image © 2009, Paul Pomeroy. My granddaughter has this little "Noah's Ark" play set and she occasionally carts all the little animals into my room. For the past two days we've been setting them up and then taking photographs of them together. What got me thinking about doing this, aside from the fact that I pretty much look at everything with the thought that it might be something to photograph, is the truly wonderful work of Anne Garland and her
Luminous Playhouse Theater Company.
The following music, by the way, has been a favorite of mine for over 20 years. If you like jazz fusion, headphones and loud volume are highly recommended.
sunny with occasional leaps and bounds
Surprisingly, a lot of people really like the grungy, color-shifted look used in the above photograph. Maybe the appeal is in what it implies: that we live in a world where "there is nothing new under the sun" and yet, somehow, everything old is new again. And I'm more than a bit amused by the fact that I'm using a computer and software (Photoshop CS2 on an iMac) to make a photograph look "dirty" even though I've taken it with a digital camera that automatically cleans its sensor to ensure a dust free image.
katelyn watering the plants
She's so used to being photographed that it doesn't take long (usually!) for her to pretty much forget I'm there. It's then that I get blessed with images like this. I understand the cultural role of posed photographs but I could never pose her in any way that would express more of who she is than what I capture in photographs of her being herself in her world. It always makes me a bit sad when clients don't feel comfortable stepping out of the "posed portrait" box.
tony o'brien at the marketplace
This is Tony O'Brien getting into it with his soprano sax. I took this last Thursday evening at the free concert event at The Marketplace in Bakersfield, CA.
image © 2007-2009, Paul Pomeroy.
The original photograph was taken in downtown Bakersfield, CA.
Image © 2007, Paul Pomeroy/Solorzano Photography.
The photograph is a candid shot I took at a wedding.
If you've never heard the following version of Over The Rainbow before, get ready ... this is as good as it gets. Whatever you do, listen to it all the way through. She saves the best for last.
Image © 2009, Paul Pomeroy
I couldn't find anyone else's music that went that well with plums, so here's another one of mine instead even though it's not a plum or about a plum or even vaguely related to anything plummish although it actually is about something ...
The song But That's Another Story is rather different for me. It began as a piece inspired by Spiritual (composed by Josh Haden and performed by his father, Charlie Haden, and Pat Metheny on their 1996 album, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories)). In working on it, though, it kept bringing to mind a photographer friend who spends a lot of time hiking in the mountains near where she lives. She takes amazing photographs from vistas she spends a lot of time and energy getting to.
But these are not the only pictures she takes as she also goes two or more times a year to Africa (and more recently, Asia and India) as part of a medical team providing free health care. In stark contrast to her wide open, panoramic mountain photographs the pictures she takes of the people she cares for are almost always up close and very personal--you can often times see her reflected in their eyes.
Every one of those people, and even more so every one she is not able to help, breaks her heart a little. Knowing this, you begin to understand the hiking and the almost reverential photos of the mountains. She is restoring her faith and replenishing her serenity. She is mending her heart so that she is able to go back and do it again. If you listen to but that's another story with this in mind you'll understand why it reminds me of her...
A note about the music: This was recorded using a $130 keyboard I got at Costco and version 1 of Garageband (which came with my iMac when I bought it back in 2003). A little better equipment would certainly have helped. However, I just do this sort of thing because I enjoy it on occasion and, though I've spent quite a bit of time playing, I've never really spent much on learning how to play. In the end, it's that second factor that has had the greatest effect here.
Image © 2006-2007, Paul Pomeroy.
Hmmm, for some reason the mp3 player didn't pick up the artist's name. That would be the wonderful Juana Molina.
Image © 2008, Paul Pomeroy.
image © 2007-2008, Paul Pomeroy. I haven't been in much of a mood for playing piano recently but there are certainly those times when it's the only thing that will "
scratch that itch" ... I'm not really that proficient at it despite having spent countless hours playing. That's what I get, I suppose, for being self-taught and for not hanging around folks who could help me improve some. Still, on occasion I come up with something that gets in the ballpark of "recordable."
Artist Vikki Cruz, co-owner of the Surface Gallery, painting during the August, 2009 "First Friday" art event in downtown Bakersfield, CA.
To borrow a line from some poem I can't remember the name of: for me, encounters with art tend to "skip the skin and burrow straight to the bone." For example, although it was done as discretely as possible, the fact remains that I literally wept the first time I came face to face with a Degas (in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC). It wasn't that I wanted to, and certainly not that I planned to, it's just that art has always seemed able and willing to dodge my normal defenses and it has, over the years, acquired a knack for doing so when least expected.
I should probably clarify here that not all great art gets me choked up, and it's certainly possible that had I seen that Degas on another day it would have been met with a less outward show of deep appreciation. It's also not just "great art" that can captivate me. I have a fondness for live artistic performance, for example, and a strong attraction to simpler forms of beauty (which is the reason behind me posting the above photo and pairing it with the following music). It was therefore a treat to be able to walk around the Surface Gallery seeing artists in the process of being artists—performing their crafts, so to speak—all the while aware that the whole gallery space speaks of "simpler beauty."
I did have two regrets, though. One is that I had other obligations and couldn't really settle in to just be there. I would have loved seeing more, and talking more. The bigger regret that I walked away with, however, is that there were so few people there (or anywhere in the "First Friday" event area). I think that in a more perfect world there would be lots of families coming out for events like this. I'd hope, in fact, that parents would be bringing their kids there with the intent of exposing them to art in all its many guises; even allowing them to get a few of their positives and negatives mixed up in the process as that is, after all, a great way of producing the kind of sparks that can ignite in them a life of active creativity—something to replace their default cultural birthright: a lifetime of passive consumerism made palatable by neverending cheap entertainment.
As with most of the other posts I make here, the intent is for you to experience the music and photograph together. Click on the play button, scroll back up and click on the photograph (to see the large version) and then sit back and see where that leads you ...
Photo © 2009 Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.