In China

I'm in China, reporting three stories, through early March. It's all here on Find China, http://chinable.org, so why don't you click it already? Come on back to OPP once that trip is over.

Colombianidad II

Thanks to Felipe, again.

Marcos's Cocuy photos on PDN's Photo of the Day

Marcos's work in the Cocuy is featured on PDN's Photo of the Day. Take a look.

El Cocuy in the Times

On the Ritak U'Wa Blanco. photo: Marcos Roda

I report from El Cocuy National Park in this week's travel section.

Above the Clouds in a Secret Colombia

AS crampons crunched ice, our guide, Rubará, raised his traditional woven sisal-thread handbag by his face and asked me to snap a photo. We were climbing above 17,000 feet, just shy of the summit of the Ritacuba Blanco, a glaciated peak shaped like a soft-serve ice cream cone, at El Cocuy National Park in Colombia. Aquamarine-hued icicles hung from the maw of a crevasse and, far below, clouds blanketed the Orinoco Basin.

The landscape stretched across dozens of ice-capped peaks and deep cirque valleys. Moraine lakes, formed by the natural erosion from glaciers’ unhurried flow and retreat, shimmered in mineral hues. Nearly 30 miles away, we could just make out the telltale church spire of the town of Soatá. Save for a photographer friend and one other guide on the ice field, no other people were in view. The February day was bright. I’d finally caught my breath.

Read on here. And please check out Dennis Drenner's excellent photos in the slide show as well.


More photos, from Marcos Roda and myself, with the voice of Miguel Herrera; 2:08 in all:


Thanks to mucholoquito for creative commons use of his music, off Jamendo.
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Park Street Remembered

Window views, Park Street, June, 2009

Some ideas about home, explored in this video of the house where I grew up, in Charlottesville. A rough cut; low res; just playing around. Photos mine, from June, 2009.

Or, pay a visit of your own:

View Larger Map

How we got here

Fraternity from Richard Mosse.

Here's how Mosse describes the 5 min work:

Fraternity was shot at Yale University's infamous DKE frat house in under an hour. The men were happy to participate in the project in exchange for a keg of beer. They compete against each other to shout or scream the loudest and for the longest time. When they cannot scream any longer they must stop, and cannot begin again. DKE (pronounced Deke) stands for Delta Kappa Epsilon, and counts five US presidents in its alumni, including George Bush Jr, George Bush Sr, Gerald Ford and Theodore Roosevelt. Other famous Dekes include three Justices of the US Supreme Court, one Vice President, and countless State Governors, Senators and Speakers.

For me, Mosse's images of palatial ruins in Iraq match:

Just a damn amazing picture, that's all.

Transiting the Sun

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.

The phtographer made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.

Image Credit: NASA/Thierry Legault

How Jell-O bounces

After the dart comes the fascination.



Follow links for HD versions, and more footage from a 2500 fps camera.

A foul-tasting brown sludge...

Glad to see John Otis and Scott Dalton out in the jungle -- always something interesting they come back with. This time, it's yajé:


Read the story over at GlobalPost.

I'd say that the idea is ripe for South Park, except that they already did it:

Wires II

Nathan Harger is one of PDN's 30 new photographers to watch, and he also works the same high-contrast black on white of things strung and structural:


Untitled (Powerlines), Elizabeth, NJ 2008

Harger's working in a long tradition, maybe none more influential in this category than the documentary work of the FSA from 1935 to 1945, like this image of West Virgina telephone wires by John Vachon:



I'm certain there's something to the upward angle on these shots (and the celestial background) that gives them their reverent tone. Here's Alfred T. Palmer, 1942:


Enough to suggest even a Weschleresque convergence between John Vachon and Enrique Metinides:

As if laying the grid were ominous of an inevitable future.

Wire: The Power Tokyo Project

(click to enlarge)

Ok, so I said I had a thing for wires, and my site shows it. See Christopher Griffith's Power Tokyo project here (let the promo run for 5 secs, then the slideshow will appear). Meantime, we'll assume that somewhere a grad student is at work on a thesis called "The Grid: Power Lines and the Collectivist Art Naif." Until it's published, I'll keep looking up to admire what electricity has wrought.

Chances are the view's just as good in your own home town, unless you live in New York or Paris, where most of the slinging happens underground. We've lost the novelty and wonder of the extent of the wiring of our lives. That's why the wires on my site are intended as more than an exercise in compositional geometry: they should be an exhortation to look up, to look.


(Robert W. Kelley for Life, May 1962)

The grid, after all, courses with instant death:



This is what Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides figured out. He takes the same formal approach to the geometry of the network, but adds dynamism to the graphic composition. Here the human element does more than just provide scale and perspective. It literally charges the grid:



More on Metinides here and here.


(Hat tip to A Photo Editor, Rob Haggart.)

Photo page update

I've updated my photo page. Please give it a visit.

Toros, Bogotá

Sound and photos are my own.

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make do

Yeah, but an architect costs money.

(thanks to Felipe for the tip.)

Jasper the friendly ghost

NYC, December 2008

Jacob's Ladder NYC

Jacob's Ladder, NYC