photo friday: christmas

Merry Christmas to all, particularly any of you with enough time on your hands to post photos four days before Christmas. I'm pretty much ready for the holiday, besides of course any kind of food preparation that might be expected of me. I can't really get into that sort of thing, I prefer to languish around in the hope that some kind neighbor will show up with a plate of frosted cookies. And then, I can always rely on Charles to procure some sort of meaty dish when he realizes all his wife has the inspiration for is broccoli. That said, I may make traditional palacinkas Christmas morning.

And, in case you were worried, that ghostly thing in the foreground of the last diptych is not the Ghost of Christmas Past, but a glow-in-the-dark Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton Ike was trying to get into the photo.



P. S. Here's our Christmas card—Christ is born!

[ F O R T H E S A K E O F A S I N G L E P O E M ]

   Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

R A I N E R   M A R I A   R I L K E 
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

{ p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y }

photo friday: shadow diptychs

All the photos in these diptychs were taken with my iphone while walking in my neighborhood this week. The scenes look more wintry than is fair--it's been a very lovely Spring and flowers are blooming everywhere.

In other humdrum news, I finally finished one of the more complicated dresses I've been sewing for Genevieve. It's very green. Photos of the dress, and other clothes I've made, will hopefully be up soon--with or without children in them.

We've also been informed that due to a high demand for kindergarten spaces, the preK program is being cut next year at the school across the street. So there goes my having to worry about whether to send Ike there. My neighbor has been hosting a small Waldorf co-op preschool in her apartment once a week, where Ike and four other 3-year-olds sing songs, make bread or soup, followed by an hour or more of outdoor play. The moms have been talking about renting a classroom at the Catholic high school (also across the street but in a Northern direction) for next year. Perhaps now we have more reason to make it work.

See, this is all very humdrum. I could write some of my more lengthy reflections on introversion, but really, I don't want to. I just want to get back to my sewing.

And I'm looking forward to Julia's diptychs, and any other shadow photos or diptychs posted. Next week I want to try: shooting up, that is, pointing the camera in an upwards direction (as opposed to other sorts of shooting up). This will not be an easy assignment for me, as I don't really like looking up to take photos.

photo diptych tutorial

Since I suggested diptychs for next week I thought I might say a few words about how I make my own.

First, diptychs are not so much made up of great photos, but what the photos say together. Two very dull photos can become one very good diptych. In fact, at least one rather dull photo is often necessary. And conversely, two interesting photos may make a very poor diptych because each image competes against the other.

For example, this image of a doorway in Harlem, taken at a rather irritating angle, is not particularly compelling.

However, something changes when another image is added. Another not-so-compelling shot, this time of waves lapping on a beach, is placed below it, and a dialog is created between the two. And a far more interesting whole.





The angle problem in the top image is compensated by the downward angle in image below it. And the two comment on each other: they start telling a story.

Which brings me to my next point: diptychs are mini stories. As if they are two frames in a movie. Do the waves suggest something about the broken window? Perhaps there is more behind that door than we thought. What is trying to escape through the latticework? Or break in? Is the door an entryway to a different sort of place than we imagine? Or does the door merely suggest we go on vacation? 

(It doesn't hurt the diptych to be somewhat color coordinated as well, and display some of the same themes--here: lacy waves and intricate white latticework.)








I think the storytelling part of a diptych is the best part. Here is another diptych that works because it tells a story.


Is the paper bird is looking at the café table, hoping for a crumb?



This image also has another element of a good diptych, movement from one photo to the other. Here the bird is facing the table, the line of the gold construction paper moves toward the curves of the chair almost seamlessly. Your eye moves back and forth from one image to the next. Lines and shapes repeat themselves, making the two seem like one image. The pie-shaped sections on the table repeat themselves in the sections of the gold leaves. In the first diptych, above, the point of the wave moves as if out of the white latticework window above it.

Finally, a diptych can also be a play of two objects or images, placing them together as though they are one object or place. My friend Julia made a diptych like this this week, of a camellia bush and a tree trunk. Here is another diptych of this sort, where the tennis court seems to be placed right under the grassy hill.

This final image could easily serve as a shadow diptych for next week's photo Friday theme, as if the hills themselves are creating the shadow of the trees on the people below.

More of my diptychs can be seen here.