Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Taking photos of eyeballs....
so you don't have to.
About Me
- Mike Bailey
- I started taking pics in 2004. I use a Canon PowerShot A640. I live in Rome, GA. I'm married and have three children. Feel free to post a comment on my pics or commentary.
Eyeball Central is also about....
what eyeballs do.
Labels
- bee(s) (15)
- cheer out the wazoo (1)
- Cloud Gate (30)
- eyeball(s) (77)
- Hands (blue or otherwise) (94)
- Harvey Hill in Hell (1)
- Homage to Marcel Duchamp (7)
- moon (blue or otherwise) (3)
- mortally wounded sugar Christmas cookies (1)
- public nudity (2)
- self-portrait (55)
- Videos (59)
Reading: Living Justification
Author is my brainy friend, Jonathan Huggins
listening to nowadays: Lana del Rey
Subscribe To
Posts
Comments
.jpg)
Eyeballs AND Hands
Brought to you free of charge!!
Some of my favorite art, one piece at a time
Shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
Eyeball Central
It's what it's all about
14 comments:
Okay, what have you been reading?
Looks like a picture of Dante's inferno.
The boys want to know what you took a picture of.
i’m writing at work, so this has to be brief. if i understand the thrust of your question correctly, i have to say that nothing that i'm reading right now prompted the photo. to see what prompted it—or at least what i was thinking about when i was fooling around with it—then read below. (maybe you just want to know what I’m reading. if that’s what you want to know, you have to go first.)
when i first started the blog, i saw the photos in good measure as an excuse to write a tiny essay or even just to pose some questions that troubled me. nowadays, i think of my photos as standing alone. while i hope my photos are evocative (and sometimes provocative), the vast majority of them are not "messages" in the sense that they are a substitute for an argument or essay or thesis. they are much closer to questions than theses. they’re like instrumental music in that way. music need not be programmatic; it is its own reward in part because it elicits a variety of thoughts, moods, and emotional tugs. sometimes the form of music alone is pleasing.
i also don't think of my photos as photojournalism. my wife takes the majority of the "here's what the family is doing on vacation" types of photos. for almost all of my "portrait" pictures, the "subject" is merely a prop for an effect or tone or feeling i'm trying to capture. the purpose of my portrait photos isn't to accurately record that person for posterity. more often, i simply i see something in the world--or even in the photo itself after i have taken it--that captures my attention. on occasion i have something in my mind that i want to create. sometimes it’s a combination of creation and discovery. for example, last night i saw bubbles in my sink basin when the water was running. something about the bubbles popping up and bursting around the "tube" of water that was hitting the water was very arresting. so i turned off the light in the bathroom and shone a flashlight at the water. then i took some photos, though i haven’t seen how they turned out. probably badly. most of my photos do turn out badly, actually. but some of them please me, and even if they don't please others the fact they please me is reason enough for me to keep taking photos.
“one after another.” what i was thinking about as i created this image was not a book but another image: masaccio’s “expulsion from the garden of eden.”
you can see that image here: http://www.firenzeviva.com/Santo_Spirito/brancacci_kapelle.htm
i’ve always that that was a terribly powerful image. haunting. just perfect.
sheesh, i'm not doing enough work today!
There is a dilapidated building, an old boat house, at the edge of a “former” lake. A number of years ago a giant sinkhole swallowed the lake whole in a matter of hours. Because of how the boat was formerly resting off the shore, one can walk right up to the roof of the house, which stands below one’s feet. The building is mostly made of stone, but the rest of it is in complete disrepair-- the roof is mostly a series of broken boards. I had my oldest daughter go into the house, which was dark apart from a little bit of evening sun. She was standing in the shadows and I could barely see her. I took her picture through slats. I was trying to create a dark and unsettling image. But when I actually saw the image, I admit that I shuddered. It was ghostly. And ghastly. It was very unnerving. But I also knew that unless a viewer was looking for a human image, they wouldn’t notice it at all. So I cropped out most of the picture and focused on her image, which was barely visible. I then digitally played with the image to *force* it to better disclose what it was making me feel.
Still, a colleague of mine saw it and had no emotional response to the image whatsoever. That’s okay, too. I recognize that I get freaked out by all sorts of things that most people brush away with ease.
I really do need to do tons of work. Later.
by the way, what in heckfire are your kids doing reading dante's inferno?!
i read that in college. in an honor's course.
don't i feel stupid now?
I have to admit, my first thought was of decomposing pumpkin.
