Visiting Auschwitz as a tourist, I try to imagine what it was like in 1943. Unthinkable in 1943 that it would ever be a tourist destination.
Parking Lot, Auschwitz
Auschwitz
Crematorium, Auschwitz
54. Return to flaneuring...Elephant & Castle
It is an absence if no one notices?
I took almost no photos in the year after the Berlin trip in February 2015…I won't describe or define the gap, at least not today, but it was with photographic intent that I took my Canon 5D with me to London last Thursday, where I went to a cocktail party at LCC (London College of Communication). Elephant & Castle is across the street. I love the markets of London, and this one is remarkable -- complex, and doomed to extinction gentrification. (Where do all these gentry come from? They are the colonists of our era.)
My eye felt alive at Elephant & Castle and that felt so good.
Elephant & Castle
Elephant & Castle
51. DOOM AS FOUND ART
Street photography is always found art, isn't it? Each day on earth is filled with how many thousands of masterpieces of photography if only yet intelligent eye and camera are in the right place at the right moment? Doesn't even have to be the right eye. Photography is the only medium (unlike say painting) where the complete novice can accidentally grab a masterpiece. Sometimes luck is the best strategy of all.
50. Stains in the Vein of Cy Twombly
A wall in Barcelona next to the escalator up from Tube or Underground or Subway…just around the corner from Parc Guell…A friend had Twombly's "Summer" as a screensaver and it reminded me of this photo so the reference is post hoc.
Barcelona
49. On a Shed for Shopping Carts, Rimini
A sign plastered to plastic siding, in a shed for shopping carts outside a downmarket food store in Rimini. Signage reversed, roughened, textured. Feels nautical and underwater to me. Reminds me of a shower stall of sorts.
48. Wall, Rimini
A wall, a sign, negative space, decay, pleasing complexity of a flat plane. Italy in miniature. In Fellini's home town, no less. I was in town to film the World Barista Championship with Harry, and his Auntie Tot came along to do sound. I took this picture on a twilight walk (passage da toura) after a day of filming.
Rimini, Italy
47. Kodak Baby, MacArthur Park
"McArthur Park is melting in the dark..." I think that song is about Chicago's McArthur Park. This shop window is across the street from Langer's Delicatessen, vestigial limb of a once Jewish neighborhood and the Kodak Baby and the film canisters are melting in the light.
46. Swordfish, Brixton Market
A bit of a cluttered frame, but the electrical plug i what makes it work for me. The jury-rugged quality. The seeming permanence of the temporary solution. The minor tension of it not looking all that safe or reliable.
45. Village of Eyes in the Sky
On my last trip back and forth to from Cambridge (UK) to Santa Monica, I shot stills for a credit sequence for the new movie ("The Trouble with Dot & Harry"). Because I was doing a job for the movie I had no shyness about taking a lot of photos. Making a movie is a grant of immunity, an escape from self-consciousness reticence/reluctance.
Something spectreal and haunted by all those screens careening through the sky...
En Route to Los Angeles
44. Mirror - Steam - Off-Season
On a vacation to the interior of Turkey, in January, where and when no one else is vacationing...
43. Berlin: Marx & Coca Cola
My first trip to Berlin, with Harry. Is the Godard quote ("the children of Marx and Coca Cola") nearly fifty years old?
Berlin
42. Parking Lot, Santa Monica
A moment of chance beauty in the Trader Joe's parking lot on Pico. When I'm in Santa Monica, shopping at Trader Joe's is my hobby, solace, recreation.
Santa Monica
41. Agony of Paris: Birds, Marble, Sky
I like how the pigeons form discordant negative space, disrupting, disturbing classic form.
Paris
40. Sleep is where you can find it. (LAX)
Shooting a title sequence for "The Trouble with Dot & Harry" on my journey back to Cambridge (UK) from LA, all my shyness and fear of being upbraided for taking airport photos vanished. I was on a mission. I needed these images for my movie. A few years ago, I asked Tod Papageorge about his Central Park series -- was he self-conscious taking the photo of people in the park? "No," he said, "The people were transitory. Art is eternal." Tod seemed such a self-contained and modest man that the certainty and vehemence of his answer startled and impressed and stayed with me.
Los Angeles
39. The Theatricality of Tottenham Court Snacks
Iconic. Accidental. Ambience. Proximity. Posture.
The semiotics of snacks.
Tottenham Court Road
38. Shrouded in Santa Monica
I took this photo outside the Santa Monica library. I did not worry about the subject seeing me, so shyness vanished, but I still felt like I was intruding on something private, and disturbing. I did not think of Christo (as an art historical reference) until I started writing this. As usual with me reason and reference follows from the moment of creation (which in photography, for me, is the moment of capture).
Santa Monica
37. Pair of Hearts, Pair of Extinguishers
Two couples. Which has the better, more stable relationship? Or...neighbors, happily co-existing, at least at the start of the party (this is the corner of a hotel events room -- I know the context because I was there -- does a sense of context leak into the frame?). It caught my eye, of course. Symbolism unforced, not really even thought about until I wrote this paragraph. I swear on a stack of Gideon Bibles (which they don't have in England) that I'm intuitive.
Cambridge, England