diploid breath gino

The first step towards getting somewhere

 is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

- John Pierpont

I have some real treats for you today, all based on photography but focussing on some odd perspectives-  just my cup of tea!  Guess I made good use of my weekend 'sans blog' because I was mining away with my little pick axe and managed to come up with some gems.  

“I don’t want to tell people what to see in my images,” explains Noell S. Oszvald who lives and works in Budapest, “this is the reason why I never really write any descriptions other than titles. It shows what I wish to express but everyone is free to figure out what the picture says to them. It’s very interesting to read so many different thoughts about the same piece of work.” 

Photographer Amy Friend  briings light, romance, and mysticism to vintage photographs in her 'Dare Alle Luce' series. Working from old found family photos Amy creates limited multiple archival digital prints of her work.  She brings life back to those who have been lost, and establishes a mysticism around her memories.

The Minimum Monument project is a critical reading of the monument in the contemporary cities. In a few-minutes action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral ice; in the place of the monumental scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies.The project started with solitary figures, later a multitude of small sculptures of ice were placed in public spaces of several cities. The memory is inscribed in the photographic image and shared by everyone. It is no longer reserved to great heroes nor to great monuments. It loses its static condition to gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water. It concentrates small sculptures of small men, the common men.

100 Abandoned Houses is the name of the latest project of photographer Kevin Bauman. Photographing abandonment in Detroit since the mid 90's, Bauman always found it "amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence". Detroit, a once prosperous industrial city with a population of 2,000,000 during the 50's, has been left with just over 700,000 citizens today, becoming an example of the downfall of American cities. With a huge number of abandoned buildings, among them over 12,000 houses, it has become a favorite location for urban explorers and photographers.

Here is work from the Brooklyn studio of Lori Nix who photographs epic scenes of destruction and grandeur, natural wonders and glittering metropolises, magnificent architecture and heroic landscapes that all have one thing in common—they’re all fake. Lori gives us a tour behind the artifice, showing us how she meticulously crafts the miniature sets using found objects and model-making materials.  Below is a video if her studio practice and also go to the link above to her website. This stuff is amazing!

As I was reading every scrap I could find on Lori I stumbled to her blog where there is a story about visiting the Buffalo Science Museum and it hit some long forgotten memories of my growing-up years.  Read the blog entry linked below.

The Buffalo Museum of Science, featuring in-house dioramas that greatly impressed Lori Nix and her staff- read her blog entry HERE.  This is where I spent so many hours of my childhood and I can remember it in detail.  In fact, my mother commissioned a lamp by the head  designer there who she knew from our hometown, a beautiful lady slipper in a glass case and lit from above.  The designer, who's name has missed my memory bank, made things on the side for neighbors on occasion.  She loved that lamp for decades and now I carry it around looking for a 'place' for it because it meant so much to her.  Now my grandkids play endlessly with the cord switch turning it off and on, off and on.  My mother would have a fit!

I know you won't believe I actually edited this post, but I'll save the next batch for another time.  God, I love the internets!  And I know you all do too or you would have quit me long ago.  Thanks-   On the run to the studio this morning to get the AC going-  going to be 86 today.  Looks like last week's 'winter' is over-  I had to wear a sweater on night it was so cold.