Don't think of even one!

Green Monkeys

Trying not to think of a green monkey, not even either of those two seemingly fake-news ones in the photo just above . . . he decided not to blog today (due to feeling under the weather):

"See you tomorrow, and may your dreams
be free
of the
green
monkey . . ."

Sun-Ae in Machu Picchu

Sun-Ae is now - or was recently - in Machu Picchu, and she sent a couple of photos. Here's the first:

Click on the photo for enlargement - and also with the next image:

Everybody's seen such photos of Machu Picchu before, of course - and probably far more stunning than these two - but photos look different, better somehow, when you know the photographer. Here's what Sun-Ae wrote:

We're just leaving the place with Machu Picchu. Yesterday evening, we arrived here and went to see the mountains today. The weather was great as you can see in the photos. We even went up to Wayna Picchu, about one and a half hours further up hiking. From there we could see the Machu Piccchu. An amazing place, I wish you were here! And the kids, too. We have had a good time so far. The heavens blessed us with great weather every day . . . . Thank you for pushing me to go. This will be the best trip in my life.

Undoubtedly, she'll have a lot more to say on her return. Meanwhile, I'm busy editing her translation of a book of short stories, as well as articles by other people for various journals . . .

Quito Finito? No, Quito Fino!

My wife sent me a few photos from Quito, Ecuador that seemed randomly arranged, so I've posted them below in an order of my own, beginning with this street scene:

Not a typical street scene, but enchanting in its own way. Next, a mysterious, rounded pyramid - if that's geometrically permissible, labeled so:

Followed by a statue standing guard:

And another statue, a bit corny, but more inviting:

And a lovely, if imminently foggy, valley - the penultimate photo . . . so far:

Now fireworks, the ultimate photo - until the next batch arrives!

Wish I were there . . .

Delana Epperson: Arkansas Photographer

Dandelion with Cucumber Beetle
Delana Epperson

A couple of days ago, I borrowed a photo of locust blossoms by night and only afterwards checked with the Arkansas photographer Delana Epperson for permission, but maybe because I'm also from Arkansas, she allowed me my unorthodox ways and let me continue to use the photo:

The attribution is correct and I'm honored that you used my photo. I enjoyed reading your blog about it. The . . . [locust blossoms] are invasive trees. When we moved where we are now, they had them and they pop up everywhere. I thought wow, that's a fast growing shade tree, lol. We now know better and just had about 30 of those Black Locust bulldozed down. Now, we are still digging up roots to dispose of them. I do love the blossoms in the Spring.

A couple of days later, Ms. Epperson led me to site with the above photo:

If you like night photos, how about a Dandelion with a Cucumber Beetle on it. I love playing with the camera at night and trying different flowers and weeds. This is on my gallery on WeatherUnderground. My handle is CalicoBass . . .

Ms. Epperson may say she's just playing around with her camera, but she produces photos that look more than amateur to me! Moreover, she has what every great photographer needs . . . luck:

I didn't realize the bug was there until I uploaded the pic onto the computer.

Of course, there's also skill, and she has hundreds of photographs to prove it. Go and gaze . . .

Ozark Photographer Tim Ernst on the Loss of a Very Special Dog . . .

Aspen Flying

Tim Ernst

Cloudland Journal

As every dog-lover knows, dogs are special, so emotionally attentive to people and intelligent enough to understand what people want of them -- so much like human beings . . . except their lives are far too short. Famed Ozark photographer Tim Ernst reports from his Cloudland Cabin on the recent loss of his dog Aspen after thirteen years together in the Boston Mountains of the Ozarks:

January 21, 2013: [In Memory of a Dog called "Aspen"]

There is an eerie calm, a stark quietness . . . at the cabin this morning . . . . [My wife and I] have taken a deep breath at the emptiness, and cannot let go. This amazing dog has been a constant fixture at Cloudland for more than 13 years, and it may take that long to not look in the room each time we enter to see if he is there. Of course, his spirit will always be here . . . . We were told . . . a couple of years ago that Aspen would soon be eat[en] up with cancer, but like everything else in his life he simply continued right on . . . living and hardly slowed down at all . . . .

Then the nerves to his hips started to erode . . . . He eventually lost the ability to use his hips to get up off the ground . . . . On Christmas night a winter storm rolled through, leaving 3-5 inches of snow on the ground. When I got up around 4 a.m., I discovered that Aspen was not in his bed and a chill ran down my spine . . . . I knew something was wrong, and I ran out the front door. I found him hiking around in the snow with a smile on his face, and I breathed a huge sign of relief. Until I saw the ground around him and realized what had happened. He had gone outside in the middle of the night to pee, and with the steps snow-covered, he was unable to climb up them -- in fact it appeared that he tried many times and slipped and fell down each time. It was FRIGID out, with the wind blowing and the temps way below freezing. To keep warm he simply started to walk around, and walk, and walk, and walk. I found three places where the snow had melted all the way to the bare earth -- he had fallen and it took him so much time to get himself back up that the snow melted underneath. He literally made HUNDREDS of trips back and forth, as every square inch of the front yard was covered with his tracks -- I bet he walked several miles in the snow, pacing back and forth. It was a scene that brought horror to my heart.

