Rotating ball game. Cyclone game. Fun Station. Tallahassee, FL. December 2009. Nikon 35 MM.
More great shots from Fun Station.
I’d went that night to celebrate the birthday of a little girl I baby sat. At this time in my life, I was unemployed and did almost any kind of odd job for money. I’d moved out of my apartment earlier that year (in May 2009) because my MA program was ending, I was losing my job, I wasn’t finished with graduate school, and my heart had been completely broken. I went from living on friends’ couches and floors to house sitting jobs. I wandered around like a ghost, taking photographs and recording the sounds of the world with a little tape recorder. I had to make sense of it all.
Then my Daddy got sick. I moved home because I knew my Mom didn’t want to tell me just how bad she feared it might be, and I was exhausted. I felt as though I hadn’t slept in two years. I’d laid my head down but never rested.
Now—from this point in my life—I’m doing okay. I have an okay job. I finished my MA this past Fall, and I seem to be understanding more and more how the universe works. Getting these old rolls of photographs developed now is like looking through a window into my past. I searched for calm and warmth and meaning in all the color saturation and yellow light I could find around me. In a way, I am still searching.
I may be biased, but IMHO this post is a perfect example of why everyone who likes (poetry/photography/beauty) or has (eyes/a mind/a soul) should probably follow this blog.
Photograph by Nan Goldin
“I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough… In fact, they show me how much I’ve lost.” - Nan Goldin
“i want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification.”
-nan goldin, the ballad of sexual dependency
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translation by Richard Howard
(via frenchtwist)
(via human-activities)
For over 40 years, Vivian Maier worked as a nanny and spent her free time as a street photographer. Intensely private, she never showed her work to anyone, but left a legacy of over 100,000 negatives. These negatives were discovered by a local historian at an auction house in 2007 and since then her prints have been exhibited at museums from Los Angeles to Oslo. Lanny Silverman, a curator at the Chicago Cultural Centre, believes that “the best of [Vivian’s] work ranks up there with anybody. She covers humanist portraiture and street life, she covers children, she covers abstraction and she does them all with a style that I think digests the history of photography.”
Above are some examples of Vivian’s work. The photo at the top left is a self portrait taken in 1953. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, the first book of her photography was published in 2011.
“there are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. it is the force of an image that matters.” —brassaï
a monastic brothel, 1931
photo by brassaï, from what makes great photographs
(via drtuesdaygjohnson)
So let us assume that at least some of these women (and we can surmise from their skirts that they are predominantly women) were the mothers of the children they held. What is perhaps strangest to me is the number of women who are not wearing a black covering–something that would blend into the background, especially once the images were cropped or matted, as several have commented they would be. Instead, however, several women are draped in pattered throws…These mothers are not merely effaced–they are shown to be effaced. Their absence becomes a presence in these images; indeed, it becomes the focal point of the images. These images, consciously or unconsciously, mark the mother–or the mother-proxy–as the subject of effacement.
A lamp, a chaise, a rug, a mother. Domestic objects all.
“Where’s Ma? Oh, she’s the one ensconced in the rug.” (Part I) « Susan E. Cook, Ph.D.
She also made a response that talked about the possibility that the children in these portraits were dead. It’s absolutely worth reading/looking at.
(via fuckyeahvictorians)
spaceships: Children sleeping on the fire escape of a Lower East Side tenement
Weegee - Heat Spell, 1941 | via ephemeralnewyork
Hands painted by Picasso, photographed by Man Ray, 1935.
(via gettinhighinthemorning)
(via aubreylstallard)
