Lola Alvarez Bravo

Yesterday was a day off from work. In my perpetual but futile quest to expand my horizons, I went to the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame to hear a lecture by Elizabeth Ferrer, an expert on Mexico's first female photographer, Lola Alvarez Bravo. The Snite is the final stop for a traveling exhibit of Lola's work.

I was, of course, out of my element among people who had the luxury of attending a lecture at noon on a weekday--students, professors, artists, couples sporting scarves and the latest in fashion eyewear, etc. When the lecturer referred to a photographer as "someone you're all familiar with," I felt particularly out of place. I tried to take notes, but it was hard to do in the darkened auditorium. I did manage to scrawl a few notes on index cards. I wrote on one of the cards, "Yellow Log," which I thought was an unusual name for a Mexican town, where one of Lola's more well-known photos was taken. Only after the lecture, when I had a chance to see the exhibit, did I discover the photo's title is "Enterrio en Yalalag (Burial in Yalalag)." The picture shows a rural funeral procession.

One of Lola's photos which Ms. Ferrer showed in her presentation won second place in a contest sponsored a cement company. This is not the sort of thing one expects to hear in a lecture about artistic photography. Personally, I think cement is amusing--so much so, that I included "concrete" as an interest in my Blogger profile, along with dust bunnies, dietary fiber, shiny objects, tropical parasites, weather maps, and hockey pucks.

So, anyway, what's the connection between great art and the quotidian material, cement? Well, in 1931, the Mexican cement manufacturer, La Tolteca, sponsored a photo contest. The theme of the contest was--what else?--cement. Lola's picture showed a concrete structure producing strong shadows. It's not possible to tell what the structure is because the camera is relatively close, leaving only a sense of light and shadow and geometric shapes. Lola's husband did a similar thing, probably with the same camera, and won first place. Isn't that always the way? Even today, I can't find a copy of Lola's picture online, but there is a link at the end of this post to a copy of Manuel's. While casting about the internet for information about the Alvarez Bravos, I found out that Manuel did a photo called "X-Ray Window," a picture of a storefront in Mexico City displaying framed medical radiographs. It's not clear to me whether this was an X-Ray lab or an art dealer. I must admit that I am somewhat jaded after looking at thousand upon thousands of X-ray exams, but occasionally I find images of internal human anatomy to be things of beauty--I'll try to post an example sometime in the future.

Links:

X-Ray Window by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Entierro en Yalalag by Lola Alvarez Bravo

La Tolteca by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Turkeys

I was planning to simply post some nice pictures of wild turkeys I took in our back yard this morning, but then, as she too often does, Governor Sarah Palin intruded on my consciousness, and I felt compelled to embed the infamous "turkey pardon" video from last Thanksgiving, featuring the governor reading, poorly, from a corny prepared speech, and then ad libbing with a typical word salad as she is interviewed in front of a happy Alaskan exsanguinating turkeys. The slaughter of the turkeys is almost as disturbing as the governor's butchery of the English language-almost. Those with weak stomachs may wish to just skip to the pretty pictures later in the post.



Here are the pictures. Turkeys are, IMHO, beautiful birds, and I can understand why Benjamin Franklin proposed that they should be America's national bird.

Sunny Day

Today started off with the usual leaden grey skies of a northern Indiana winter,but then the sun came out. I decided to return to the scene of the crime and try some more pictures in the same area which was so foggy two days ago.

Crows are cagey, when I pulled over and tried to take pictures, they flew off. I did manage to catch this guy before he took off. The picture would have been better if he turned to catch more sunlight on his head, but it's OK. I'll keep trying.

They're far from rare around here, but I thought I'd get some shots of a gaggle of Canadian geese at Pinhook Lake. I don't seem to be able to catch birds facing me when they land, but I like this picture anyway.

This one came out of the camera well and didn't need much postprocessing except for cropping.

Here a group was squabbling on the shore.

