Have you ever stood on a beach and looked out over the water to some distant boat on the horizon and wondered about the people out there? I have, which is why I enjoy Mårten Lange's project The Sea so much. The little boats give scale to the sea's vastness, humanize the incomprehensible, and provide a space for your mind to fill with a story.

Lange is an editor at Farewell Books which specializes in delightful (but cheaply constructed) photo books.

The American tendency is to associate any display of skin with sex and because of this I imagine many here would have a hard time wrapping their minds around the traditional Japanese sentos (public baths) and onsens (hot springs) you find all over Japan. In the most traditional village sentos families, neighbors, and co-workers bathe together, male/female, young/old with everyone gloriously and unabashedly naked. During my visits to Japan I was sometimes invited to join friends for baths after work and was always struck by the family atmosphere in these places—everyone with their little washcloths resting on their heads washing, gossiping, and just enjoying the warm soak.

Hiroyo Kaneko's series titled Sentimental Education gives us a bit of the feel of these places. When I compare these nude figures to the contrived "we're all so so naked and we don't care!' figures in Ryan McGinley's recent work I'm reminded that often the best way to showcase someone's humanity is by catching them in the middle of their most ordinary daily rituals.

Related: Sento at 6th and Main by Gail Dubrow.

I was lucky to see Raimond Wouda's show School last year at FOAM in Amsterdam, but didn't had a hard time finding the photographer's images online. Happily that has changed and Wouda now has created an eponymous website featuring School and several other projects. The image above is from one titled On Scale. Scale is an important aspect of Wouda's work. He shoots hyper detailed large format images and displays them at wall size. His revamped website only hints at the impact these prints have in person. (The prints are immersive without being monumental and self important.) I hope some smart New York gallerist hooks him up with a show. I'd love to have a chance to commune with the prints again.

I got to know Gail Albert Halaban's work while hanging around Gabe Greenberg's print studio and came to be a big fan of her highly stylized slightly offkilter peeks into the world of upper crusty New Yorkers.

For her new project titled Out My Window NYC she invites New Yorkers who see their neighbors only through the window and have an interest in connecting with them, to contact her. She states, "I would like to photograph you looking into their place and them looking back at you."

She's posted a few early images from the project and the results are promising. Be sure to click on the images to get a nice large version of the image.

Alexy Titarenko is best known for his long exposures of Russian commuters like the one above. The grim loveliness of that project speaks to both photography's early history and to more recent Soviet reality. ( You can here Titarenko speak about this series on the lens culture website).

Titarenko has a new show at the Nailya Alexander Gallery titled simply Venice. The photos are a nostalgic look at Venice. The images are as pretty as all of his photography is, but I found them to be misleading in the way tourist board postcards are misleading. They hide the ugly overcrowded overtouristed reality of the city today. This seems to be a missed opportunity as Titarenko's technique would have lended itself well to both showing Venice's teeming tourist masses and commenting on the nature of the city itself, instead we get images that evoke an empty romantic Venice that exists primarily as fantasy. This comes off as fluff.

The phrase that came to mind while looking through Christopher Talbot's portfolio titled Transformational Light was "backwoods, Crewdson light". Sounds horrible, but it sort of works, at least for me. Reminds me of East Texas.

I'm a fan of Brad Temkin's project titled Relics. The Illinois based photgrapher shot the image above Iceland which features regularly (and for good reason) in the portfolios of landscape photographers.

I like photographers who work in places with history.
I like photographers who use natural light.
I like photographers who get out there in the world.
I like photographers who shoot with a specific point of view.

Bert Teunissen has done and continues to do all these things traveling around the world shooting what he calls Domestic Landscapes. His photographs are a vivid protest against the prefab readymade corporate world that seems to encompass more and more of our lives and are vivid arguments for living life connected to a specific place. In interviews he estimates that 90% of the locations featured in Domestic Landscapes no longer exist.