From that night forward, Aspen was never been able to get back into the cabin on his own again . . . . The funny thing, up until literally the very last day -- was that once up on his feet, Aspen could hike for miles, and often did. He . . . would hike out to the mailbox and back (three miles) several times a week . . . . [a]nd often . . . hike the "loop" around our end of the mountain, about a mile through the forest and meadows. But recently, he was unable to hike completely around the loop . . . and would turn around and head back to the cabin -- that was not a good sign . . . .

I know . . . the difficult decision of when to pull the plug . . . and . . . our decision was compounded by the fact that Aspen seemed to be totally thrilled to be out in the woods hiking . . . and even though he had reached the point where he could no longer take care of himself, we just couldn't do it . . . . [F]or the past several months I've considered every single hike we went on as his last . . . just . . . that you never know when the end is going to come. And nearly each time at some point I was down on my knees in the leaves with him and the tears would flow. And yet there was tremendous happiness on both sides . . .

We all took our last hike on Friday [the 18th of January], and Aspen was happy and eager to make the complete loop around the mountain, through the forest, and across the meadows he had called home for more than 13 years. Towards the end of this hike we all sat down on a sunny slope in the woods -- and everyone knew it would be the last hike -- it's just one of those things.

On the way to town Saturday morning we stopped and Aspen got to dip . . . [his] toes into the Buffalo River, another one of his playgrounds all these years. I never knew a dog that could spend so much time in the water swimming, and swimming, and swimming. And then once in town I took him out into the woods near where I grew up -- in fact the very same woods where I took my first steps. And we hiked a little bit along the first trail that I ever hiked on. And I gave him a cheeseburger -- he LOVED cheeseburgers!

At the doctor's office I stroked his ears (that always gave him intense pleasure), and he laid his head down . . . . The doctor looked up and said "He is chasing bears in heaven now." I have no doubt about it . . .

A beautiful memory of the sort of loving friendship possible to have with a dog . . . and even more beautiful in its entirety, so go there to Tim's Cloudland Cabin and read the complete story . . .

Ozark Spring House: Mild, Rainy Winter Day

Ozark Spring House

Cloudland Journal of Tim Ernst

January 27, 2012

Whenever I need my Ozark fix -- which is every morning -- I click over to the website maintained by Ozark photographer Tim Ernst and spend some time contemplating his latest photographs. This morning in Seoul is January 28th, but since Arkansas lies on the back side of the International Dateline, Mr. Ernst must have posted this update of January 27th only some hours ago, though the picture was taken a couple of days earlier. The Ozarks had gotten a bit of rain, apparently, so the Buffalo River Valley had hundreds of waterfalls pouring off its bluffs. Mr. Ernst had gone out to take pictures and also took one of this small spring house directly beside a tiny waterfall:

It rained all day Wednesday, but I was able to sneak out for a couple hours in the afternoon with camera and tripod to visit a couple of nearby waterfalls. I have been unable to get enough [photographs] of the [small waterfall alongside this] little spring house in Boxley, and it only runs well during flooded times for a few hours, so I stopped there first and spent some time with this old friend. There were a few raindrops coming down but nothing too bad. I just love the look and texture of the smooth stones they used for this little building, also the lush moss-covered little bluffline right next to it, and of course the splashing waterfall in between.

Boxley is a small Arkansas village on the upper Buffalo River, and I'm guessing that this is an old spring house from which the locals used to get their water, back in former days. The spring itself -- seen emerging from the pipe in the lower part of the above photo -- surely runs year round. Only the miniature waterfall requires rainy weather to run. Below is a close-up of the falls.

I find these two images so peaceful to gaze at, especially the upper one, with the full stone structure in view. In my younger days, I believed that I'd make my way back to the Ozarks after my worldly adventures, but in my case, Thomas Wolfe seems to have been right, for I likely won't be going home again, not to live, anyway. I guess Seoul is my home now, and I'm getting to know this great city of Asia, but I do need my Ozarks, if only in snapshots, so I'm glad that a man like Tim Ernst is around, daily taking photographs in the Ozark Mountains of Northern Arkansas.

I encourage others to visit his website and look around . . .

