Getting Neighborly on the Tops Parking Lot

IMG_1532, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Near Ithaca Falls, Getting Soaked

IMG_1514, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Ithaca Falls After the Rain

IMG_1512, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

These Days

IMG_1384, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

It's summer in Ithaca, I'm finished my coursework and writing a masters thesis. These days, I mostly shoot the shit on my Flickr site, click this image to go there and peruse photos.
Click on my profile to see other blogs I may or may not be updating with any regularity.

A poem by Rita Dove

Exit

Just when hope withers, the visa is granted.
The door opens to a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. A visa has been granted,
"provisionally"-a fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it's gray. The door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the world's open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.

Rainbow over the Arts Quad

rainbow1, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

A few weeks back, we looked up from our work after a fine spring rain and this was the view from the LA studio window.

Landscape Architecture Studio

IMG_0853, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

I had my last class on Monday.
I've spent the bulk of each day for the past three years in the top floor of this building under that barrel vaulted ceiling.

Columbines in Tremen Gorge

IMG_0898, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Speared Magnolias

IMG_0752, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

David's Hellabores

IMG_0378, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Click on the picture to see David the new home owner.

Crown of Thorns

If you were disappointed that I didn't bring you back a crown of thorns souvenir, rest assured you can get your own right off the web.

Caeserea

Haifa and Caeserea 221, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Last Day in Jerusalem 079, originally uploaded by EastJoppaRoad.

Flash & Pidgeon must have gone off at the same time.

Before going to Jerusalem, this is a model I made of the part of the city we are doing our studio project on.

got the biker's shadow and his headlight but not the biker himself.

Wow

Topographies of pavement and salt

golumpki

polish rye bread

steaming golumpki

After the ParkeHarrisons

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison will be exhibiting "The Architect's Brother" at the Johnson Museum here at Cornell March 25–June 11. (They will be giving a talk on the 30th at 5:15). One of the interesting things about their work is that the inclination is to assume it is a digital process in some way, but it's not. In fact, they work entirely manually with photogravure, collage with paper negatives, and printing by hand.

I've no interest, personally, in becoming intimate with chemicals in a photolab. The effect is of course entirely distinguished: wonderful resolution and depth, a luminosity that (probably) can't be replicated digitally. But it's not something I am motivated to sacrifice the time, money, and health to achieve.

But ever since seeing their work I've imagined playing with their themes and aesthetic on my own, digitally. Because I can. Digital technology enables me to run out and experiment with several hundred shots in an afternoon, out of which I may only keep a couple. In photoshop I can adjust hue and saturation and contrast, collage, smudge, blur, smear, change the point of focus, enlarge, shrink, reformat and post to the web within an hour.

I'd like to play with this soon if I get a chance. I want to take some images in the blustery barren winter landscape, and I have a willing model right now - a fellow who collects vintage clothing and has a wonderful pinstripe suit and fedora.

The story I am thinking of setting up is the return of a local man to his small rural, still agricultural, town after his adventures in the Big City. I like the idea of the theme "developing" - I will not be developing the "film" but a story of a person developing personally. I'd like to use photoshop to set up some surreal montages- a waterfall pouring out of his chest, crows perched on his hat and shoulders, cows or sheep that replicate in varying opacity into the horizon - a ghost train of animal production, a techno-utopia glimpsed through the cracks in the siding of a dilapidated barn. I like the idea of the man returning to the town feeling out of place / stuck in time while the town has changed/moved forward in time... so that, rather than "future" being represented by the City - as it is often - the traveler instead represents a kind of time traveler not moving linearly but fluidly between eras and also in and around a kind of aesthetic diaspora with a kind of longing for things he didn't experience. The idea that "I'm from another era but I would never want to live in other than this one".

Sorry, it's really hard not to speak Art & Architectur-ese when you've been reading hundreds of pages of criticism. Know that it's all to a degree tongue in cheek.
Tongue in Cheek would be a good name for a blog.