I've blogged about Mr. Teunissen before, but he is doing an edition with us tomorrow at 20x200.com so I've posted again as a heads up. If you want to purchase a print, the best way to get notified is via the 20x200 mailing list which give you a bit of a jump on the edition.

Teunissen has blogged about Domestic Landscapes over at Aperture.org.

I have a soft spot for photography made in the world's more visceral places. Davin Ellicson is working on a long term project documenting rural life in Romania where according to his bio he lived and farmed with a peasant family for a year in the Maramures region. He knows the people he's covering and it shows.

While I don't necessarily understand some of the editing choices he has made, the portfolios of California based photographer Victor Cobo contain some compelling images full of narrative delight and mystery.

John Chiara by using archaic techniques and hand built cameras has become of photography's most innovative landscape photographers. Working with giant truck-sized cameras that he actually crawls inside of while creating an image he produces one of a kind prints that manage to evoke not only the grand tradition of making landscape pictures but also of the essence of photography itself.
If you happen to be in New York, there are only a few days left to visit his exhibition at The Von Lintel Gallery. Go See the works in person as they demand to be seen.

This short video (real player format) of Chiara shows something of his technique.

John Davies is on the short list of four finalists for this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. His large scale prints are best seen in person as they contain an incredible amount of detail. They're currently in a show of prize finalists in London. Of course any British readers of this blog have probably already seen the exhibition.

The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street
London WC2H 7HY

Unlike many photographers who visit to Pyongyang, North Korea only return with images of the Potemkin Village spectacles put on for tourists, Charlie Crane manages to capture the some of the stark emptiness and weirdness of the place. Crane's recent Welcome to Pyongyang is one of the best of the recent spate of North Korea books and has been widely hailed as one of the best photo books of 2007.

We have a Charlie Crane print available on 20x200 this week!

Next Thursday here in New York Nicholas Nixon will be opening a show titled Patients which is a must see... It features arresting images of terminally ill patients. Nixon turns the photographic cliché of shooting the dying it's head by making savagely beautiful almost sensual portraits that are at once sculptural and delicately, tragically human. Most of the images from the show aren't online yet, but I expect they will be soon.

Nixon became part of the modern art photography canon for his Brown Sisters project, but his portfolio is wide ranging. I wish galleries/phtographers would realize the value of putting up older projects online. Nixon's Photos from one Year for example is a no brainer for the web.

Long time readers of this blog know that I have something of an obsessive relationship with snow, a product of a largely snowless childhood in a hot corner of Texas. Simply put I love snow. It makes me a little bit crazy, so I guess I was predisposed to be a fan of Lisa Robinson’s Snowbound, photographs taken over several years of snows. Her landscapes remind us of the thrill of being the first to tread on new snow and the wonder of discovering a world made new. The understated images achieve power through subtlety which is a hard trick indeed given the challenges of shooting and of printing such images.

This work deserves to be seen in person as digital files viewed on screen don’t do the prints justice, so make the trek over to DUMBO and check out the show at the Klompching Gallery, it’s up through February 29th.

If aren’t in the New York area, Robinson’s book of the same title was cited by PhotoEye editor and photobook connoisseur Darius Himes as one of his favorite photobooks of 2007.

Tangential: And while we’re on the subject of snow and photography why not re-read Alec Soth’s snow-tagged posts. Of all the blogs that have come and gone over the years, his is the one I miss reading the most.

Stefan Ruiz is a San Francisco born photographer of Mexican-Italian descent. His wide ranging portfolios cover everything from African refugee camps to the sets of Mexican telenovelas, to Cuban Psychiatric hospitals. They give us much to chew on.

His book, simple titled People features portraits from many of these projects presented in sequence.

As a response to yesterday's post a friend asked if I had ever seen the work of Mikiko Hara. I haven't seen it in person, but I recently read a nice post on Hara on Japan-Photo.info, one of my favorite photography blogs. Hara's work is quiet and poetic, a rare quality in street photography. Works for me.

