Paradiſe Loſt

Seen on Florida Ave - DC Fringe

Winter in New Jersey - the most happy accident of me not really knowing how to focus to infinity on a point-and-shoot film camera and Clark Color Labs messing up the 25th shot of my roll of film. Not a bad start to this website. 

Apparently a street near my childhood home is a deaf child area. I grew up walking home past this sign or another one like it, but I had never photographed it until this snow day. I always get chills thinking of this sign; it's a warning for people to drive slowly because there might be kids playing in the street that can't hear cars or hear their horns. It seems really sad that someone would die like that, and only slightly less sad that parents felt it necessary to resort to such public measures to protect their children.

Anyway, I like the sign in the middle of the blizzard, because it is utterly pointless: the children have long since grown up (perhaps the sign was meant to warn parents taking kids from the elementary school across the street, which makes a bit more sense, come to think of it...) In any case, the road was so snowed over that no one could have safely driven over 8 mph.

Another snowstorm photo from New Jersey. This tree was getting pounded by snow, but only on one side.

A, perhaps poorly worded, sign near my house, during one of the three snow storms in the winter of 2009-2010. Miserable, but good for shooting it. Snow brings out a lot of good I think. It brings things that would not ordinarily occur to me as beautiful into relief against the banalities of life. That's important, I think.

I took a walk down to Rosslyn a few Mondays ago. I wanted to try to take some photos of the US Marine Corps War Memorial before the sun set.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out. I enjoy having this much negative space in photos and photos with such high contrast, and low color range, despite the reletively poor light excite me.

Got a lot of detail shooting like this.

It was challenging to keep shooting with the ligh getting worse and worse. The sleeting rain didn't help either. It's always strange looking at this stature. I don't want to get too meta here, but you're looking at a photo of a statue of a photo of a replacement flag-raising for the flag thet fell down. Strange how stories and images get told and retold and remixed.

Close Up

It got harder and harder to shoot as the day worn on. The light was failing and my fingers had long since begun to feel numb. 

The cemetery was closed for the day, so I wasn't annlowed to go inside. There were some very sern Secret Service agents making sure of that. Still, I was ablt to get a few shots off from between the links in the fences and over the boundries.

It's that liminal space between eerie and beautiful. It is frightening and hubling to beable to visualize how many men gave their lives in Vietnam, and how little America gained.

This really reminded me of the weirwoods from Game of Thrones, which was apropos for the situation, being both at a place of interment and in the snow