I bought this portrait years ago, and it’s been reposing in the barn at Horton Landing (where I’ve been busily cleaning and organizing for the last few days): 
I know very little about its subject, but presume that she died before it was done –such memorials were common in Nova Scotia parlours in the late 19th century. Attached to the lower corner is a photograph that I can’t squeeze any more out of than this:
You can fill in the rest of the story…
Category Archives: photography
Fillum
The photographs at my favorite food blog (EatingAsia) are always stunning, but Dave the photographer is usually the silent partner to Robyn the writer. In today’s posting (A Word from the Photographer) he Reveals All. Don’t miss it…
Kate’s 37th birthday
This is one of my most favoritist of the pictures from the Archives:
Shorpy again
Another of those startling images at Shorpy: Picnic at Marshall Hall 1893. How can you resist these bits of Arbus-like detail?
What were they thinking
Shorpy keeps pumping out wonderful images like this detail I’ve extracted from a panoramic image:
(see the whole thing)
Where to begin? The architecture (there’s no other word for it) of those costumes is breathtaking, but the looks on the faces of the background spectators are just too wonderful.
A detail from another one:
…and the whole thing
Sort of nice, actually
Here’s what it looks like now:
Fortunately, no need to go anywhere or do anything.
Runnin’ around with the rag top down
As Gillian Welch puts it, Oh me oh my-oh
(detail from this panoramic gem, 1928)
My fascination with vernacular photography is generally known to readers of this blog [if not, see Nova Scotia Faces and Squidoo on Vernacular Photography], but perhaps you won’t yet be acquainted with Shorpy the 100-year-old photo blog, where things are really being done RIGHT, including images by Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, various WPA photographers, and not-so-famous people too.
On the Force being with one
In answer to Max’s query, Robert Force is HERE, complete with a digital version of In Search of the Wild Dulcimer and musical examples and oh jeez a whole lot of other stuff. Now it’s time to dust off that Mike Rugg rosewood CapriTaurus dulcimer that’s been sitting on the shelf:
(it’s the one Kent is playing –and it’s really his, but lives with me until he comes to reclaim it. I’d love to see him, but… The one I’m playing is by Paul Reisler, and resides chez Ron Brunton. These bits of provenance might matter someday.)
Recent imagery
Take a look at Kate’s recent picture of the four of us… More context can be had via this Flickr set
Ghosts
My continuing immersion in the seemingly-bottomless project of scanning negatives from former lives probably sensitizes me to ruminations on the past. This bit, the opening sentences of John Lahr’s review of J.M. Barrie and Tom Stoppard plays seems to have been written with my own obsessions in mind:
Can we agree that we’re all haunted? The ghost world is part of our world. We carry within us the good and the bad, the spoken and the unspoken imperatives of our missing loved ones. As children, we are dreamed up by our parents; as adults, when our parents die we dream them up in turn. Conversations rarely stop at the grave.
(New Yorker March 5 2007 pg 92)
Many of the people in the ghost-images I’m rediscovering are lost in the present (that is, I’ve lost track of them –they probably sail on, and now and again I’m able to reconnect with their current incarnations), but they’re certainly as real to me now, seen via Photoshop and Flickr, as they were then. Maybe even realer.