Awkward Family Photos

http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

Barnumville

Portraits of circus sideshow performers, by Matt Hoyle:

http://www.matthoyle.com/#/PORTFOLIO/BARNUMVILLE/

Above, The Mysterious Clawman.

One year in 40 seconds.

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

One year in 40 seconds. Beautiful. And just one reason I love living in the east. Via eirikso.com.

54631 Mulberry St., New York - Circa 1900

While I'm posting pictures of New York, I thought I would post this beautiful picture. Look at all the kids in the street!

Here's the Google street view for the same location today, though I can't figure out what's where. I found this on the Wikipedia page for New York City, via Katie's wonderful At the Half Note blog...New York's finest on-line diary.

Did I mention...I love New York!

03-01-93

Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid photo every day for 18 years (1979-1997) until the day he died. His pictures are an amazing collection of snippets of everyday life--his work, his friends, his city, his lovers--and finally his illness. You can read more about it here and here.

To see Livingston's Polaroids, go here.

"The Parisians" by Alfred Eisenstaedt

This is one of my all-time, favourite photos, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who loves it.

Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera.

From the LIFE photo collection.

Tibetan Sky Burial....

...and a committee of hungry vultures waiting nearby. This photo is from an amazing collection of pictures by Zhuang Xueben from Tibet in the 1930s. Discovered via (and I keep saying this) one of my favourite blogs, Heading East.

I would not mind being "buried" this way. Better than the commercial North American way.

Your Fez

Tai didn't win her fez, so I thought I would post one for her to make her feel better. Tai, this fez was home-grown in Anaheim. It's a green fez, in keeping with the environmental spirit of the times. I thought your aerophant might appreciate knowing that.

This is from the website 20x200, where you can buy great art cheap. They make 200 prints (8.5 x 11) of fine art photography and offer them on-line for $20 each. What a brilliant idea.

The Brown Sisters 1975-1999

Photographer Nicolas Nixon's "25 Years of the Brown Sisters" series captures so much of the melancholy beauty of the human experience of aging. Since I was a child I have stood before the mirror and struggled to imagine myself 10, 20, 30 years older. Now that I'm well along that road, I can see that my imagination wasn't especially accurate. No mirror is sharp enough to predict the life ahead of a person and tell them how it will be reflected back through the look in their eyes. That can only be determined by the decisions we make each day.

Graciela Iturbide

There's a fascinating piece in the L.A. Times about an exhibit by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. Thanks to Tex(t)Mex for the tip. (Above, The Angel of Sonora, 1979.)

A student of photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo and perhaps most famous for a prodigious, alluring body of work made over six years in the remote village of Juchitán in Oaxaca, Iturbide, 65, has had a prolific career and has shown all over the world. This month, however, marks her first museum exhibition in Los Angeles. "Danza de la Cabrita (The Goat's Dance)" at the Getty Center contains nearly 140 pieces highlighting Iturbide's work in Mexico and the U.S. -- and the line in the sand that attempts to separate the overlapping lives she's found there. "The Mexican and the American Mexican," says Iturbide, "are marginal people -- on both sides of that line.

"Her work expresses "the culture between the culture," says author Luis Rodriguez, who has also been pulled to the worlds that call to Iturbide -- Oaxaca and of course the East L.A. gangs he became famous for writing about in his memoir "Always Running." "It's the way I think of Mexico when I'm in Mexico City. You feel all the layers -- the ancient, the indigenous, the modern all coming together. Her photographs are borderless. Everything comes streaming over it. No border, no wall will stop that."

20,000 Mexicanos Desnudas

I never thought I would see even one Mexican nude in Mexico City's Zocalo. But here you go, today almost 20,000 stripped for the photographer Spencer Tunick. And right in front of the cathedral no less. ¡Que escandalo!

It's hard for me to see these photos and not think they were shot at some kind of mass human sacrifice or a genocide or something, but then again, I have a suspicious mind.

There's video here, and an article in English here.

By the way, according to some historians the Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 people a day for three days when the Temple Mayor, which stood at this very site, was dedicated around the year 1390.