Driving along the St. Joe River, I noticed some unfamiliar black and white birds floating downstream. I pulled over and walked along the bank till I saw a flock of ducks in a flooded grove of trees on the opposite shore. When I consulted the bird book at home, I learned these are buffleheads, who live in Canada and Alaska in the summer, but winter from here to the Gulf of Mexico.

Foggy Landing

Another picture from this week's visit to Pinhook Lake. It was cold and foggy. A large flock of gulls stood on the thin ice of the lake while this mallard was coming in for a landing.

Leaf and Vines

I intended to include these pictures in my last post, but I was getting weird results when I tried to add captions. So, I'm just putting them in a separate post without captions. The first picture is a sycamore leaf frozen in ice and its shadow. The other two are wild grape vines, photographed against a foggy sky.

Foggy Photography

Today was a day off from the salt mines, and even though the weather was far from ideal (foggy all day, cold in the morning, raining in the afternoon), it was a good day. I spent a couple hours this morning taking pictures. A few were keepers, and I learned from the rest. In the afternoon, I got to see my granddaughter, the always-entertaining Magnolia, and I got to see her sister in utero, in real time, via ultrasound. Magnolia is a tough act to follow, but I'm sure the new baby, due in July, will be up to the challenge.

Here are a couple of the pics from this morning.

Starlings on a wire, in B&W

Crow, South Bend, Indiana

This is my best crow photo to date, but still not up to the standards of my bird photography role model, Abraham Lincoln.

Bison

Dave King, one of the few, the happy few, readers of Lugubrious Drollery, is the author of a terrific blog called Pics and Poems. Recently, Dave posted an article about Picasso's creative process, with a series of sketches of a bull, demonstrating how the artist went from realistic to abstract by reducing the drawing to a few essential lines. In a subsequent post, Dave challenged readers to do the same.

I found the idea interesting, and decided to give it a go. Unfortunately, my formal art education is limited to Mrs. Phend's art classes in elementary school, but, as usual, I will not let a lack of training or knowledge stand in my way.

I chose as my model a picture of a bull bison in Nebraska from Wikimedia Commons. Ironically, the bison figures prominently in the seal of my home state of Indiana, shown above. There are still a few bison on farms and in zoos around the state, but, thanks to the work of heavy-handed pioneers like the woodsman pictured in the seal, they no longer live in the wild here.

Here's the original photo.


My first sketch might laughingly be called realistic. It only looks like I drew on the back of a paper grocery bag. The paper was white, but I photographed the drawing with a point-and-shoot camera under incandescent light. One thing I noticed as I started to draw is that the bison's rear hooves are concealed by a burdock plant--a hardy weed I have written about in multiple previous posts (see link at the end of this post).


Next I started substracting details and using more straight lines. The burdock leaves are now triangles.


Next, fewer curves and further simplification.


Finally, I reduced the drawing to mostly straight lines. I noticed as the drawing became simpler and more childlike, I used bolder, darker strokes of the pencil than in my original "realistic" drawing. The internal critic was turned off, and I was enjoying the process. I decided the burdock was superfluous and excluded it from the finally version. In exchange, since no self-respecting bull should be without two cajones, I added the one not readily apparent in the original photo.


Thanks, Dave, for an suggesting an enjoyable exercise.

Link to Pics and Poems
Link to posts about burdock

Technology and Nature

I had to start my day at a rural hospital about 45 minutes drive from our house, so I took off a little early and carried the Nikon D90 with me. I was able to catch a shot of the sunrise reflected in the clouds at a railroad crossing.


On the way back, I took this picture of electric wires and their supporting towers. Next time I think I'll change the perspective to show more of the towers.

Mavericks

I was going to include some of the information in this post in another article I'm working on for Lugubrious Drollery, but then I decided I should ratchet up my already intense research efforts a notch by reading a relevant book, or at least part of a book, before publishing the article. Or maybe I'll just look at the pictures, if the book has any. I've ordered it from Amazon, but in the meantime, I know readers of LD are thirsting for knowledge. So gather around the fire and quaff deeply, campers.

