

Lexicon: "Gulf"

I've decided to start a new recurring post which I am calling (for now) "Lexicon." It's an ongoing list of words (usually reflecting my current thought track) and their definitions pulled straight from the dictionary. I've always loved dictionary entries--the progression of the etymologies, the histories bound up within a single word, and all of a words myriad inflections pushed up against each other.

gulf \gəlf\ n [ME goulf, fr. MF golfe, fr. It golfo, fr. LL colpus, fr. Gk kolpos bosom, gulf; akin to OE hwealf vault, OHG walbo] (15c) 1 : a part of an ocean or sea extending into the land 2 : a deep chasm : ABYSS 3 : WHIRLPOOL 4 : a wide gap {the ~ between generations}

gulf vt (1807) : ENGULF

A Bit of My Philosophy

Here's an excerpt from a post on my other blog that I share with three friends and thought it had some place here. It's a jumping off point to explore my philosophy towards documentary work.

Instead of working at my desk through lunch, I took a two mile walk through a rough neighborhood and industrial area. (The weather here is unseasonably warm--70F--and drizzly.) I carried with me all of the ideas that have been posited here--what is home, what are we doing, what is extraneous--as well as a few ideas for larger (hopefully collaborative, Brian) projects. As I was walking past abandoned buildings and railroad tracks, I was also contemplating my own impulses, specifically why I prefer to photograph these "unpretty" places.

I believe there is a truer commentary on us, socially, to be found in the functional spaces and back alleys and empty lots, the places that were never meant to be seen or viewed as places. A truer version of our worldview (would it be too much to say "our beliefs"?) are captured, not in what we say, but in what we do--the marks we leave on the landscape, the things we throw away, etc. And that led me to this larger idea that is worth exploring:

The gulf between what people believe and what they do.

It is a reformulation of the cliche, "Actions speak louder than words," and I think it is especially rich, if I cold find some specific scenario to apply it to. (What I don't have any interest in is picking out people's inconsistencies and holding them up for ridicule or charges of hypocrisy.)

Holga Photos

I ran across these Holga photographs I took a few years back at a small fair set up in a parking lot in Durham, N.C.