Blog Response 3: Inspiring Photgraphs from the Stacks!

Leibovitz never fails to inspire me.  But something about the compilation I found in the library of her photographs of women was particularly fascinating to me.  It was an interesting study to flip through the pages and see so many different versions of the same breed.  All the women featured were led very different lives.  Yet there was a similarity between all the women--a common thread of self-empowerment and individuality in all of them that I'm sure Leibovitz recognized.  It made me think of my own female heroes and the women that inspire me to be the same.  I smell a new photo project....

Some of my female heroes:

Carole King, singer/songwriter

My Mom, Carol, anesthesiologist

Maya Angelou, writer

Stevie Nicks, musician

Blog Respon 2: Bergamont Station

Ron Jude's "Emmett"

The "past" is like a magical beast. 

At times, it makes me want to cry and a pit overwhelms my stomach, coming on like the weight of a ton of bricks. At other times, I want to grin and smile - I want to scream and howl like a hyena at those visions that flood my head, pouring out from my memories. The "past", yes, I can see it in my minds eye and who I was then, something different, another me in third person, frozen forever in my head. In these versions of wide awake dreams I see my youth and the powerful will to think for myself and I see the magic contained in my innocence and in the absence of everything that I had yet to know. In my youth I could only look ahead but now, here I am and increasingly I see so much that is moving behind. 

Perhaps it is then a ghost of me that I see. There he stands, a partial figure or symbol of something, distant and fading... rapidly moving away. 

Ron Jude's use of color was particularly appealing to me at Bergomot Station.   Jude overlays images to create dream like effects in his photographs.  Jude wished to create a sense of the past in his photographs, mimicking cloudy memories that we recollect throughout our lives--perhaps better than the actual events themselves.