Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

See No Evil

Reflected in the impossibly slim forms of the near naked mannequins are two less narrow women. The women cover their faces, determined to see no evil; avoiding the accusation offered by the dummies and the giant photograph of an anorexic girl that shares their window.

Would the real women cut of their heads and arms to look like the mannequins? No, but they might consider it. Rubens and Renoir celebrated a different standard in their paintings; who offers such alternative valuations today?

Store windows have been a long running theme in my photography; you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of my main Web site.

Fire zone meets crossing

Another photograph taken yesterday, another modernist painting rip-off composition, and another entry for my ‘Urban Semiotics’ project.

Is this a bomber design for Star Wars Episode VIII?

What is a fire zone? Is the concrete likely to spontaneously combust?

If a wheel chair were to hesitate too long in the red zone would the chair get towed away?

Since the yellow paint is over the red paint does that mean that a wheel chair has right of way over a fire truck?

Fire markings and drain, Arboretum, Austin 2008

If you have read any of my earlier posts you will have realized that I am not the kind of blogger who has the energy and enthusiasm to take a new picture each day to feed the blog; until now I have cheated and pulled something from the archive that I wanted to write about. Today is a new day. Today is a good day. Today was a Sunday and I had no excuses. I used my camera and here is one of the results.

In all parts of the wealthy, developed, world we have a thing about painting lines on our streets. We read them so unconsciously when driving that we don’t really see them until the first time we arrive at a complex junction in a foreign country. If you do stop and take the time to consider some of these lines they have a few jokes to tell and questions to ask that were almost certainly not intended by the rule makers that commissioned them or road gangs that laid them down.

Like the store windows series, I don’t have to go far from my house to find some paint on the street and I have a growing collection of what I have named ‘Urban Semiotics’. In this case the pull is mostly in the color and form rather than any contradictory message. The damaged red lines, the blacks and blues of the grate, and the Pollock like randomness of the grain in the road surface. The picture is a rip-off of (homage to?) modernist painting. It’s another one that my dad won’t get and I won’t be able to put my finger on why exactly I do.

[Added September 15, 2008] There are some alternative messages that can be read from this picture. Drains, grates and manhole covers all imply an underworld, a dark and unknown place, a place where monsters live. Is the fire that the red lines warn of something that might come up through the grate? Is it dangerous to stand near it? Might a bogey man pull you down?

Lobo Peak in morning cloud, from Casa De Cuentos house, near Taos

The last time I spent more than three nights in a hotel as part of a vacation was with my parents when I was 18 – that was my final family vacation as the child rather than as the parent. Almost every vacation I have taken since leaving college in 1979 has been in a rental home. If you think that vacations are synonymous with hotels you should really give renting a house or an apartment a try.

This summer we spent two weeks near Taos in a house named Casa de Cuentos, “House of Stories”. Awesome was how one of my twin 13 year old daughters judged the house 10 seconds after we got through the front door. And that was before she had seen the queen size bed in the room she did not have to share with her sister (who had a queen bed in a room of her own).

This picture of Lobo Peak (maybe it’s Perra Peak?) was taken from the deck of the house at breakfast on our first morning. You won’t find many hotels with a view like this from your own private table. For photography, it was a prolific fortnight and you can find all of the results in the Casa De Cuentos & Taos Area, New Mexico, 2008 album of this blog’s parent site.

You can find Casa de Cuentos on the vacation home sites www.homeaway.com and www.vrbo.com. The same sites list tens of thousands of other vacation homes all over the world.

Tire track in oils, Austin, Texas

Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion
that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.

Robert Adams

The photoblog syndication site, VFXY Photos, proposes a different theme each week and invites submissions. This week’s theme is “Random” which VFXY defines as: Randomness is a lack of order, purpose, cause, or predictability. A random process is a repeating process whose outcomes follow no describable deterministic pattern, but follow a probability distribution.

Strictly speaking, the tire track in this image is at least partially deterministic, but the pattern of color it makes though the oil slick, water and cracks is not. Throw in a couple of leaves and a solo red petal and you have a combination of formless and form that, for me, meets Robert Adams’ criteria for beauty and hope while acknowledging that chaos is a fundamental attribute of our universe.

You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

Female mannequin, New Orleans, 1990

The sadness of this mannequin’s resigned expression, her beauty, her baldness, and especialy her mutilation, all ask larger and more disturbing questions than whether I like the clothes she is displaying. A young women with a shaved head suggests cancer and concentration camps; the slice through her right eye, parallel with her elegant collar, speaks of abuse, misogyny and rape in the heart our ‘civilized’ society.

And that’s just one photograph of one store. Sometimes beautiful, often sensual or erotic, occasionally sinister and disturbing, always, always surreal: store windows offer a chorus of mixed messages waiting to be noticed. These windows are frozen one scene plays, unconsciously assembled in small theatres by store managers and window dressers. They are commentaries on us, on our society and culture. They are mirrors, literally and metaphorically, for looking at ourselves and who we are.

Store windows have been a long running theme in my photography (you never have to travel far to find one); you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of my main Web site.