Without giving too much away, I will say that the article I'm working on involves an historical figure who could have been considered a maverick. Rather than waiting to share my desultory thoughts on the word maverick, I offer them up now.

First, let's review the meanings of the word desultory, which I have to look up any time I'm tempted to use it. From the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary:

Main entry: des-ul-to-ry
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin desultorius, literally, of a circus rider who leaps from horse to horse, from desilire, from de- + salire to leap--more at sally (a word I used to good effect in a previous post*, if I do say so myself--ed.)
1: marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose
2: not connected with the main subject
3. disappointing in progress, performance, or quality

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, my thought process in a nutshell.

As I have pondered the word maverick these last few days, my thoughts have skipped like a flat stone hurled sidearm across a stagnant and algae-choked pond. I have ruminated upon a real-life Texas cattleman (who should be used to rumination), an old TV western, a cheap Ford sedan, and last year's Presidential campaign.

Let us begin (I know what you're thinking--all that, and he hasn't even begun?) with the etymology of the word maverick, from the old standby, The Online Etymology Dictionary:

Maverick: 1867, "calf or yearling found without an owner's brand," in allusion to Samuel A. Maverick (1803-70), Texas cattle owner who was negligent in branding his calves. Sense of "individualist, unconventional person" is first recorded 1886, via notion of "masterless."

My earliest recollection of hearing the word maverick, like many of the things that persist in my brain while more important data are lost, comes from television. I grew up on a duck farm, and there was no need to brand our stock. Even if they got outside the pen, they wouldn't waddle far, so our conversations would never include statements like, "I've got to saddle up the palomino and round up the mavericks." For one thing, we didn't have a palomino, or any other kind of horse. There was no desultory jumping around from horse to horse, circus style, at our farm. For another thing, there was no rounding up to be done. We would just grab the escapees by their necks and lift them back over the fence.

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah--TV. One of the coolest actors of our time is James Garner. Back in the fifties, he was the star of the western Maverick. His character was Bret Maverick, a carefree gambler, and of course, he was an "individualist" and "masterless." Whether he was supposed to be related to Samuel Maverick, the negligent cattleman, I don't know, and I don't feel like going to Wikipedia right now to try to find out. I have gone to the trouble to go to YouTube to embed the intro to the show here.



Fast forward now to 1970. That was the year my father purchased the second new car he had bought during my lifetime. The first was a 1964 VW Beetle, which I had commandeered. A frugal man, he went for economy again and bought a Ford Maverick. On those occasions when I drove it, I didn't feel nearly as cool as Bret Maverick, but I did prove that a tinny Ford with a four-cylinder engine and a three-on-the-tree manual shift could, however briefly, exceed one hundred miles an hour without blowing up--a fact I never shared with my father.

In case you don't remember the sleek lines of the Ford Maverick, I'm posting a picture here. I wasn't enamored enough with the Maverick to take a picture of it. I was fortunate enough to find a picture of one at Wikimedia Commons. It's even the same color as ours, although ours didn't have such fancy chrome lug nuts.


Lastly (do I hear cheers from the audience?), during last year's Presidential campaign, the word maverick was bandied about a good deal. Sen. John McCain, trying his best to distance himself from the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, painted himself as a "Washington outsider," (who happens to have been in Washington since 1982). He and his running mate Sarah Palin spent a lot of time calling each other "reformers" and "mavericks" even though McCain voted with the Republicans 93.8 percent of the time during the 111th Congress. You want a maverick? How about Sen. Olympia Snowe (R, Maine), who voted with the GOP only 34.4 percent of the time? Now, there's a woman who can say, "Thanks, but no thanks," and mean it.

So, there you have it, cowpokes and cowgirls--a brief ride through the deep recesses of my mind. Happy trails until we meet again.

*Link to previous post, "Step Into My Bidet," wherein the author cleverly uses the word sally.
Link to Online Etymology Dictionary

Snowing...again

More lake effect snow. Taken with a Canon point-and-shoot on the way to get the Sunday paper.