Category Archives: Photography

Restoring Street Art

Americana, Art, Photography

 


I am sort of fascinated with informal street art – graffiti, if that makes you happier – I like the pictures, but I like the lettering even better. I am convinced that the lettering is a throw back to Mayan Glyphs.

About a week ago, Ed Dieden called to tell me to bring my camera with me to lunch, he had found a great vain of street art in Oakland.

By the time we got there, however, the art had been defaced. I have seen this on alot of Mayan sites, also. Somebody comes along later and trashes the art, presumable to show dominance. With street art, all it takes is a spray-painted line drawn through the art, sort of like keying a nice car.

OK, “restoring Street Art” is way too grandiose a term. But with street art, or any digital photograph, the photographer has an astounding amount of after-shot-control using Lightroom and Photoshop. I have talked to lots of photographers who frown on post shutter manipulation but I am not one of them. Ansel Adams – one of the demiGods of photography – retouched both his negatives and prints taking the tradition of post shutter manipulation back almost 100 years (and I am sure he was not the first).

My own standards – using the word standards in the most grandiose way possible – is having the final picture most closely represent what it felt like being there (I guess, by that criteria, I should accent the white defacing lines because, once I noticed them, they became very obtrusive but, at first, I didn’t notice them and they do detract from the art). I have no desire to Photoshop batman running through a wall although I have no problem with other people doing that. Here are a couple of shots, cleaned-up.

 

 

Gordon Parks

Photography, Politics

The New York Times has a slide show of some unusual Gordon Parks photographs that I would like to recommend. To go out on a limb – a little – Gordon Parks was the most important, black, visual, artist of the 1950s and 60s. He became famous – and, therefore, influential – during the disgusting Jim Crow era. It was a time when everything was segregated – at least in the south all the way north to Washington D.C. – everything, not just public schools and parks and public transportation, but restaurants and restrooms. Even drinking fountains.

Black people were kept out of sight and Parks’ photos helped change that. He started out photographing for the the Farm Security Administration where he took the powerful picture above, and eventually became a fashion photographer for Vogue where he published the pictures below. 

But it was his work published in Life Magazine – the premier photo-magazine of the day – where I first saw him and his seemingly naive photographs. They seem so straight forward, and they pack such a powerful punch. Check out the slide show and you will not be disappointed.

 

 

Summer Solstice 2012

Around home, Current Affairs, Photography

Michele planned the return from her trip to Ireland so she could be there for the solstice (and spend some time with her step-sister). Yesterday, she went to see the Drombeg stone circle near Baltimore and liked it so much she went back this morning at 5 AM for the Summer Solstice Sunrise. Yesterday, it was clear and green and very Irish and this morning, after getting up in the middle of the night and driving for an hour, the sunrise was fogged in and – I guess – still very Irish.

Of course she had her iPhone and, of course, she had her handy App that tells her where the sun is coming up – or the moon, or Jupiter –  and, of course, it works in Ireland.

As an aside, I have never been to Ireland and have no connection with it but I do know all the Counties around Baltimore; County Cork, County Kerry, County Clare, County Limerick, County Tipperary,  County Kilkenny, County Waterford. I don’t think that there is any other place in the world where the names are that famous. Not Paris, not New York, not even London. It is very strange. End aside.

Twenty three and a half hours later, I was watching the Summer Solstice Sunset

 

cast its alpenglow on the buildings of San Francisco.

As the light faded, wisps of fog came in softening the scene and dropping the temperature. A very San Francisco Solstice.