Category: Uncategorized

Every year, England’s “The Economist”  magazine publishes its Democracy Index, ranking countries of the world in terms of the degree to which they measure up in five categories to democratic standards.

The New York Times Magazine publishes this intense story of the Syrian city of Aleppo, after its takeover by the Syrian army.  Featured are images by Brazilian photographer Sebastian Liste (whose amazing black & white work has been referenced in past years in my photoblog — but that site, where I would normally post this story today, is still out of operation as a result of the massive WordPress hackery that my ISP and many other web hosts around the world are still trying to deal with.)

Driving Foothill Road …

Janet passes on this link to an article in which Bill Gates gives advice to the current graduating class.

Old friend (and former college roommate) Herman noticed a recent photo published here, and decided that it was, for him, reminiscent of an impressionist, perhaps Pissarro, painting. (I should mention that Herman’s mother was a professional artist, he shares imagery of some of his own oil painting projects with me from time to time, and he has spent a great deal of time over the years exploring art here in the US and especially in European museums and galleries — so I was inclined to take his comment, while undeserving, as generous and complimentary.) However, Herman sought to bring forth the better picture from within my photograph by cropping out its automobile-dashboard context. So here is my original from the other day:

And here is Herman’s cropped and re-conceived version:

And I am going ahead, if we are going to remove the dashboard, to Photoshop out the antenna as well (as I expect Pissarro would):

Now, I am ready to admit that Herman’s take does represent an “improvement” on the prettiness of the picture, but it does veer from my purposes on a couple of counts:

1. For a number of years, I have been amassing a “body of work” of what I call “windshield photography”. This rather tongue-in-cheek collection is mostly a result of how I while away my time as I ride shotgun on road trips. And I tend to include contextual visual elements — dashboards, side mirrors, windshield reflections — as important parts of the narrative.

2. What I publish on the While Busy family blog has no conscious pretension to artistic purpose. This blog is as close as I get to keeping a journal or diary, despite on-again, off-again attempts over the years, and was originally intended just to keep the grandparents in touch mainly with the antics and evolution of their grandkids — and now is just a snapshot continuation, mostly sans kids — of some of the reality of our daily lives, to be shared with other family relatives and some close friends. As such, what gets shown often has little meaning beyond that family-document context. (I even sometimes use the blog to nail down family dates and events when questions around fact arise.) Photographs that might be capable of standing on their own as photography, and that particularly interest me, might make their way to my other photoblog instead.

Speaking of “windshield photography”, if I were to add the photo identified by Herman to that collection, I might render it like this:

Or this, to reflect the Herman touch …

Or not.

Further Meanderings

Regular viewers probably are aware of my banal penchant for clouds and trees.  I suspect that this can be traced back to my childhood when, on the farm, I would lie back in the grass or weeds — often pretending to be out of earshot of my father and his calls to return to work — and study the treetops and skies. And even today, the first thing I tend to do when stepping through my front door is to scan the sky and clouds and trees.   (What appears at eye level here in Lag City is not always quite as interesting, but then, maybe it’s just a farm boy’s weather consciousness.)

Documentation of family and daily life events are, for some, an artistic calling. (The work of Sally Mann immediately comes to mind.  And of course there is Stieglitz and O’Keeffe.  But I mostly think of Emmet Gowin and his intimate and sometimes shocking portraits of his wife and family in rural 1970’s Virginia.)

While I have a good number of old friends who vigorously pursued and continue to pursue a life of and in art, I became somewhat disillusioned around the politics and compromise and self-promotion that seemed to be involved for myself. And, of course, there was the recognition that I was “just another more-or-less competent photographer” and would have to apply enormous dedication and effort to go beyond that, if it was even possible. Except for commercial transactions like populating many customer websites during my ISP employment and an occasional print sale, photography has been a matter for my own amusement since I showed in a few gallery exhibitions and publications years ago. Not everybody has the psychology (or talent) needed to do this stuff.

Okay, back to clouds and trees.

Out on the economy for grocery shopping and errands.  Just when we thought summer was almost here, cold and rain return.  But we stock up on healthies for M-Day this weekend, and I compensate by catching up on newstand reads.

Read this Quartz article to see if it helps clear things up.