Update:Lesley Martin, who always writes incisively about photography has written a nice piece on Ms. Hara in the Winter 07 issue of Aperture. I've met Lesley a couple of times while sitting on Jen Bekman's Hey Hot Shot Panel, she also happens to be swell in general.

Hiromi Tsuchida always included on the short list of great Japanese photographers for his books Hiroshima and Counting Grains of Sand. He's recently released New Counting Grains of Sand, a continuation of the original project. It's a delightful book and worth tracking down (you can find it on PhotoEye .)

If you don't visit Tsuchida's website for the photography, go for the 20 year timelapse of his head... I have a weakness for time based projects...

And if you happen to be in London you still have a week to see some of Tsuchida's prints in person. They are part of a show titled The Eyes an Island: Japanese Photography 1945-2007.

Related: Noah Kalina, Time Photography

In interviews Melanie Schiff often references music. "You hear a sad song and you feel like it's your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that." And many of the images in her current portfolio literally reference music. There are still lives with skulls and cassette tapes, another of light bouncing off cd cases, and a self portrait with a Neil Young album. It might sound silly when described but it all just works. The image selection is eclectic and personal and for me it does play like a very good album.

I read on MAO today that Ms. Schiff was recently chosen for the 2008 Whitney Biennial which is good news indeed. I look forward to seeing her enormous prints here in NYC.

More of Schiff's work can be seen at the Kavi Gupta Gallery.

If you've ever found yourself in a taxi roaming a part of the world far from home, you'll appreciate Stefan Rhoner's essay from Morroco "The King Is Coming"...

This morning I was reminded of this exhibition of photographs of South Africa from 1998 by a friend who attended with me. Then this evening I got an email about an upcoming Goldblatt show. If you don't know his work you should check it out. The photographs are quiet but powerful, especially in person.

If I were in a band I'd want my album cover to be photographed by Michael Schmelling who is known for his atmospheric band portraits. He also has a terrific set of personal stories online. The image above from his series titled El Paso.

Today I came across the website of Dinu Li a Hong Kong born artist whose family emigrated to England when he was a young child. His work from China/Hong Kong is especially remarkable, and strike me as the images of someone both looking for himself and trying to picture a past that doesn't necessarily exist anymore.

I should note I found this work via Asian Photography Blog which is fast becoming one of my favorite daily reads.

After writing a post about Hendrik Kerstens' Dutch Masters-inspired photos, a friend recommended I check out the work of Pierre Gonnord who also makes portraits heavily influenced by Vermeer Rembrant and the like. This time the photographer is a Frenchman who lives in Madrid. My bet is that he uses simple lighting setups-one big diffused light or a big northern facing window-to achieve this look.

If you have to be born into a national artistic tradition you could do worse than being born Dutch. The love of natural light, the emphasis on quiet emotional portraits, and the long history of reverence of the everyday interiors gives the modern artist much to chew on whether working within the tradition or in opposition to it. I remember seeing Bert Teuissen’s Domestic Landscapes series for the first time and my first thought, was, "ahh he must be Dutch"- the national DNA is just so embedded in the work.

Another fascinating unmistakably Dutch artist is Hendrik Kerstens. For the last 12 years Kerstens has been almost exclusively photographing his daughter Paula creating photographs that consciously evoke Vermeer and other Dutch masters and yet are unabashedly modern. He’ll make a photograph of his daughter in an archaic hairstyle and in a classic pose, but then you notice her arms peeling from a sunburn. A hoodie will substitute for a 17th century bonnet, and so on... The play between the contemporary and traditional as well as the natural tensions between the photographer and his daughter give the series an unsettling frission and make it worth keeping on your radar.

Related: on tradition and tronies, on his technique, a clickable map of all the known vermeers (generally lousy scans), Vermeer's Camera

Celine Clanet is a versatile photographer with a wide ranging set of portfolios covering editoral and photojournalistic work, but I'm most drawn to her personal portfolios. Check out her sets titled Maze and Une mélodie japonaise.

