Category: Hand Made: Art and Craft

Global Union 2012 – The dancers

Alverno College held their annual Global Union concert in Humboldt Park; on the south side of Milwaukee; this past Saturday – a gorgeous, hot, sunny, late summer day. The music, with its varied ethnic inspirations, always brings many to their feet and sets their bodies in motion. You can see many more of these dancers in this larger gallery.

(click photograph for larger view)

Too young! Dear Alisa – too young!

This morning, as I waited for coffee to brew,
I read the following heartfelt words,
written by my daughter, Tanya:

“Farewell my sweetest, my dearest friend.
Farewell, my inspiration, my muse, my confidante….all my love, Alisa.
May your new travels be incredible and limitless.
I already miss you so much.”

beautifully expressing deep love, and heart-rending loss

Alisa, Tanya’s best friend since high school,
mom to two young daughters, Sig’s beloved wife, daughter and sister, friend to so many
— danced to life’s rhythms with the soul of an artist —

Damn these cancers — damn them all.

I photographed Alisa on 4×5 polaroid print film for her high school year book.

A half dozen years ago Alisa borrowed my Linhof Tech IV
in order to practice her own photography, using some of Polaroid”s last run of various print films.

Alisa, Anderson, Strautmanis, Venus: Beautifully, intensely unforgettable

Here – the day she bought my M6 Classic with 28 mm Elmarit

and finally
A soul escaping confinement, Watercolor on paper, Shadowbox, 1980 by George Lottermoser

The road I live on

Within a 4 mile stretch of Mequon Road (WI Hwy 167) you can find 4 Synagogues, Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist churches and schools, the local public high school, fine dining, a sub shop, Cherry Berry frozen yogurt or Culvers frozen custard, designer clothing, designer shoes, kayaks and other sporting goods, 2 country clubs, 3 banks, and both immodest mcmansions  and very modest little homes — including my own.

I find the images below rather interesting for their visual, conceptual, and in some way, tribal contrast.

(click photograph for larger view)

The two women from Madison, WI who delivered and installed Tammy Baldwin‘s political sign on my front lawn.

The women I found, 3/4 of  a mile east of my home, modeling designer clothing:
as I walked home from grocery shopping later in the day.

Leica M8, 28 mm Summicron Asph

What are friends for?

Wendell Berry wrote, “Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing…” — Wendell Berry, from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (He also published a collection of essays titled What Are People For?)

This photograph of my friend Doug, with a couple friends, at his 50th Wedding Anniversary dinner seems to express all this.

(click photograph for larger view)

Canon 5D, 70 – 200 mm L USM IS

Back to the wabi-sabi of it all…

Here are two passages from Juniper that summarize wabi-sabi:

The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. …

Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.

(click photograph for larger view)

in the corner of my garden

on my porch

in my little town

Leica M8, 50 mm Summilux Asph