Main Street in Los Angeles where when you you see a man sitting on a trumpet you go talk to him. He was on his way to play and had his music sheets in his lap. Nice man. Said he was passing through, but I hope to meet him again.
The photographer who complains about the blight of parking lots is missing something. The open lots of downtown Los Angeles provide the breaks that make views possible. These spaces, with their attendant islands of isolated AM radio luxury, are surprisingly beautiful.
This film by Jonas Normann is a very nice little glimpse into the neighborhood photo work of Brad Evans and Travis Jensen who spent a year photographing the people of San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The neighborhood often photographed purely for its seamier aspects, is here treated as a community of hard-working and creative people. The photographers produced a book with the material from their year of living respectfully.
Rafal Milach is a documentary photographer based in Warsaw Poland. He is publishing a book of photographs taken along the Ukraine's Black Sea coast. The short film stands on its own as a glimpse into an industrialized life on the sea in a region that seems caught in a limbo between centuries. The photographs are beautiful and informative. This is the kind of work that makes the devastation of nature its own form of beauty and inspires one to go there and tramp through the oil-slicked landscape in a good pair of boots. The beauty one can pull from the depressing lives of others! One person's struggle to pull a living out of the sea is another's gallery print. That's what being a photographer gives you – a free pass through the lives of others. Ultimately, in spite of all the questions, recording is better than not recording. The people in this film seem close to happy. It would be improper to live along this particular coast and affect a bright, cheery, bouncing disposition. One is liable to slip off a steel deck into frigid waters if one prances about too much. So take your bleak beauty where you find it. That's my advice.
