photo américain

Ongoing series of photos taken in the alleyways in Evergreen, Baltimore

 

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.

 

Baltimore backyards and the BMA

I've been wandering around the back alleys of our neighborhood with my Zeiss Ikon folder camera, which looks like this:

It takes surprisingly good photos, although the edges go soft (an effect I like for it's uniqueness). I submitted one of the photos to the Baltimore Museum of Art for their "Looking Now: Digital Photography Project," which I was kindly invited to participate in. (Click on the link and then scroll down the page to see the project description.)

If you're in Baltimore, I recommend seeing the exhibit "Looking through the Lens: Photography 1900-1960."  I and 18 other professional Baltimore photographers responded to individual photos in this exhibit by taking our own photographs, which will be displayed in the exhibit in a digital display. It opens March 16. I will scan and put my photo contribution up once I get the print back.

In Beirut I was most intrigued by the trees' ability to adapt to the urban environment, and vice-versa -- buildings and walls were sometimes built around the trees. I was interested in how each interfered or encroached on the other. In Baltimore I seem to find the graphic quality of the tree branches and their shadows falling over and mixing with the manufactured environment to be most compelling. The winter light and bare branches heighten the effect wonderfully.

Starting Again

This blog is changing from one focused on my year in Beirut to one that will still be about photography, but will revolve around my life in Baltimore. It will continue to feature my photography and my writings about photography (with occasional diversions).

So, rather than starting a whole new blog, I am going to continue posting in this particular bit of cyberspace, but the blog's name will change (once I think up a new one). You'll always be able to find it at this web address, regardless of its name.

Thanks for visiting!

----

I saw the movie "4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days" the other night. It's by a Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, and depicts a few days in the life of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in 1987. It is unrelentingly bleak, but mostly well-crafted and compelling. [Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's ruler from 1965 until his overthrow in 1989, had outlawed birth-control and abortion in 1966 in an attempt to increase the population.]

Although I enjoyed the storyline, I also found the little details of life under that authoritarian regime very interesting and familiar. In 1990 I took a trip to Turkey and Bulgaria with some friends from Cairo, where we were living. Bulgaria's communist leader had only very recently been removed by opposition forces and later in 1990 the Communist Party gave up the reins of power and free elections were held for the first time since 1931.

But when we were visiting there was still a shortage of food in shops, we could get very little at the few restaurants, pro-democracy protests were still being held and the general look and feel of most places we visited was institutional and bare. It wasn't all desolate, though. In Sophia we randomly met a man who spoke English and we went to visit his mother and sister's young daughter at their flat in an area of colorless high-rise apartment buildings. Inside the flat was a whole different world. It was warm and vibrant, they offered us what must have been precious fresh oranges, chocolates and some homemade fruit liqueur. For a glimpse at what we saw, here are a few photos from that trip.

missing Beirut

We've been back in Baltimore for 3 weeks now and I still miss Beirut. I finally got around to scanning some of my last photos from wanderings around the city. Here in B'more I'm thinking about photographing, but have only taken one roll (as yet undeveloped) with my old folder camera (a Zeiss Ikon) of the alley behind our house. The Hasselblad is in the shop for a broken mirror, so when you notice a few of the photos below are out of focus, that's why. I find I am still contemplating trees. Here they are skeletons, creating filigree patterns against the winter sky. Very beautiful in an austere way. For now, though, here are some shots of temperate, Mediterranean Beirut.

(Banyan trees on the AUB campus with their roots like ropes stretching down from the branches.)

(Cactus plants in pots in the woodsy part of AUB's campus. Below is an olive tree in the same area.)

As much as I love the AUB campus, it's really my old neighborhood of Hamra that I miss the most. Below are spots I frequented or walked by often. The first is a fig tree, though I seem to have completely missed the proper focus. Nevertheless, I like the feel of it, an improbable spot for a tree to sprout up. Unfortunately I never seemed to pass it when there were actual figs to be picked. (You might recognize the graffiti on the lower right.)

(Cafe Younes is where I bought coffee, someone behind the counter was always roasting the beans in small rotating cylinders over gas flames. And you can get all sorts of espresso drinks here to accompany your people-watching or newspaper reading outside.)

(Cigale is where I bought croissants and ogled various pastries and elaborate buche de noel cakes at Christmas.)

(This stand is on the bottom floor of the building we lived in and is owned by one of the landlord's sons. He makes delicious manouche. In other parts of the Middle East it's called mana'eesh. It's flat bread made like little pizzas with various toppings. My favorite is with zaatar, the mix of spices, including thyme and sesame seeds, spread on top with olive oil.)

