photo américain

my photo at the BMA

As I've explained in an earlier post, 19 Baltimore photographers were asked to respond to an exhibition, Looking Through the Lens at the Baltimore Museum of Art, of classic photography of the first half of the 20th century with their own photograph. The responses are displayed on three screens at the end of the exhibit. It may rotate, but for now they are using my photo and the one I responded to on the description page of the project on the BMA website. Here's what it looks like:

To see the whole page where it appears, go here.

Evergreen

Evergreen is the name of our neighborhood in Baltimore. I'm intrigued by its back alleys and the winter landscape. Below are some recent photos. I'm experimenting with a paler color palette than usual.

I read an interesting article in the New York Times in January about a Dutch landscape designer who plans gardens by how they will look in the winter. The article said, "For Mr. Oudolf, in fact, the real test of a well-composed garden is not how nicely it blooms but how beautifully it decomposes." Piet Oudolf said, “The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”

This reminds me of the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi, which is the aesthetic sensibility that finds beauty in incompleteness, imperfection and decay. Both these perspectives, of the landscape designer and of Wabi-sabi, describe well what I enjoy visually in the world. I need to keep this in mind as I photograph.