photo américain

Images close to home

A few new photos from the house and garden. Close-up details, using a shallow depth of field. A bug's eye view perhaps.

 

60 years of the Universal Human Rights Declaration - photo slide show

Oeil Public, a French photo agency that I like to use for excellent photos of the Middle East, has a poignant and compelling slide show commemorating 60 years of the UN's Universal Human Rights Declaration. As you might imagine, from a photojournalistic/documentary agency, the photos almost all show violations of (not respect for) human rights. It's powerfully done. I rarely sit through online slide shows, but this one was riveting (the music adds a sense of urgency). Just click on the link above and it will start up.

One of the photographers whose work appears in the slide show is Karim Ben Khelifa, whose photos I use occasionally for Middle East Report, and who focuses on Islam and the Arab world.

Cool Middle East design and visual culture

I stumbled upon the website for the Khatt Network for Arabic Typography again today and it is even more interesting than I remember (with a lovely new interface).

"The Khatt Foundation is a non-profit cultural foundation dedicated to design research and cultural exchange between Europe and the Arab World/Middle East."

You can join and become a member of the community, post announcements, notices, thoughts, designs. Check out the news section for events, conferences, calls for submission, exhibitions. Learn about such things as Samandal Comics, a quarterly tri-lingual comics magazine, or "Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a heartfelt tribute by some traditional letterpress printers in America to the literary and bibliographical heritage of Iraq, and its partial destruction."


The calendar section is especially worth visiting for detailed listings of events, including many photo, video/film and art exhibits. For example, here's an exhibit by Egyptian painter Huda Lutfi (a former professor of mine at AUC).

[Democracy is coming! 2008, Mixed Media, 45 x 35]

Also check out PhotoCairo04 put on by the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo:

An international multi-disciplinary visual arts project in Downtown Cairo featuring a series of exhibitions, screenings, presentations, residencies, a workshop and a temporary publishing house.

Opening reception on Wednesday 17 December 2008
Symposia: 19-21 December 2008 | 9-11 January 2009

And here's a curious call for posters by Iranian artists for a roaming display in Berlin, after one in Istanbul, about "Urban Jealousy":

Return to blogging

After a long absence here I've decided to try blogging again. It will be different from my earlier blogging, which was done from Beirut during the year we lived there, 2007. Since January 2008 we've been back home in Baltimore, MD and I've felt less inspired to use this platform for expression. However, I'm not ready to give it up just yet. Posts will still revolve around photography and the Middle East, but fairly broadly. I hope you'll check in once in a while and see how it goes.

Michelle

 

snapshots of Italy

California wild

Dew on Mt. Diablo

California poppies falling apart

On Mt. Diablo

On Mt. Diablo

Madrone tree in the Sierra foothills

A woodpecker's granary in a dead tree, Sierra foothills

Shooting star, Sierra foothills

Lichen and rocks, Sierra foothills

Layers of a redwood tree, Calavaras Big Trees State Park

San Francisco shadows

San Francisco, the Mission district

San Francisco, the Mission district

my photo at the BMA

As I've explained in an earlier post, 19 Baltimore photographers were asked to respond to an exhibition, Looking Through the Lens at the Baltimore Museum of Art, of classic photography of the first half of the 20th century with their own photograph. The responses are displayed on three screens at the end of the exhibit. It may rotate, but for now they are using my photo and the one I responded to on the description page of the project on the BMA website. Here's what it looks like:

To see the whole page where it appears, go here.

Evergreen

Evergreen is the name of our neighborhood in Baltimore. I'm intrigued by its back alleys and the winter landscape. Below are some recent photos. I'm experimenting with a paler color palette than usual.

I read an interesting article in the New York Times in January about a Dutch landscape designer who plans gardens by how they will look in the winter. The article said, "For Mr. Oudolf, in fact, the real test of a well-composed garden is not how nicely it blooms but how beautifully it decomposes." Piet Oudolf said, “The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”

This reminds me of the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi, which is the aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in incompleteness, imperfection and decay. Both these perspectives, of the landscape designer and of Wabi-sabi, describe well what I enjoy visually in the world. I need to keep this in mind as I photograph.

 

Baltimore backyards and the BMA

I've been wandering around the back alleys of our neighborhood with my Zeiss Ikon folder camera, which looks like this:

It takes surprisingly good photos, although the edges go soft (an effect I like for it's uniqueness). I submitted one of the photos to the Baltimore Museum of Art for their "Looking Now: Digital Photography Project," which I was kindly invited to participate in. (Click on the link and then scroll down the page to see the project description.)

If you're in Baltimore, I recommend seeing the exhibit "Looking through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960."  I and 18 other professional Baltimore photographers responded to individual photos in this exhibit by taking our own photographs, which will be displayed in the exhibit in a digital display. It opens March 16. I will scan and put my photo contribution up once I get the print back.

In Beirut I was most intrigued by the trees' ability to adapt to the urban environment, and vice-versa -- buildings and walls were sometimes built around the trees. I was interested in how each interfered or encroached on the other. In Baltimore I seem to find the graphic quality of the tree branches and their shadows falling over and mixing with the manufactured environment to be most compelling. The winter light and bare branches heighten the effect wonderfully.

Starting Again

This blog is changing from one focused on my year in Beirut to one that will still be about photography, but will revolve around my life in Baltimore. It will continue to feature my photography and my writings about photography (with occasional diversions).

So, rather than starting a whole new blog, I am going to continue posting in this particular bit of cyberspace, but the blog's name will change (once I think up a new one). You'll always be able to find it at this web address, regardless of its name.

Thanks for visiting!

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I saw the movie "4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days" the other night. It's by a Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, and depicts a few days in the life of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in 1987. It is unrelentingly bleak, but mostly well-crafted and compelling. [Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's ruler from 1965 until his overthrow in 1989, had outlawed birth-control and abortion in 1966 in an attempt to increase the population.]

Although I enjoyed the storyline, I also found the little details of life under that authoritarian regime very interesting and familiar. In 1990 I took a trip to Turkey and Bulgaria with some friends from Cairo, where we were living. Bulgaria's communist leader had only very recently been removed by opposition forces and later in 1990 the Communist Party gave up the reins of power and free elections were held for the first time since 1931.

But when we were visiting there was still a shortage of food in shops, we could get very little at the few restaurants, pro-democracy protests were still being held and the general look and feel of most places we visited was institutional and bare. It wasn't all desolate, though. In Sophia we randomly met a man who spoke English and we went to visit his mother and sister's young daughter at their flat in an area of colorless high-rise apartment buildings. Inside the flat was a whole different world. It was warm and vibrant, they offered us what must have been precious fresh oranges, chocolates and some homemade fruit liqueur. For a glimpse at what we saw, here are a few photos from that trip.