That aside, I wasn't trying to extrapolate any message or agenda from your recent pics, just noticing a nice cinematic, surreal element. Sometimes unintended themes impose themselves on us, as when you, through happenstance, learn the word uranography, then your child brings it home as the bonus word on their spelling list and NPR interviews a scientist from U Cal who uses the term in the 15 minutes you're in the car. Later, when you're brainstorming about what theme your kid would like in their room, you envision stars, maps, etc., and might not give a thought to what led you there.
Anyway, what's on my nightstand? Giving snapshot views of your to-be-read pile at any given moment can be misleading, but what the hell? I'm a multi-tasker, so it's currently Snow (Orhan Pamuk), Love in the Time of Cholera (GGM of course), and, at the risk of scaring you, A New Christianity for a New World (Spong). There, I've laid my soul bare, brother. Now get back to work.
The Dante's inferno is from me. The children haven't read it. yet.
They are into Pilgrim's progress, Sherlock Holmes, TinTin, Calvin and Hobbes, GA Henty, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
I, by the way, am reading Uncle Tom's Cabin for the very first time. I really am enjoying it. It is very interesting all the different methods she uses to get her anti-slavery message across.
GA Henty was one of my favorite authors of our homeschool history curriculum--I appreciate books that bring history to life, rather than taking a more textbook approach.
I am looking forward to reading for pleasure over Christmas break.
what do you read for pleasure?
It varies--but these are on my list for December, although I rather doubt I'll make it through all of them: Quo Vadis (Henryk Sienkiewicz), Voyage of the Dawn Treader (CS Lewis), a book on the liturgy (I'm hoping to find something that touches on its historical significance and gives insight into its meaning--perhaps I should ask Dr. Hill?), a book on Catholicism, and a cookbook or two. The latter comes with the necessary recipe-testing, which is another delightful part of Christmas break...as well as giving you something to nibble on while you read the next book on the list.:)
Rachel
I remembered another--Rilla of Ingleside, by LM Montgomery. Now I'm sure that I won't get them all read in that short four weeks!
well better to aim high and fail then to aim low and succeed. wait, that didn't come out right.
hmmm....
i'll switch gears. good reading list.
what recipe/dish do you do best, that you are most proud of?
btw, i've never even heard of dawn treader. if it's his fiction, i probably wouldn't like it. i always appreciate his non-fiction prose, and i'm crazy about some of his works, but reading his fiction is like shaving with a rusty razor. a thousand little painful cuts. if i didn't feel so guilty for rejecting C.S. LEWIS!!!, i'd put his fiction down in eight seconds. but since it's C.S. LEWIS!!! i sometimes feel obligated to force myself to read it, and pretend that i'm liking it. because, you know, you can't reject C.S. LEWIS!!
ironically, liking C.S. LEWIS!!! has become part of a necessary creed of mere christianity:
i believe in god the father, maker of heaven and earth, and in his apologist C.S. LEWIS!!!, spinner of transparent allegories.
just to make sure you know (and god knows), i do like him, as one of my earliest posts on this blog reveals. but it's so weird that this guy has become iconic--a fate that would disturb him, i think. but what do i know?
answer: nuthin.
Cinnamon rolls, without a doubt. I can cook a lot of things, but if I want something to give away or to impress :) then I make from-scratch cinnamon rolls. They're soft and light, and I use my sister's recipe for cinnamon filling with brown sugar, and the icing has a hint of maple. Mmm...
I think that I'm going to bake an enormous batch and give them out to stressed fellow-students during finals week.
When I'm home, my little sister (who has kitchen skills far superior to mine) and I like to go through a cookbook and pick out unusual-sounding recipes and make a whole meal out of them. Great fun, with sometimes excellent and sometimes semi-distastrous results. :)
Dawn Treader is the third(?) of the Narnia books, so you probably wouldn't like it. It was my favorite as a child, so I want to go back and see why I liked it. I wonder if I will?--perception changes a great deal between ages ten and twenty. I only discovered Lewis's non-fiction prose when I came to college--and yes, it does seem ironic that it's made an impact on the "Christian Inspiration" section of places like Barnes & Noble, right next to fluffy titles about happy Christian living. I've decided this semester that Christian living isn't about feeling happy. It seems to me more like doing hard things and trusting that, in the end, they will come out better. And one reason I've found Lewis to be encouraging is because he's real and not just happy. Or perhaps I'm just tending towards discouragement?
That was officially a ramble.
rambles are often the best.
----------------
"real and not just happy." yes, exactly.
----
here's a question. why did this walk through dante's inferno become the blog post for so much commentary? hmmm....
Post a Comment