(Sam's is where we bought beer, wine and arak. I had lots of nice chats with Sam too. It's the first place we went after we experienced the car bomb assassination of Walid Eido a bit too closely. A drink while watching the news on TV back at home with friends was necessary for pulling ourselves together. And talking to Sam, who had heard and felt the blast, was a comfort too.)

It's these places, among many others, that really anchored my experience of the year in a very particular locale. Even if I didn't know people's names (and I have to admit, I am just assuming his name or nickname is Sam) it did feel like we knew each other. I saw the same young women every time I went to the supermarket, the same man where I bought my contact lens fluid, the same dignified older man in a lab coat at the pharmacy across the street, the same few techs at the photo shops who always remembered my name, the same men at the Takkoush flower shop who seem to have been there since the '50s, the same waiters at Walimah or Kebabji, and on and on. I recognized people on the street, and said hello to my neighbors. I do that here too, but I see so many fewer people. This is a residential area of small houses and during the day during the week it seems I am the only one around. After Beirut's bustling street life, it's eerie. And a bit lonely. I'll get used to it, but for now it makes me feel I'm in a much vaster, more anonymous place. I miss the cozy intimacy of Beirut. 

Beirut graffiti

Well, my year here is over in a week. When we get home I may try to convert this blog into "photo baltimore."  But until then I have more photos from Beirut and the South to post and several rolls of film left to shoot. So, don't give up on me yet.

I've really enjoyed this sketchbook of a blog and hope you have too.

Here is some relatively recent graffiti.

[Ain Mreisse, bottom of the steps. I have been told that the person who did the pink "love bomb" is behind these -- serve, tolerate, love, respect.]

[Ashrafiye.]

[Hamra street, near the intersection with Sadat street.]

trees along walls

Many of the large trees in Hamra are on the edges of parking lots. I assume this is because they used to demarcate the edges of agricultural or garden plots. When these individual plots of land were converted one by one for buildings (or parking lots) some of the trees were left on the borders.

Trees in the Gefinor plaza

The Gefinor plaza is home to one of our favorite restaurants, Gruen. The lines of stylized trees seem to compliment the modernist design of the building. The Gruen Eatery is named for the architect of the office complex, (first name: Victor), know as the designer of " the world's first true shopping mall."

"Victor Gruen was a Jewish bohemian who began to design shops for fellow immigrants in New York after failing in cabaret theatre. His work was admired partly for its uncluttered, modernist look, which seemed revolutionary in 1930s America. But Gruen's secret was the way he used arcades and eye-level display cases to lure customers into stores almost against their will. As a critic complained, his shops were like mousetraps. A few years later the same would be said of his shopping malls."

    From "The Rise and fall of the shopping mall," The Economist Dec 19th 2007

A building comes alive

The other day I got an interesting comment on a photo I posted on December 25th. I responded and he wrote again, with an amazing story. I thought I'd make it into a post, because not everyone sees the comments and it's worth reading. It's just a reminder of how many stories are buried in our environments that photographs can only vaguely hint at. One reason I took the photo, besides the tree, is the line of jars on the shelf on the ground floor apartment's balcony. The personalized decoration gave me a sense of the particular people who dwell there, but I never expected to hear a real story of this building.

---

From Nadim:

Oh my God! The top picture is the building where my grandmother's house was. I grew up there! The balcony at the top of the picture is where I spent a large part of my childhood. Amazing. I was just discussing the building with a friend here in the US the other day and wondering whether it still exists. Just to make sure I'm not crazy, the building is on Bliss Street, just past IC and just before Mike's barbershop, right?

Michelle:

Hi Nadim, thanks for the comment. You're exactly right about the location. I'm thrilled to have delivered a photo with so much meaning to someone else. The side of the building (to the right) has a lot of scars, bullet holes from the civil wars I imagine. If I take another photo of it, I'll let you know!

Nadim:

Michelle, the scars are from a shell that fell in front and to the right of the building during the war (~1975). I remember the day clearly. I was playing with my cousins and three siblings (on the balcony at the top of the picture) when we heard the doorbell ring. For some reason, we all decided to go answer the door. It was a family friend coming to warn us not to go outside because of expected shelling of Beirut. Right at the moment he finished telling us, the shell landed, exploded and sprayed the building and balcony with shrapnel. We all avoided death by a few seconds. Answering the door saved us.

---

Here's the photo again.