Picture Notes

Messages on top of messages.

I wonder how much money it would cost New York City residents to clear all graffiti and messages off public and private spaces from about 10 feet down. It’s like Times Square has spilled into the rest of the city in it’s own way. It’s a colorful and rich world full non verbal messages that can be ignored or studied - depending on circumstances.

I think of the sounds that the young can hear and older people are deaf to and I wonder if visually there might be the same thing going on in reverse. I like the way everyone knows what a font and a point is, and what kerning and leading does and that 10 years ago only printers and art directors knew and cared about type faces and what they brought to the page. This may be the golden age of communications and female folk singers.

There is a new flash movie on Instantpictures.net - a collection of city scenes that aren’t in the tourist brochures or in the stock agencies.

What’s it like to be in Los Angeles? This pedestrian bridge connects office buildings in West Los Angeles and I was visiting there for the first time with my camera a couple of years ago. This is another one my Omakasi selections. I don’t think this has any value in the commercial market but might have value in the editorial market with the right art director. It’s one of those images that I can’t throw away and forget about because it speaks to me about business and working late. There is a planet rising in the dark blue sky. It’s hard to complain about a city with perfect weather most of the time.

This is what I like most about digital photography, being able to use parking lot lights for lighting. I realize that this really isn’t much of a photograph - it’s just a bicycle locked up on a railing in front of a fast food place. It’s about 5:15 pm during the winter and I’m walking home from the metro with my digital camera. I like the confusion though and the negative space and the shapes that are created with the metal and in the middle of all this visual noise there is an orange diamond with instructions.  It’s kind of an over the top snapshot. Anyway, here it is. Another day in the suburbs. What a funny word, suburbs. It’s an old word - [Middle English suburbe, from Old French, from Latin suburbium : sub-, sub- + urbs, urb-, city.] suburbium is more fun to say.

I’ll get back to more faces next.

Consideration: Does anyone know where I took this photograph?

Where are you? Don’t you wonder about this and ask yourself “Where am I?” I do this every so often because I seem to get lost easily; either in my head, in another person’s dreams or caught up in emotion. So when I walk though the National Mall in Washington and I see little signs that tell me where I am, I usually ask myself, “who designed this sign and how did they know that I was coming this way and would need this sign?”

The two rivets holding the sign to the map are nice, they give me a sense of security and the impression that “you are here” will be around for a long time and no one is going to move that little marker and try to trick me.

I drove out into America yesterday. I live inside the Washington, DC beltway and hadn’t been out in about 8 weeks, since I went to Fallingwater. I’d like to report that America is just fine, despite what we hear on television about the goings on at the Capitol. This is one of the main streets in Staunton, Virginia - “the Queen City of the Shenandoah Valley,” it escaped the damage of the Civil War and there are still 18th and 19th century buildings in town.

Small towns have interesting people who talk about things that you’d forgotten about and help you forget your current crisis as they present ones of their own. It seems like these people would get lost in a large city and would no longer have a voice.

Notes from Staunton residents, I have no idea if any of this is true.

“1. Photographic film will no longer be made in the United States by as early as next year.
2. If you take the limiter off a 74** series BMW you can get it to 165 mph.
3. Fall color will be weak this year because there hasn’t been much rain.
4. There is no difference in the corruption of Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of government.”

The Shenandoah Valley was brown and warm, I think global warming has come there first. I remember it as being green and fertile. This is the only photograph I made as I was walking to the coffee shop with the green awning. I’d like to report that the coffee is hot and delicious in Staunton.

I was at the Air and Space Museum waiting in line for an exhibit and saw this photograph, well sort of. The shadows of Americans were there and I added the flag. It reminds me of our innocence as Americans, we believe in high ideals; Democracy, the Republic, balance of power, the Geneva Convention and not torturing prisoners of war, nor do we use mercenaries to fight our wars or spy on our citizens and we actually believe our court system is fair and makes the accuser produce evidence of guilt, and we don’t overthrow foreign countries for our “ideals” nor do our politicians lie - ha ha, just had to throw in that one. See, we are so innocent, none of what I just wrote is true of America, or anywhere, we do all those things and more. We will not know the real horror of the war in Iraq for many years and when the total truth is known it will be interesting to see who is still standing to the right of this issue. This may be the time when Americans lost their innocence.

This silver is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is a vignette on the silver makers over the past several hundred years. This display is a discussion of the maker’s mark and how it’s changed over the years and what different numbers and marks mean. Before the industrial age everything was made by craftsmen in their own shops, one at a time, and the maker’s mark identified the piece and was probably a little bit of advertising as well. I’m sure there are a few silver smiths who didn’t really need a mark, that their work was so beautiful it was recognized by people who loved the craft.

The industrial revolution brought on thousands of mass produced goods made in factories by anonymous people using molds and Henry Ford’s ideas of the assembly line and today we have plastics being pulled out of molds in countries we’ve never seen by people we know nothing about and it turns out that these people are polluting their world the way we polluted ours.

Mass production is a cheap fix and a way to produce goods at a lower cost and sometimes they can be of better quality, and some things like silver serving spoons, should continue to be made in shops by craftsmen and women. There is no reason to flood the market with expensive items that last forever, it’s best to leave the most beautiful items as the rarest.

Is it too late to argue for a craft based industrial movement?

A National Disgrace

People coming to America from Europe can’t really believe all the homeless sleeping on the streets of Washington, DC.  In the UK they call that sleeping rough, and there are none.  In the UK homeless people are given services and a place to sleep.

In the United States we’ve spent over 400 billion dollars on the “Bush” war and for a fraction of that we could get the homeless people off the streets. Doesn’t anyone else find this unbelievable? We are worse than a third world country because we have the money and we do nothing.

The photograph is of a homeless mitigation project. There was a homeless person who slept on this ventilation grate on winter mornings. Instead of helping him, the powers that are, spent money on a fence around the grate and on welding steel pieces to make it uncomfortable to sleep on. It all didn’t matter, the man figured out a way to sleep there. The area is in one of the Washington, DC tourist areas, down the street from Air and Space and other high profile museums.

I vote to not spend anymore money on the war in Iraq until we’ve taken care of those who are sleeping rough in our “modern American cities.”

Looking for another right hand man.

When your right hand man goes missing it’s like being left on the platform waiting for the train. Do you hear, in your head, “Wanted - one good man for a job to last 515 more days.”

After a life time of political campaigns and years on “the stump” when does it stop? When should a politician stand down and eliminate his political adviser to govern and do the job? There is not enough time left to fix all that’s broken, some of it will take decades and still television airtime is being bought and ads are being aired like there is an election to win.

The problem is that the “job”, that is governance, hasn’t happened.  There was, and is, one long hard political campaign. When one party has an election machine that works well and they understand that process and don’t seem to have a vision for anything else or this vision is flawed and can’t be debated, they can only do what they know how to do - run campaign ads.

There should be a law prohibiting all political ads, by everyone, when there is no election within 12 months. I’d like to see the leaders lead.