Category: American Landscape
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Thank you, Allan Porter
A few months ago a curator from the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, German contacted me seeking information about several of my photographs that were own by Allan Porter, the editor of the influential editor of Camera, a Swiss magazine devoted to photography. He has published by work three times during Camera’s heyday. In connection to the exhibit And Suddenly…
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I don’t have a body; I am my body
Tom Hayden, political activist, one of the Chicago Seven, said this sometime in the seventies. Back then I thought this was so obviously true that it was trivial. Yet these words stayed with me and have taken on relevance as I’ve gotten older, echoing when I’ve been weak and injured and when I’ve been strong. Today October 24, 2016,…
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Bilingual Sign on Madeline Island
On Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, public signs are now written in English and Ojibwemowin. While the Objibwe who encounter these signs are sure to read English and don’t need the translation, the signs signal respect and remind those of us whose families were immigrants of who was here first.
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A Lasting Vision, Exhibition and Grad School Reunion
Having only taken a few inept family photos and one pretty bad class in photojournalism at Northwestern University before I applied for admission into the graduate program in photography at the Institute of Design at IIT, I was lucky to get in. At the time I had no idea that the program, founded by Moholy-Nagy…
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Novels spark and national dialogue
The maelstrom around the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set the Watchman (2015), a novel set in a time after that in her To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), has proven how essential books are. Go Set the Watchman was published fifty-five years after Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and became one of the most revered books in America. The book and…
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Coffee shop Philosophy
Every state in the union has an image. Often it’s a two-faced image. I live in Illinois, the land of cornfields and corrupt politicians. I visit its northern neighbor Wisconsin, the land of cheese-heads and granola-eaters. Ludicrous simplifications, but there you are. Last week I bought a cup of coffee in small cafe in Illinois,…
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Signs Seen
Outside the large urban/suburban/exurban centers of America, the language of the land takes on different slants, depending on where you are. Accents, colloquialisms, cadence, and customary vocabulary vary by region. So does the language of road signs. Here are some legends from signs seen recently in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.