Archive for the 'selected photographs' Category

Kite Board Lift Off  by  D. Ude

Avid kite boarder Wendi Palmer, “lives, breathes and dreams about kite boarding constantly” she says.  “There is no feeling as free as being pulled into perfect wave by a kite and being able to shut the kite off and surf the wave, then pull out and do it all over again”.  Wendi practices her art around Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on both ocean and sound side, where the heritage of pirates, shipwrecks, and violent storms segues into the present summertime warm lusty winds and choppy waters.

Tuscany Street 2009 by Clara Rojas

Falling up by Tom Hyde

East Fork of the Satsop River, Washington State. July 3, 2009.

I shot film for years until I started shooting digital, and that’s mostly what I’ve done for a number of years now. Until two days ago. I dropped my Canon 5d, with its expensive L glass, all of 20 inches onto my gravel road. It landed just right, or wrong, and the mounts on both the lens and the camera broke off at the same time. The camera is … toast. I didn’t even get a conciliatory self portrait of shock and rage out of it. Actually, I may have gone through all the stages of grief. Silly really.

Now I shoot film in an old rangefinder without a working light meter and an apparent two stop shift in the shutter. I like it.

Faded box of cheap Kodak film courtesy of the Matlock Country Store (stored near the deep fat frier).
Processing and scanning courtesy of WalMart.
A good day courtesy of a bad event.

The results … well, whatever, it was a good day hunting and I never even tried to look at the back of the camera. Made some new friends. Left prints stuck on tree branches by the river bank.
They’ll find them tomorrow.

God I love summertime.

Website: tomhyde.viewbook.com

Snapshot on the Road by Marcin Łuczkowski

This picture was taken somewhere between Mietków and Milin (Poland). The image is a part of the “Everyday Snapshot” essay I started two years ago, and I will probably never finish.

In this particular image, a newly married man is standing staring in a field, while taking a break from the wedding photography session.

Website: www.marcinluczkowski.com

The Best Fall of my Life by Patricia Lay-Dorsey

Much of the time living with a disability is a big fat bother. But there are moments touched with magic. Like the early evening I was out taking self portraits for the photographic essay workshop David Alan Harvey and Jim Nachtwey were co-teaching during the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville.

I had turned the dial to self-timer, pressed the shutter release button and lowered my camera down to the red brick pavement. The light was good and I intended to get a shot of me riding my scooter up the hill in this quaint Virginia town. Knowing I only had ten seconds before the shutter would release, I pulled my scooter accelerator lever down hard.

As if a noose had tightened around my neck, I was yanked towards the left wheel of my scooter and thrown to the ground. I immediately knew what had happened because I’d experienced it once before: the long end of my neck scarf had gotten caught under the wheel. Whenever this happens I remember the famous dancer Isadora Duncan who had died like this in 1927, but she was riding in a sports car not a scooter.

I heard myself cry out in pain. Two men came running over to help. I calmly instructed them on how best to lift me back into my scooter seat: “Stand behind me, put your hands under my armpits and lift me until I’m standing upright. Keep holding tight because I can’t walk on my own, then swing me over into the seat of my scooter.”

The fellow was strong so the lift went smoothly. His friend saw my camera on the pavement and brought it over to me. I thanked them and they walked away.

It was only then that my brain kicked in. Could I have captured the fall with my camera? I caught my lower lip in my teeth and quickly hit the playback button. There on the LCD screen was my body lying on the pavement, partially obscured by the rear wheels of my scooter, my mouth open in a cry. I was in clear focus with the foreground blurred and the whole frame perfectly composed. As if it had been set up.

I was so excited I had to share it with someone. My “lifter” was talking on his cell phone in front of a nearby restaurant. I scooted up and showed him the picture, but he didn’t seem to get it. I didn’t want to bother him so I smiled and scooted down to the pedestrian mall. Earlier I’d seen a classmate about a block away with his camera gear slung around his neck. I soon found him again. “Monte, Monte, you’ve GOT to see this!!!” He understood.

When I showed the picture and told the story to David, Jim and the class during our daily critique the next morning, David, who had been mentoring me on my “Falling Into Place” self portrait project for a year, let out a loud “Whoop!” and came over to give me a congratulatory kiss. Yes, my ribs were a bit sore and I had a small scrape on my knee, elbow and big toe, but that was nothing. Of the thousands of self portraits I’d taken since starting this project on June 11, 2008, this was the first and only TRULY authentic photo I’d ever taken. All the others, although reflective of my lived reality, had been consciously set up in one way or another.

I’ll always think of this as the best fall of my life.

Patricia’s essay on BURN: Falling into Place
Website: www.patricialaydorsey.com

My Daughter’s Question by Marc Davidson

We buried the remains of a family dog today. It must have reminded our four year old daughter Laurence of last summer when we buried my father’s remains.

Laurence has a vague understanding of death, or “going back to nature” as we have explained it to her; she knows Grandpa Davidson was in a building when a plane crashed and now he is back with nature.

But today was a new kind of question. A why question. A why question we didn’t know how to answer.

“Daddy, why didn’t the pilot watch for your dad?”

—

This diptych of my father’s remains are  part of a long term project which began with an essay I did for David’s At Home Loft Workshop in September, 2008. David’s hope for us was to start an idea in class that we would continue after the workshop; an idea that would take us to the next level. My idea was Zero Ground, an essay on 9/11 and the identification and burial of my father’s remains who died in the World Trade Center.

The image on the right is my father’s identification card which was recovered from Ground Zero in December 2001. In June 2008, my father’s remains were identified using the latest DNA techniques and the image on the left is my brother Adam, holding a piece of my father’s rib.

And so, Zero Ground has led me to “Shared September”; a project on the effects of 9/11 which I am currently working on and hope to complete for the 10 year anniversary in 2011.

Website: www.marcdavidsonphotography.com