• Category Archives Photography
  • At the Fair

    Lughnasa                                                                            College Moon

    This guy was in line ahead of me for a discounted senior ticket:

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    Samsara

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    A howl from the West. Our future.

     

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    More of samsara.

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    Dulling the pain of samsara.

     

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    fiddledIMAG0601Kate chooses her way.

    fiddledIMAG0603Leaving the earth behind

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    Mortals

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    What we become if we remain at the State Fair too long.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    This gallery contains 17 photographs in all as   photograph etc.

  • Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

    Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

    Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

    Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

    Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

    Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

     

    The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

    The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

    When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
    I found myself within a shadowed forest,
    for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

    This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

    (Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)


  • Cindy and Lonnie

    Samhain                                                         New (Winter Solstice) Moon

    Lunch today with Lonnie Helgeson, an old friend.  We’d gone to the Walker together for lunch many times prior to our mutual engagement in child rearing, got off track.  Nice to get started again.

    We saw the Cindy Sherman show.  Lonnie’s a big fan.  I am, too, but I didn’t know as much as Lonnie.  It’s interesting to consider a artistic career built on substantial modification to one’s self, then the recording of it through photography.  It’s as if she has become her own doll, dressed in many costumes and posed in interesting places.

    Her work is evocative of stories happening just off camera.  Her early black and white work–like many photographers working today her career spans the film to digital change–is vulnerable, has a yearning.  She’s fascinated with horror films and it shows in her work.

    Lonnie alluded to one way of seeing her entire corpus, as a Jungian set of inner selves, archetypes carried deep within her, many within all of us.

    There is, too, a playful side to her work, but more often she veers toward the exploratory, the serious, the strange.  In this last case her clown series look like they might have been cast in Killer Klowns from Outer Space.