Susan Barrett Price's Blog, page 47
July 7, 2010
Dreaming of Faraway Places
This is one of my favorite pictures of Jim. 1990. Thailand. On our own in Lopburi, north of Bangkok. It was hot. We stopped at a streetside restaurant, where we dared to buy only the bottled water. I thought Jim looked like someone out of a Joseph Conrad novel. Or out of Hemingway. My sweaty hero.
On this Thai-hot day in Rochester, 20 years later, we're still dreaming of adventure. Nailing down plans for an August roadtrip to the cool northeast edge of the continent: Nova Scotia. We thought...
July 5, 2010
Rescuing Old Photos: Islamic China
From ChinaBest_TIF
At age 43 I took the trip that changed everything. Five weeks on the Karakoram Highway in Central Asia (with Jim at age 60) resulted in (1) marriage, (2) a novel written, and (3) an enduring perspective on the kindness of strangers.
We took about 800 photos… on good old Seattle Filmworks Film, which yielded both prints and slides. But then we got a very avantgarde Kodak PhotoCD player from Anny and Terry and transfered the best shot to this new digital technology...
July 4, 2010
Read the Declaration of Independence
Your homework: Before you make the cole slaw, before you baste the spare ribs, before you pack the lawn chairs for the fireworks display, take a few minutes to read the full text of our Declaration of Independence. Discuss.
Like all sacred scripture, it's got something for everyone in today's America. I read it as anti-tyrant, pro-good-government [with my proud liberal bias:] . My reading says good government…
is representative of the people [not remote multi-national corporations whose board...July 3, 2010
100 miles of cataloging
Every time I delve into our photographica collection, I wind up sorting through the hundreds of slips of paper where Jim recorded his purchases from about 1979 through 2000. The box of slips isn't disorganized. It's all very neatly in chronological order.
But, with a variety of different items on each slip of paper, they are impossible to sort any other way. And a lot of the items have already been traded or sold.
I have no desire to be an obsessive catalog-master. But we do need to know what w...
July 2, 2010
Lewis Hine & Empire State Bldg: W00t or Woof?
From LewisHine
The magic maw belched out an envelope of Lewis W. Hine photos for today's consideration. Hine used his camera as a tool of social reform, especially during the Great Depression. But one of his best known series was his documentation of the construction of the Empire State Building (1931). We have 18 prints, shown here in the little slide show below. [If you are getting this by email and can't see the show, click on the link to the blog site.:]
They have a great kind of...
June 30, 2010
My Performance Review
The hell of being your own boss is that your 360s wind up being with me myself and I. I woke up this morning realizing that half the year is over. Have I accomplished anything? Luckily, I did take the time in January to write my job description:
Today's quick mid-point review (read>>>) tells me I've done better at my stewardship function that my daily guilt trips have led me to believe. Thumbs up for organizing collections and sales.
As for my creative manifesto,* I've made good progress on...
June 29, 2010
Ansel Adams: Meticulous Professional
Ansel Adams, Self Portrait
I wanted to do something that would allow me to listen to the Kagan hearings, so one of the magic bottomless storage shelves yielded a collection of 1960′s Ansel Adams letters — mostly correspondence with Beaumont Newhall, his longtime friend and director of the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography. So I'm scanning them, wondering what next.
The letters are workaday, about exhibits going up — thoughts about technique, lists of photos with...
June 28, 2010
Self Portrait
The newspaper is calling for self-portraits as part of the local Neighborhood of the Arts project. I couldn't resist. Something about me.
I tarted up my old chestnut, with the shoulder brats (?) angels (?) pundits (ok), added some background complexity (so me), and the brain doodles (can you believe people have accused me of thinking too much?). Of course painting over a photograph means that it's pretty literal as art goes, but (unfortunately) being too literal is the curse I inherited from m...
June 27, 2010
Is The Constitution Our American Bible?
With the Elena Kagan hearings starting this week, we're bound to hear a lot of palaver about how the the courts should or shouldn't read the U.S. Constitution. Should they treat it as a living document, to be held up against the times we live in? Should they read it literally, with no leaps of logic? Should they try to get inside the precise framers' intentions? Yadda-yadda.
All I can say is that our Constitution is looking more and more like a sacred text — our Bible — handled with respect...
June 26, 2010
Rochester Riviera
Every once in a while we have to remind ourselves that we live on the north coast of the United States. Yesterday the weather was perfectly June — the warm breezes drew us to lunch on Irondequoit Bay, then on to check out the Harbor Fest where the Genesee River meets Lake Ontario in the Charlotte (say sha-LOT) neighborhood.
There were supposed to be "tall ships" in the harbor, but there was just the one: the Hollywood version of the Bounty, made for the Marlon Brando movie — unabashedly...