I've mentioned Dylan Chatain on this blog before... he recently updated his website... there are no new images, but the edit is somewhat different than before and it's fascinating to see how a new edit can dramatically change the mood of a particular project... The work on the site was culled from thousands of images taken during some very long road trips in which he did nothing but shoot film for days on end....and from what I've seen there are several projects in there just waiting to be curated...

Like many young photographers Miranda Lehman's portfolio is full of moody pictures of couples in bed, but the photograph on her site that hooked me is one above that evokes classic Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia imagery..

I'm almost always a fan of photography of interiors of places that look well lived in... the type of photography that people like Bert Teunissen or Seth Thompson do so well, so I was pleased to come across a team of Polish photographers who work in this subgenre. Their projects can be seen here or (in bigger sizes but with fewer images) here.

It is much too late to be looking at photography but these images by Asako Narahashi from her series half awake and half asleep in the water matched my mood perfectly. Indulge yourself.

More can images can be found on the artist's website.

Donald Weber is a Guggenheim fellow and a Lange-Taylor prize winning photographer based in Moscow. His portfolios whether they be from the Ukraine or Turkish Kurdistan or Chad are reminders of just how muscular and illuminating photography can be when in the hands of a fearless observer... Please stop wasting your time here and click over to his site right away.

The image above is from an Austrian artist named Lois Hechenblaikner who shoots the "iconography of mass tourism". This series is part of an exhibition of 21 Austrian artists titled '21 Positions' at the Austrian Cultural Forum here in NY (pdf catalog of the exhibit). It's a nice lineup of artists most of whom were new to me...

As an aside, and I know this is completely unfair, but when I heard about an exhibition of Austrian artists my head instantly went to that scene in the film Before Sunrise where the two characters meet a pair of non-professional actors on a bridge:

Continue reading Lois Hechenblaikner (and 21 other Austrian Artists... »

Image ©Neil Rough
I always like hitting up my photo minded friends for the names of photographers to watch for.... today a friend forwarded the above image and recommended I check out Neil Rough's Tunisia Portfolio which she described as "mysterious and enigmatic"... It is indeed. "Who are these people," I kept asking myself. "People he met along the way? Guests at a party?" They seem to exist outside of normal time. This is the kind of portfolio I love.

I should also note that Mr. Rough does a great self portrait.

I first heard about Denis Dailleux from an Egyptian friend who said the photographer 'gets' Cairo like no other photographer she knows. Later I found a few of his images in the Aperture book Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World (more info on the Nazar show on the 2005 Fotofest site). Now I've finally found a few of his images online. While he has several portfolios of other subjects, Cairo seems to be where his heart lies.

Images can be found here, here, and here. Can't find his book anywhere...

I generally refuse to browse photography sites with hover based navigation because I find that convention so darned annoying, but I really like Katie Murray's photography so I suffered through her site... I especially like her series on Queens which I've always found to be New York's most impenetrable borough... A few more images can be found on Jen Bekman's site.

In response to my previous post a friend sent along a link for Rachel Hope Feierman's site with the promising beginnings of a project on kids hanging out in parking lots. As someone who grew up in a small town where this was the only form of entertainment on a Friday night, I instantly connected with these images. I also like the way the photographs have been laid out on the page. The juxtapositions lend a cinematic quality the images might not have had on there own. Somehow though the project as presented feels incomplete to me, I hope there is more to come.

Feierman is recent SVA MFA graduate from an impressive class.

I received an email the other day about a new exhibition from South African photographer Pieter Hugo and, as usual, it's provocative and inspiring work. Pieter is on my very short list of contemporary photographers whose work brings me back over and over again for repeated viewings. The new project is called Messina/Musina and was taken in an around a colonial town on the northern border of South Africa. The gallery site also points to an interview with Hugo about the project that will be included in a forthcoming book.

