New Posts

I have been organizing my work into series and giving them titles.  I am going to post them here to get them all in one place.  Many of them have been posted before, so bear with it.  There will be new things as well :~)

New Work

Some new photos taken last week while walking around Pasadena looking at older buildings.  Found a wall that had lifting paint and erosion caused by  sun and water.  Great textures were created and the early morning light gave up some unforeseen colors on the walls, which were tone-on-tone to the naked eye.

Old Apartment Block Downtown

WOOD

I took these last Sunday down by the lake in Echo Park.  It was early and the light was very clear and white but the warmth of the wood still glowed.  I liked that the cut wood was just as vibrant in its way as the living wood.  This is what I call 'loose geometry'  ;~)

Roy DeCarava

DeCarava, who was born in Harlem in 1919, was the first Black American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He worked with langston hughes to create a photo/poetry book of harlem called 'The Sweet Flypaper Of Life'.  I have put here 8 different photos from that collection and a couple, I think, from 'The Sound I Saw'.  His sense of light and the way he lets the darkness fill in form and bcome physically present in his shots is astounding to me.  And, of course, I love his geometrics!  I encourage everyone to look up more of his work.  At the bottom of the last photo I will put a link to more information about him :~)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_DeCarava

Something new that I saw a long time ago

Here are 5 photos I took recently and some of which I posted here before.  I have been learning Photoshop and I manipulated (slightly) some of these photos.  I am re-posting them to see if anyone can tell any difference (!)  and because I am interested in them as series.  I'd like to know what anyone thinks of them :~)

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene was a very interesting cat, I'm thinking.  He was born in 1925 in Normal, Illinois and moved to Lexington, Kentucky in the 50s after he got married.  He was an optician.  The company he worked for made camera lenses as well so he fell into photography.  He wound up showing with and being collected by major museums and players in the art world.  His photographs use his family members wearing masks and carnival heads and positions in broke down environments.  He took photos of them when they were moving about in these environments and achieved ghostly effects.  He seems to have been entirely self taught and an artist who followed his own bent and found his influences and inspirations where he may.

You know that I can not pass up a power line

Walking around Hollywood today in an area now filled with older Russian emigrés I found a marvelous house from the 1920s that had been daubed with stucco at some point.  It had been some strange minty blue-green color but now the dirt had settled into the swirls of stucco and the texture was really good.