Istanbul based Mexican photographer Andres Gonzalez recently sent me a short preview of his new project Tarlabashi, photographed in the Kurdish neighborhood he calls home. It's a promising start. Gonzalez' website contains several more projects taken along roads that inspire deep wanderlust, a reminder that the world is too vast and beautiful to be left unexplored.

The guys behind Square America, a site that collects and curates vernacular photography, have put together a super book called Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America. The book displays the humble photographs with great respect (generally one per page), at close to actual size. Snapshots are often accompanied by bits of text written on their backs. The combinations are sometimes mysterious, often poetic, occasionally tragic—tiny puzzle stories.

While the photographers in Who We Were are mainly anonymous, photographs sometimes appear to be naive echos of well known images by Man Ray, Dorothea Lang, Frielander, Eggleston, etcetera... Books like this can feel scattershot, but the sharp curatorial team behind this collection have culled through countless images to create a thought provoking volume I'll definitely be returning to again and again.

"October 31, 1910-Plainview, Nebraska I hope you won't laugh yourself sick at the picture on this card, it is only a picture of myself in a mirror taken by myself."

I am not particularly a fan of the genre of photography that covers abandoned buildings or of the subgenre that covers abandoned amusement parks. Photographers are drawn to these places (myself included) because of the easy analogy to death and the perverse beauty of decay. Like many subjects imbued with easy emotional shorthand (unmade beds, grandparent's houses, strangers staring into the middle distance, gas stations at night, etc) the very attraction of hordes of photographers to abandoned theme parks turn most images of these things into tired clichés. But of course the thing about clichés is that they are also challenges. A good artists will take a cliché and turn it on it's head, or they will take an image so iconic that it becomes the defining image of the genre, or they will find subject matter so extreme in it's beauty that it forces us to consider it outside the context of the banal stream of other similar less beautiful images.

Argentinean photographer Pablo Cabado's 37*57'35"S 57*34'47"W is one of those projects that breaks from the pack. It's not just a bunch of pictures of a beautiful old abandoned amusement park, it's a self contained world gone topsy turvy. Large pigs roam the amusement park grounds only to be butchered by a band of rough looking men one would never like to encounter after dark. It's dark and heady stuff.

Also check out Cabado's much praised book, Cuba the 90s (Coleccion La Vista Gorda).

As a side note Cabado's bio notes he drives a 1971 Ford Falcon and anyone who drives a 71 Falcon is cool with me.

At about 2am last night I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It was my fifth cab of the day and this driver and like all the other drivers today wanted to talk about the election. The drivers were a diverse lot ranging from a Bangladeshi immigrant to a man who moved to New York from New Orleans after the flood, but all the conversations had a common theme. They men started by asking me who I was voting for and when I said Barack Obama, they would say they were so glad and that they hoped he would win too. Then they enumerated their reasons for supporting him but all ended with a variation of "They won't let him win."

The election stealing conspiracies varied from computer fraud, to hidden racism, to vote fraud, but despite my protestations none would allow themselves to believe that Obama could actually win, almost as if the disappointment of losing would be to great. I'll spare you a long oratory (I suspect blog audiences are largely self selecting and the vast majority of you are already in the Obama column). But I wanted to say, let's prove the fears of these men unfounded. Get out there and do this thing right.

One of the special thrills in photography is coming across a photographer who has travelled some of the same roads you have travelled, looking at their images, and saying 'I have stood right there, I have seen those things.'

I know nothing about Chinese photographer Eris Yo's life, but I know we've walked some of the same paths, and I love the way she's seen things along the way.

If navigating her website is too abstruse, you can find more of her work on flickr, and on her blog (written in Chinese).

'Emergency Mind' as in "We are all so worried about her, we all have emergency mind."

-From my Korean mother in law (apparently a literal translation of a Korean phrase).

I was thumbing through a months old copy of the NY Times Magazine in a doctor's office this morning and happened upon Sara Stolfa's project titled The Regulars which documents the patrons of McGlinchey's tavern in Philadelphia (where she worked as a bartender). It's a fascinating study in loneliness.

Stolfa was also in the band The Delta 72 (now defunct). She played organ. How cool is that?

Related: NY Times Article

Overheard at Gray's Papaya yesterday afternoon and transcribed practically verbatim:

"I keep having these dreams about Abraham Lincoln. He's sitting on the couch in his top hat and everything and we are talking about my problems with Susan. He keeps telling me not to worry, "Mary was worse, you know." And then after he gives me some real wisdom on the female mind, I start thinking about everything going on in the world, and I think, 'Holy shit why don't I ask Abe what to do'. And it's like he's reading my mind... he turns to me and says, "Don't worry we've been through worse." And then he hugs me and I think, 'Abe Lincoln hugged me. He smells like Old Spice.' I ask him who he supports in the election, and he smiles and says, "Believe it or not you're the first person who's asked me that this year; of course I support Barack. These so called Republicans remind me of Copperheads." And then he laughed sort of sad a deep ha ha ha laugh and I woke up. This dream had me so jacked up I couldn't sleep. I just kept beta-ing it over and over. I literally couldn't sleep. I saw him. I smelled him, he felt real. His jacket was scratchy. His hat had a worn rim. It was the middle of the night and I was pumped up and freaking out so I Wikipediaed the Gettysburg Address and recorded a version of it to a beat and then, get this, I REMIXED IT. I remixed the freakin' Gettysburg Address. This is either the greatest thing I've ever done or a total fucking disaster. I can't tell yet."

Dave Jordano's project documenting storefront African American churches titled Articles of Faith, just made made my otherwise blah Friday. Storefront churches have long been a source of fascination for me. (found via Andrew Sullivan who also links to this super interview)