More Hugo Links:
Witnessing the End 2007 interview
interview on the making of the Hyena Men May 2005 (images from the hyena men series)
another interview 2005
Pieter Hugo (personal site)

Update: Someone just emailed that Amy Stein wrote an almost identical entry to this one complete with the same title yesterday. Except that she one ups this post by noting she has one of Pieter's prints hanging in her house. So don't listen to me, listen to Amy who is doing great work of her own and delve into Pieter's portfolios!

Laura Letinsky has gained art world fame for her evocative still lives, but of her projects Venus Inferred is still probably my favorite. She talks about these projects and others in this 2004 interview with mouth magazine.

From: oilpainting-a@sohu.com
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:04:52 +0800
Subject: From the oil painting studio

Welcome to the Oil Painting Studio.

We have been successfully working with fine art galleries and artists internationally for over a decade. Our museum quality realism is created by 25 of Chinese most skilled artists. Each artist has been formally trained and has received their degree from many of the finest art universities in China and abroad.

We have always and will continue to respect international copyright laws. Your order of original art whether created from digital, photographic or any other form will never be recreated for another client. Each of our artists works inside the framework of their own specialty whether portraiture, landscape, marine, floral, still life or what ever your personal need may be. Our extensive community of fine artists is capable of creating exactly the fine art oil painting that you order. We offer an unconditional money back guarantee to all of our clients if you are dissatisfied with your shipment.

We look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship. Please contact us by e-mail with your requirements. Individual orders by private parties are gladly accepted. Deeper discounts are available on larger orders. Please contact us for details.

Sincerely,

The Oil Painting Studio.

About a month ago I pointed to a set of photographs from Eastern Europe by my friend and gallerist Nelson Hancock. Now Nelson has put up a new set of images, this time for an upcoming exhibition called Kamchatka, Photographs from Russia's Far East. As he notes, "Most people in the US have only heard of Kamchaka because it was an important territory in the old board game Risk..." His portraits from the Kamchatka River valley both bridge the distance and add to the mystery of this far away place.

The show opens June 14.

I'm a fan of the portfolios of Yale MFA student Kathryn Almanas... She mastering the hard trick of mixing images rooted in reality with imaginary tableauxs to create projects with emotional heft...

I was going to blog these all separately but it would take forever, so here are a few more portfolios I saw at Review Santa Fe that caught my eye:

I've mentioned Birthe Piontek on this blog before. Meeting her in person and discovering her to be modest, sensitive and funny made me like the work all the more.

Paula McCartney showed a portfolio of fake birds in nature. Not sure if that description sounds appealing, but I assure you the prints had a touch of magic to them. She also handcrafts jewel-like artist's books.

I noted the work of Ferit Kuyas before heading out to Santa Fe and his work did not disappoint. While his website is still down it's worth checking back in to look for his project on Chongqing. One of the things that came out of the review was a name change for the project. The working title was Double Happiness which was a deeply personal choice (his wife is from Chongqing), but during the course of one of the reviews he realized a more apt title would be City of Ambition riffing on Stieglitz... I like the new title and love the images from the project.

Daniel Traub was also showing work from China. His project called The City's Edge an especially relevant in a time where Chinese cities are growing at an almost unfathomable pace. Daniel lives in Shanghai and was just selected to be in Jen Bekman's spring Hot Shots show (full disclosure I was on this Hot Shot's Reviewer Panel)

Rachel Herman was another photographer with really beautiful prints. The web doesn't do them justice.

Sarah Wilson is a photographer for Texas Monthly which is known for it's deeply researched stories and sharp photography. Her photographic essay on the murder of James Byrd in Jasper Texas reveals the ripples and scars left by the events of that night nine years ago.

Finally I hope you visit the work of Kay Lynn Deveney who presented a project called The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings, a Welshman she she met while in graduate school. For each of her photographs she had Mr. Hastings write a caption and the images were presented together with his text. A book of their collaboration will be available soon from Princeton Architectural Press.

