A few weeks ago I pointed to a project called The Lams of Ludlow Street by Thomas Holton. A fire has damaged their building on Ludlow and Mr. Holton is helping them out with a set of benefit editions. A worthy cause.

Finnish photographer Markku Lahdesmaki's high profile editorial work doesn't do much for me, it's too finished and perfect in the way the editorial world demands, but I love many of his personal portfolios, especially the ones taken in Chinese Space Museums and in the Finnish countryside. (via my friend Tina who I've been trying to have lunch with for over a year even though we run into each other all the time)

I love that Faulkner sounds exactly like what you think Faulkner would sound like (Faulkner on college English and Faulkner accepting his Nobel). Hemingway on the other hand sounds nothing like what I expected. (Hemingway accepting the Nobel). I assumed Hemingway would sound something like Orson Wells.

Related: Teddy Roosevelt's voice

Ghost #1
The house, a solid four bedroom colonial on an acre of land in Buck’s Country, had been on the market for years, and each year the price had come down. The stain of death bothered Jenn’s parent’s but their immigrant’s love of the deal overcame any sense of trepidation. Each house they had owned since moving from Korea had been a little bigger than the last, but this one was two steps up the ladder.

Soon after moving in, Jenn, who was 8 at the time and who had heard nothing of the dark history of the place, would complain about a man whistling in the hallways. “Can you tell him to stop,” she would ask her mother. Her mother would shush her. Ghosts should be ignored. Later, through the network of 8-year-olds at school Jenn found out about the dad who had been murdered in the basement. Friends were scared to sleep over. She told the whistling man to go away and as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Four years later when her own father dropped dead of a heart attack in church, everyone blamed the ghost. To a certain extent, they still do.

Ghost #2
One of the previous owners of a house I lived in on Coronado Street in LA was a man named Fink. Fink had died in the tub and wasn’t found for several weeks. While I avoided tub baths in that house, I didn’t think much of the story until I found an old suitcase full of Fink family snapshots. Most were apparently taken by Mr. Fink himself. There was his shadow at the Rose Bowl, the shadow at the State Fair wearing a hat, the shadow wearing another hat at the Golden Gate Bridge. There was Fink's date at Chasens. Fink's cat. Another cat and another (Fink apparently had many cats). And at the bottom of the suitcase in an envelope, there was a single picture of Fink himself. A picture of Mr. Fink in a bubble bath wearing one of the saddest expressions I have ever seen.

Ghosts #3-#8
My grandmother was one of 11 children. Nine of her brothers and sisters died before her and she claimed to have had premonitions of each death. Her mother was also a frequent visitor in dreams.

Tio Gorgonio had come to her in a dream the night before he died. In the dream he was wearing his best suit, but without shoes. He did not speak when she called to him, but just waved and walked away.

At the very moment someone called to tell her of Tiberio's death, a wind blew up the curtains and slammed the doors of her house. It was a windless day.

With Tia Honda it was a nighttime vision of her sister alone on a bus carrying a live rooster. When my grandmother would call out her sister's name, Honda would turn towards her with a twinkle in her eyes, shush he,r and tell her to get off the bus.

When my grandmother would sleep in her blue rocker, she would dream it was Tio Nacho who was rocking her, and indeed even in the deepest sleep her rocking would never stop.

Her mother, Mama Juela, would show up in afternoon dreams as a 10 year old in a confirmation dress eating Polvorones.

More often than you might think, my grandmother woke up with tearstained pillows.

Ghost #9
Most of all I remember the silence. In the mid-90's I worked for for a movie producer for a few years and we had offices near the top of the old Gulf an Western building on Columbus Circle. The building was on its last legs (it was about to be gut-renovated, renamed, and clad it chintzy bronze by Donald Trump) and our offices were less than glamorous (and made less so by a boss who had a habit of punching holes in the walls), but we all had spectacular views.

One afternoon out of the corner of my eye I saw a man falling. He was out across Columbus Avenue. It was not a graceful fall. It happened in slow silence although the fall itself was incredibly fast. I was spared the impact by some intervening buildings but some officemates were not and I remember the startled yelps that echoed through the office. The man we later learned was a college professor. In the middle of a lecture, he had paused mid sentence, gone to the window, opened it, taken off his glasses and jumped.

A scrum of police cars and fire engines arrived quickly on scene. An ambulance showed up, and then men with power hoses. An hour later it was as if nothing had happened. When I walk that particular corner I always feel enveloped in the cold and helpless silence of that moment.

Ghost #10
My brother Christopher would probably enjoy being thought of as a ghost. He always had a thing for the supernatural although he was an intensely rational soul. In my dreams he is usually reading in the back of the room. I'll have been doing something else and will only notice him after a long time of being engrossed elsewhere. He is always 19 always with a fresh haircut. I try to ask him how he's been, but by the time I reach him, only the book remains, always with one of his elaborate homemade bookmarks. I collect the bookmark hoping that finding it missing he will have to pick up the book again, and I will have another chance at saying, 'Hey there little brother, I miss you'.

More Ghosts
I am in Maine for the week and ghosts are plentiful here. People talk of the ghost of a headless sea captain who roams Damariscove island, the ghost of a mother who lost her baby in the sea, and the ghost of a girl who walked into the woods one day and never returned. In thinking about ghosts I realized the ghosts that scare us are born of other people's tragedies, the things we can't understand, they are the mental form of our fears— a clumsy way of marking the unspeakable and warning us that danger is all around. But there are other types of ghosts, these are the ghosts conjured from our hardest memories, the ones that give shape to sadness. In their strange medicine of allowing us taste to loss anew, these ghosts provide deep comfort even if we must occasionally wake as my grandmother did with tearstained pillows.

