The 52 Weeks Photography Project: July Edition
My lens, my words
This edition of 52WPP uses a familiar phrase: “Just like that.”
Years ago, I worked with a photographer on corporate annual reports. Julia was warm and engaging and excelled at photographing people. She would talk to her subject, getting them to relax, and when she saw what she was after, she’d say, “Yes. Yes! Just like that.” Her subject would brighten, stand up straighter, and reveal their personality. It may be the oldest trick in the professional photographer’s book, but I was fascinated to see this happen, all of a sudden, and without fail.
I’ve never been much for taking pictures of people. My subjects are land- and cityscapes, found objects, paths leading away. Bicycles, water, buttons, a detail on a grandfather clock. They, too, show personality and stand up a little straighter when I aim my lens.
27 — Abandoned
Vermont has always been my greatest muse for photography. For a few years, traveling about the part of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom, I became fascinated by the number of houses, barns and other structures in the northeast that were allowed to slowly collapse.
Well heck! These abandoned buildings were taking up good real estate, I remember thinking. So why don’t they (whoever “they” are) pay to have them demolished and cleared away so they can build something else? Well, that’s apparently a privileged New Yorker’s way of thinking. The standard of living in Vermont, while not poor, is far from affluent, especially in the NEK. I shifted my lens and pondered some more.
I started a photography project that I call “Falling Into Ruin.” It’s not a big collection, but each image seems to tell a poignant story of years gone by. Abandoned, yet still allowed to “age in place,” these structures have a gray, elderly beauty that strikes a chord in my heart.
28 — From My Kitchen
My husband is a bit of a prankster. He likes to surprise me with small, artful arrangements, usually in my kitchen. You might call them micro art installations.
For example, I’ll set out my pile of daily vitamins, turn away to fill a glass with water, and when I turn back he has made a little picture with the vitamins: a figure of an animal or a running person or a shooting star. If I leave a bowl of yogurt or a ripe peach on the counter for more than a few minutes, it will have a birthday candle sticking out of it when I return. (The candle art has been going on for decades. It hit its peak one day at work when my fax machine slowly pushed out a sheet of paper containing nothing but a photograph of a birthday candle. And the words, “For your lunch.”)
One morning when I opened the spice cabinet, I was startled to see this tiny troll figure grinning out at me. Situated between the beet powder and the nutmeg — with an inexplicable trail of wishbones behind him — the troll serves as a reminder to take life a little less seriously. Even though I have to move it every time I need to access my orderly collection of condiments, I leave it in place to remind me that creativity can be found anywhere.
29 — Street Photography
My years as a New Yorker were all but over by the time I got my first SLR camera and began taking photos. Land and sky, sea and shore, close-ups of flora and fauna, when I’m stealthy enough…but not people. Or street scenes.
But when I saw this guy striding along — was it 14th Street? — with a newspaper in one back pocket and a sandwich in the other, I had to capture his ingenuity. I, too, like to read when I’m eating lunch. Maybe I don’t need to carry it in a zippered cooler bag after all. But where does the beverage go?
30 — Frame Within a Frame (Just like that…)
The framed photo is my Blanche, a grandmother I never knew. She was my mother’s mother, and she died suddenly at age 52, leaving a husband and two teenagers. There are precious few photographs of Blanche. She had a way of dodging any camera pointing her way. She’d step just out of the frame, or she’d be the one holding the camera, and her shadow on the ground was the only clue to who she was. I’m fascinated by this mysterious ancestor.
My mother used to tell stories about Blanche, but only while I was very young. Maybe it made her sad, or she didn’t want to scare us by talking about losing a parent. But I did find one artifact about Blanche that I treasure. To the right of her framed photograph is my mother’s diary, which I discovered years ago and asked to keep. I found the entry — just four lines — in which my mother mentioned this profound loss. Most of the pages are empty after that.