One of the nice things about a portfolio review is that you get to look at a broad range of work outside of your own specific interests. I rarely seek out industrial or architectural photography, but at the review I got a chance to look at several excellent portfolios in this genre including the work of New York based Israeli photographer Shuli Hallak. She makes big powerful prints of the world's largest cargo ships and factories and so on... Ms. Hallak was also a pick in PDN's 30 emerging photographers for 2007. The portfolio worth checking out even if this isn't normally your kind of thing.

I'm back in New York and have nothing but good things to say about Review Santa Fe...

For the next few days I'll highlight work from photographers I met at the review...

First up, Karolina Karlic whose portfolio of images from Detroit was notable not only for the loving handling of her subject matter but also for her luscious prints. Karolina now lives in Minneapolis home to a strong community of smart young photographers.

The other day I mentioned a photographer named Li Yu in passing and said his portfolio on the Beijing Fotofest site suffered from lack of explanation. Thomas Wain of Stoke-on-Kent, England who saw one of the photos on Tim Atherton's site wrote me asking if I knew of a web page that had those explanations (the images are recreations of scenes from local newspaper crime blotters)... indeed I do.

The portfolio is called 13 Months in the Year of the Dog and contains English translations. In describing the work Li Yu writes:

"A boy was riding a bicycle with a girl on the backseat in the street. Many passers-by accused them of violating the traffic rules, which forbade bikers to have anyone on the backseat. Instead of following their advice, the boy rode faster. All of a sudden, the girl shrieked in alarm. Her skirt was tangled up into the wheel and completely torn up. Soon the boy fell onto the ground with the bicycle while the girl stood aside, blushing and only appearing in her underwear. This was a news story I read in high school and it still remains vivid in my memory. The extremely critical writing of the reporter who wrote the story severely condemned certain uncivilized phenomena in the society and met the needs of his readers.

The year of 2006 was the year of the dog according to the Chinese lunar calendar. It consisted of 13 months and four Valentine's Days, totaling 385 days. In the same year, Liu Bo and I launched an art project entitled "13 Months in the Year of the Dog." We picked out two local news stories from newspapers in Wuhan, restaged the reported scenes, and shot large photographs of them. During this process, we brought our own imaginations and other everyday experiences such as the secondhand experiences we had obtained from films, TV and news photos into this project.

Our selection of the news stories was inspired by the early-mentioned news report. But nowadays, the magic power and literary value of news has far exceeded our anticipation and even films: deceit, murder, eroticism and violence…so striking and unimaginable. How can one decide whether these stories have truly happened or not simply relying on written words? Maybe it's not important, at least they have truly existed in the papers. But as for the readers, these stories are as eye-catching as the blushing girl in her torn-up skirt. That's the so-called media truth. The life of today is the history of tomorrow. Someone says that history is like a girl ready to be dressed up by anyone. Now, let's put the girl with the torn-up skirt back into another beautiful outfit."

I love this picture by Luo Dan of a performer waiting to go on stage... It was included in the photographer's portfolio for Fotofest Beijing. Luo Dan has a nice touch, many of his images are infused with quiet lyricism and hints of narrative that draw the viewer right into the work... The fotofest portfolio was a short selection of images from his project National Highway 318. (National Highway 318 is longest east-west highway in China stretching 3314 miles from Shanghai to Tibet ...) Many more images from the project can be found on Luo Dan's personal website. This is a link to the actual images.

The fotofestbeijing site is worth checking out on it's own for it's varied portfolios by Chinese photographers of all stripes. Some suffer from lack of explanation, for example I think it helps to know that Li Yu is recreating stories found in local crime blotters... but even without text there is plenty of food for thought here...