Donald Weber has recently added work online to his ongoing Guggenheim Fellowship taken in the Komi Republic, Russia. After you look a these photos, some brutal, some beautiful, note that they were shot in May. Can't imagine what January would look like.

A reader named Mu Qian turned me on to the work of Zhuang Xueben who travelled the Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham in the 1930s. I don't think it's just my history in this region that makes the pictures so fascinating. Anybody have any more good Xueben links or book references outside what is easily googleable?

another site

I haven't read or thought about this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks since high school but for reasons unexplained it has been running through my head all day:

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Benoit Aquin's series titled "The Chinese Dust Bowl" is a sobering look at the consequences of over-exploitation of fragile environments. Be sure to also read the associated magazine article in the Canadian [pdf] Walrus Magazine. Today's NYTimes has a story about something similar happening in Spain. (via the always superb BLDG BLOG)

For all the art photography I look at some of the pictures that compel me the most are taken by robots. This view taken yesterday by the Phoenix Lander of of what is almost surely ice on Mars sent my little geek heart aflutter:

And since we are on the subject of Mars here are two other favorite images: below is the much reproduced sunset over Gusev crater (Spirit Rover):

and

A view into a deep pit crater on the side of a volcano taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

Somewhere in storage I have a big book of Mars images (including 3D images) produced by the Viking Landers which I picked up with grass cutting money after a visit to Nasa when I was around 12. The pictures might look fairly primitive compared to the ones coming through now, but there were very few single books that had a greater impact on my adolescence.

More adolescent geekery: ASCII Days

I don't buy into the whole idea of universality — the popular "it's a small world after all" belief that if you scratch the surface a bit we're all just plain folk who are the same underneath. Our culture, our families and our unique quirks mold our worlds and define the physics around which our lives revolve often blinding us to other worlds that exist beside us. I enjoy the work of artists who expose the intersections and rifts between worlds allowing us to peek into the unknowable territory that marks the boundaries of other people's lives. This is what Thomas Holton's The Lams of Ludlow Street does for me.

I think I'm going to make the reader question thing a regular feature so here's another one by a reader named Daniel, a NY transplant from Wisconsin, who I met at the recent photo festival in DUMBO: "One thing still bothers me about our conversation. You said you make contact sheets. Were you talking about old fashioned contact sheets or digital ones? Isn't it easer to just do view them on the computer?"

I do scan most of my 35mm film and I manage the files in Aperture but for project related photography I always make physical contact sheets (sometimes I now print them from the digital files because having them made traditionally is so darned expensive).

Why waste the paper when we can see everything bigger and better on screen? Mainly because I like to see the boundaries of the roll of film contained on sheet of paper. I rarely shoot more than one or two rolls of film in a day so a contact sheet represents a definable moment. Those edges of those days get lost on screen and make editing more difficult. I edit all my medium format film as contact sheets out of necessity as I don't own a decent medium format film scanner.

a large version of the contact sheet

Above is a contact sheet from Amdo. Most of my film had been ruined by being frozen so I was shooting parsimoniously. In the first couple of frames you can see I wandered off the road to check out a house-raising. I ended up staying in this village for a few days. The roll of film covers a day and a half.

You can download a large version of the contact sheet here if you want to check it out in more detail.

These are some of the resulting images: Number 10, Number 16, Number 18, Number 19, Number 25.

Got a question? Feel free to ask just email my first name at mexicanpictures.com

My dad was served as a doctor in the war we call the Vietnam war, the war the Vietnamese call The American War. He was there from 1966 to 1967. My dad's Kodachromes—there are hundreds of them—were my first sense of 'the other side of the world'. Many photos are of empty landscapes. There are shots taken from the backs of jeeps. The barracks. A whole roll is devoted to a praying mantis that lived in his dorm.
There are many shots of red dirt roads and palm trees. The palms and the red dirt must have made some deep psychic impression because during my trips there as a backpacker, my first impression was of a kind of overpowering and almost haunting dejavu. His photos largely turned away from the horrors he experienced. In the year he served more than 6,000 Americans died. 12,000 South Vietnamese died and 61,000 North Vietnamese. More than 30,000 were wounded. The hospital where he worked was one of the busiest in the country. When I was growing up we would sometimes talk about that year during long Texas car rides, but his answers to my questions always seemed like riddles to me. They still do.

Related: Quiet Sunday, Telegrams and Polka Dots

Seyeon Yun is a Yale MFA student with several knockout projects. Incomplete Journey is a astute wander through Korea... The portfolio is split into three chapters and, as the title suggests, it feels that more chapters are on the way. Homecoming is an equally powerful project delving into the lives of war veterans. Yun is part of the Yale MFA group show at Danzinger Projects opening on May 27th.

I want a book about all the trees.

And can you find me a book about volcanos?

And leaves. I like books with all the kinds of leaves.

Don't forget shark books. Tiger sharks and hammer heads and sharks with teeth that eat other sharks.

And volcanos! You never get me volcano books.

Also one about salad.

Daddy does it cost a lota money to get a book about train stations?

I want a book with the blue fish and one with brown fish and one with silver fish.

And a book about chimneys! And peacocks! And armadillos!

Do you have a book about the third rail?

Can you get me all these books?

I want one book about streetsweepers and.. and.. and... a concertina wire book!

And maybe one about giants with lotsa lotsa pictures. Three giants!

I will find books about rodeos.

Can we organize my books so we can see the spine?

Daddy do you love books too?

Mark Powell is a prolific maker of compelling enigmatic images. If you hang out with Mark for any time you realize his world follows him around. Strange things happen. He has kind of a force field that creates mystery.

I hadn't checked in on his website for a while and found that it is full of new work.