French 'Photograffeur' JR

Big Fisher is Watching You

(Image from New York Times)

Literary critic Gaby Wood writes in "Supercolossal Street Art" (February 24, 2011) for the New York Times Magazine of the street-art photographer "JR," a Parisan artist who posts enormous photographs on buildings, wall, embankments, rooftops, wherever a surface sufficiently flat enough presents itself and opportunity accords. He has an interesting method of operations for carrying out his artistic concepts:

His M.O. is to show up in a shantytown in Kenya or a favela in Brazil, a place where some event has been noted in the media and captured his attention, and turn it inside out, photographing the residents, then wrapping their buildings with the results, on a scale so vast that you can see their eyes from the sky. Often he has worked at night, and as soon as he's done, he disappears; so when the installation becomes front-page news, there is no one left to explain it but the people whose voices had not been previously heard.

I can appreciate what JR's out to do -- give voice to the voiceless and all that -- but he runs the risk of treating his subject matter superficially, as his persona might suggest:

JR's style is a little bit Belmondo, a little bit Buddy Holly -- the glasses are Perspex -- and he speaks in the enthusiastic slang of a hip, young Parisian. "C'était ouf!" is how he often describes some exciting or exceptional event -- the punched-in-the-gut exhalation of that last word standing in for anything more precise. "Nickel," short for "nickel-chrome," is applied liberally to mean "great."

But perhaps his aesthetic vision alone suffices. Check out the slide show for the man and some of his art works. Speaking of the man, here's a photo of JR, shot alone with his art:


But who shot JR? A certain wise guy with dead-eye aim, Jonathan de Villiers, hitman this time for the New York Times.

The wonderful pun "photograffeur" is not my own, incidentally, but I wish that I'd coined it . . .

Mystery of Vivian Maier, Photographer Extraordinaire

Vivian Maier 1926-2009

(Image from Vivian Maier: Her Discovered Work)

A mystery is unfolding over at Vivian Maier: Her Discovered Work, a blog maintained by John Maloof in honor of Vivian Maier, an obscure woman who might turn out to have been one of the greatest street photographers of the twentieth century. Here's a brief account by Mr. Maloof of how he discovered Ms. Maier:

I acquired Vivian's negatives while at a furniture and antique auction. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I didn't know what 'street photography' was when I purchased them.

It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian's negatives and I would "see" more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.

After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very "keep your distance from me" type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn't care much for American films.

Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960's-1970's. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it's very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to 'Google' her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn't want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had.

Questions answered? Perhaps. But she sounds like a very private woman, especially in remarks about her presented in this ten-minute documentary: Street Photographer’s Work Discovered A Few Days After Her Death. The documentary title is somewhat perplexing, given Mr. Maloof's words above, until one realizes that it refers to the fact that he learned Ms. Maier's name only a few days after her death. That sobering fact focused my mind on questions about the meaning of a person's life. I wrote to a friend concerning Ms. Maier and her artistic aim, a possibly quixotic quest that led her to take more than 100,000 photographs over the course of her adulthood, which in turn led me to openly wonder about the meaning of her life:

She may turn out to be one of the great photographers of the 20th century, but she never attempted to display any in a gallery. Indeed, she seems to have left most of the photos undeveloped. Her work was uncovered by chance, and even her name was unknown until the young man who had obtained the photos found it in one of the boxes that he had purchased. He conducted an internet search and came up with a single reference, an obituary of only a day or two before.

If Ms. Maier turns out to be great, I wonder what the meaning of her life was. Did she know she was great? If so, why live in obscurity? Why not display one's work? We might recognize and acclaim her greatness, but what good is that for her now?

I realize that these are rather ill-formed questions, but perhaps readers can intuit what I'm trying to get at. One wants greatness to be acclaimed, the great individual to be broadly recognized, a deserved reward to be justifiably showered on the one who achieved greatness . . . lest life be unfair.

Life, of course, is unfair. Greatness is no guarantee of reward, and in Ms. Maier's case, she in fact appears not even to have sought any recognition and acclaim for her work. Indeed, as noted above, she didn't bother to develop the vast majority of her photographs. Was that profound confidence . . . or deep insecurity? Given the description of her as "outspoken" in her views on things, and her confidence in her opinions about films, I venture that she was profoundly confident, so sure of her artistry that she saw no need even to see the developed results. Yet, the mystery remains.

To see for yourself what Ms. Maier saw through the camera lens alone, visit John Maloof's blog -- or also a website, maintained by Jeff Goldstein, offering several more of her photographs (from among the more than 12,000 negatives he obtained) and a recognition that "sequestered, private motivations" focused her artistic vision.

Perhaps we'll learn more about those motivations over the next several months and years as we learn more of her art and life . . .