One of the many things I love about early photographs of seemingly empty street scenes is the slight blur that comes from the people who were passing by during the long exposures. Michael Wesely does modern versions of those long exposures taking the technique to the extreme sometimes leaving the shutters on his custom constructed cameras open for months or even years at a time. In the longest exposures people vanish completely, but the sun and moon leave streaks in the sky...

While his website features obtuse navigation and an extremely poorly coded javascript that occasionally hangs Safari and slows Firefox to a crawl, the site is still worth exploring for it's visually rich and thought provoking images which include still lives and motion studies in addition to the landscapes...

The image above was taken over two years during the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz... (via Pruned)

related: PBS interview

I had a dream last night in which I looked out the window and kept seeing Peter Garfield's mobile homes flying through the air... Luckily a detailed Peter Garfield website exists with many of his flying house pictures as well as lots of behind the scenes info to fill my waking hours...

vaguely related: Dreams (an mp3)

Talking about his project Be Yourself Tonight in which he rephotographs images from his family photoalbum Norwegian photographer Dag Nordbrenden says, "[this project] very much deals with the sadness of returning home... there is the experience of returning home to something that appears to be exactly as it always has been, but at the same time confirms that things have changed, since you have changed. The family photo album is in a way a celebration of the family - a celebration of the family that used to be. It is both something very private, but still something that one is eager to show in social gatherings to resent the official image of the family. But still photographs of holidays and celebrations will never guarantee that family members actually know each other."

(via Foam #7)

My gallerist Nelson Hancock is a fine photographer in his own right (and also, for good measure, a trained anthropologist). He's known for his sumptuous large format landscapes, but I also love his medium format portrait work... He just updated his gallery website and on it has posted a set of portraits taken around the eastern fringes of Europe in the early 90's. They are wonderful.

One of the great evocative travel experiences of my life happened in a dingy windowless room in a Rajastani guesthouse. I was bed-ridden with both dysentery and giardia and had not been outside in two or three days. I wanted to change rooms but was literally too weak to move. There were a tiny pinholes in the wall letting in shafts of light and a dim 5 watt bulb overhead which only worked a few hours a day. Hours were spent watching the ceiling fan circle ever slowly around and around and killing flies... so many flies. The nights were absolute black which was actually a relief as even the flies would stop buzzing.

One morning (at least I think it was morning as time had little meaning in there), when I awoke I noticed a dim but unmistakable image projected on the opposing wall... actually several images. There was the inverted village and the red hills, a tree with a swing, the train... dusty blue skies and clouds... The pinholes in the wall were turning the room into a natural camera obscura... They had been there all along but I had been too sick to notice. It is hard to express what comfort those images gave me and I think they were the boost I needed to get well enough to get out of there. I've never seen the camera obscura phenomena in any room since, although I've often dreamed turning a room of our house into one for a while.

I was thinking of those days in Rajasthan today which led me to revisit the work of Abelardo Morell the great creator of roomsized camera obscuras... His work is a reminder all rooms have secret lives as silent witnesses not only of the comings and goings inside but of the world beyond... and this is as true in the great rooms of New York City as it is in some miserable flyblown guesthouse on the Udaipur to Jodhpur railway line.

Related: a camera obscura fan site, Wifi Camera Obscura, Did Vermeer use a camera obscura?

Perhaps it's the vestigial art historian in me, but I love still lives with fruit. I like them precisely because they are so mundane. Artists have been attempting them for something like 3000 years and so often they fail which is why a good one jumps off the wall.

'Portraits of fruit' as I refer to them were one of the first impulses of photographers. Daguerre himself took many. For the next hundred years most photographic still lives were primarily lush 'our bounty overfloweth' type images taken by painter/photographers like Roger Fenton (the image at the beginning of this post is one of his from 1860) or vanitas of decay (again usually taken by photographers schooled as painters).... After almost 100 years of this the surrealists finally punched life back into the form starting in the late 20's.

(In my fantasy art collection I would own this little Man Ray peach from 1931)
Anyway this is all a long winded way of saying making an in