This is pretty much the best picture I've seen in a long, long time.
You know how all these photographers travel to Paris to stick their tripods in the exact spot as Atget to recreate his magic, or maybe just to take notes on a city's change? Well, eventually they'll GPS our cameras, and then, well, then our generation or perhaps the one which follows us will have some Egglestons and Winogrands and yes, Atgets, and then being their ghost a hundred or a thousand years later will mean something completely different; they'll stand in the exact spot you or I or one of the famous ones did, breathe deeply hoping to conjure your ghost, your luck, your magic.
I personally don't have much nostalgia for this sort of thing, and I don't suppose I'll ever want to stand right where this picture was taken, but I would want to say to the photographer: "You've done it! You captured the inner woo-hoo, the elusive one, the childish gratitude inside of every photographer that feels exactly like blasting off into outer space powered by Aqua Net. That's quite a feat, actually, and can't be discounted. You've done it all with two cans, a man and a flash. Congrats."
The poetry of aerosol and the ghosts of Atget
Flickr Curation XXX
You ever notice how it's hard to look nonchalant in nipple clamps? Maybe it's just me.
The quilts of Gee's, at PB
Not Since Oprah decided to add Faulkner to her book club authors has anything been so notoriously ridiculous. The above quilt is from the collection of the rural Alabama artists of Gee's Bend. Their lovingly handsewn and handquilted blankets are one of a kind and completely exquisite, both as bedding and as works of abstract art. They'll be auctioned off soon (sad, actually, that they'll be leaving their original homes for likely vapid white walls or worse, archival boxes for storage). This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pockets of the daughters, grandaughters, and great-grandaughters of slaves and sharecroppers who used the most modest pieces of fabric imagineable: shed clothing worn until threadbare, grain sacks and rags... making them, ohhhhh, perfect. This is what I truly heart about the wealthy: enslave a people, then a few generations later, buy trinkets like a tourist for quarters on the penny.
