Some photos from Colours of Ostrava

As promised, here are some of the photos I took at Colours of Ostrava festival in July. I didn't take pictures of all the bands we saw. Rufus Wainwright and The Flaming Lips got the most attention from me (mainly because I had the best vantage points for shooting during those shows). Not too bad for the little Canon G9, eh? Enjoy!

Rufus Wainwright

Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips

A confetti extravaganza!

Art House Co-Op 4x6 exchange

I recently decided to participate in the Art House Co-Op 4x6 exchange. You create a piece of art that is 4x6 inches, mail it in with a SASE and receive another artist's work in exchange. I'm not sure if it's a direct swap - person A receives my work and I receive person A's work. Anyhow, I decided to make a piece that includes 4 individual photos of clouds. I printed the pictures on my little Canon Selphy printer (great little printer but won't work on Lion so I can only use it with my laptop, which will only run Snow Leopard - oh technology, how you vex me!), which prints on 4x6 paper.

Here is the piece I'm sending in:

Collection of Clouds - Edgewood, WA 2010-2011

It's a fun idea to create a piece of art that you'll send off into the ether to be claimed by a random, unknown person. Reminds me when I would occasionally get mail art. I miss mail.

Tight on time

I've committed to writing on this blog about three times a week. Unfortunately, this week is extremely busy. Hopefully I'll have a bit of time to post on Sunday or Monday evenings. I'm heading to the Washington coast with a group of students tomorrow. I've brought both the Lubitel and my G9 so I'm expecting to snap something worth looking at. Still haven't had a chance to pick up the color Mamiya C220 shots. Should have them in my hot little hand by the middle of next week.

Yard sales, old photos and forgotten people

Today I stopped at a yard sale without any clear idea of what I was looking for. I was hoping to find some sort of funky tchochkes but the fellow didn't really have anything that interesting. However, I did find this ancient light meter that I picked up for $2 (in the original box with manual and warranty card):

I started thinking about the old photos you can sometimes find at yard sales and junk shops. I once found an old photo album from the 1920s in a junk shop in Seattle. From what I could guess based on the captions, the photos were taken in the Spokane, WA area during that era. At the time, it struck me as sad that there was perhaps no one in that family who had any interest in holding onto the book of photos and the memories of those people. Maybe there was someone who still wanted to know about their now-dead relatives, but because the book had been sold or given away and eventually arrived in my hands, they would never see those images.

I have many old photos from the early 20th century - my great-grandfather was a photographer (as well as a doctor) and took endless numbers of pictures of family and friends. Although I occasionally look at them and ponder who the people might be and what the heck I'm going to do with all the photos, most of the people pictured are lost to time. I don't know many of them and I know even less about their lives. I can only guess their histories by looking at how they dressed, how they presented themselves and the occasional, hard-to-decipher caption. I suppose it's sad but it's also the way of human existence. We might be remembered for a couple generations if someone bothers to pass on our histories. But, after a while, we'll be forgotten. Occasionally, someone (related or not) may see our pictures and wonder who we were, what we were like and how we lived. Then they'll move on to the present and we'll be forgotten.

Here is a question: in the digital age when so few people actually print pictures, how many physical photos will people in the future happen upon in the way that I did with the album from Spokane? The likeliness of someone retaining all my digital photos and actually looking at what I've stored electronically is extremely low. We live digitally in so many ways - email and text messages have replaced letters and postcards, television has replaced family time and conversations, and Facebook albums have removed the need for having physical photo albums. In the future, how will people remember their ancestors without the letters, the stories and the images?

Here is Ellinore on April 13, 1924 - I don't know her last name, her age, who took the photo or where it was taken: