May 23, 2012

Do you believe in karma?
Do you believe in good?
Do you believe in Him or Her?
Do you believe in you?

Do you believe we all are one?
That we are all connected?
You touch me and you'll be touched,
It's magically kinetic.

Do you believe there's a reason for this?
A reason for it all?
Feel it in a hug or kiss,
Feel it in the awe-

The awe of existence
The miracle that binds
this spinning earth
with your beating heart
Is there a reason?
Can you feel the rhyme?

It doesn't matter what you think,
it matters what you feel.
Look inside that pumping organ
And you will find what's real.

May 9, 2012

Violins vibrate through the air,
Strings pushed and pulled.
Their melody tells me not to care,
Moves me towards the truth to be told.

My heart and lungs expand,
Organs involuntary to the power of the sound.
I see the water rippling softly into land,
My body is no longer on the ground.

I'm in the sky, eyes open to the light.
I cannot speak nor hear nor think.
My soul is cleansed and takes flight-
My body bursts, my ashes sink.

April 19, 2012

There's something romantic about living,
There's something romantic about life.
There's something romantic about love,
There's something romantic about strife.
There's something romantic about you,
There's something romantic about I.
There's something romantic about the two,
There's something romantic about the why.
There's something romantic about morning,
There's something romantic about night.
There's something romantic about the calm,
There's something romantic about the fright.
There's something romantic about rain,
There's something romantic about wind.
There's something romantic about the beginning,
There's something romantic about the end.

April 19, 2012

To travel the country by railway car
What a tearful gypsy dream
One whose fruit I shall most likely not taste
But whose juices I shall catch on my tongue as I dream

April 15, 2012

To everyone with eyes on heaven
To everyone with eyes on hell
To everyone with eyes in between
To everyone with eyes all around
For everyone there is a peace
For everyone it can be found

So open your eyes
Open your mind
Open your heart
Let it be kind
We all have our struggles
We all have our time
But there can be peace
If we'll all be kind

April 14, 2012

There's a god in me
There's a god in you
Breathe me his spirit
I'll feed you her food

Body parts touch
and it's like a lucid dream
I close my eyes and smell your skin
Oh! the primordial scream

Teach me your lessons
I'll show you my ways
Will you show me your soul?
I'll go in through your gaze

Eye contact
You won't let go
There's a god in you
It touches my soul

Now kiss my lips
I'll grip your spine
You show me your god
and I'll show you mine
There's a spirit in all of us
We all intertwine
Yours and you
Meet me and mine

The energy flows
Let it go
Let it take you where it does
Let it be
We will see
All I know
Is it is love

April 6, 2012

I have been getting back into journaling and writing lately, which I have really been enjoying. The next few posts will be poems that I have recently written. Here is the first:

I'm trippin' over all these roots
Tryin' to hold me to common ground
But I ain't got no shoes
Strong enough
To hold me down.

They say "All humans should learn
Before they die
What they're running from
And to
And why."

I'm just somewhere on this path
At some one speck in time
Trippin' on all these roots
But their presence I don't mind.

Emma

I took these pictures to fulfill my 'emotional appeal' assignment. I, personally, can't look at a little child and not feel some kind of an emotional pull...especially this child. I regret that I had to use my on-board flash because of the indoor lighting and hyper-active subject but I edited each photograph to the best of my ability.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis Missouri. Looking at the respectable status of his family, the time period, and his high level of education, it seems a surprise that Evans became a photographer. His decision to do so was, perhaps, a surprise even to himself. In his young adulthood, Evans resented both Americans' preoccupation with money as well as the fact that he had none of his own. Furthermore, he resented the smug self-satisfaction of a nation dedicated to business, and its seeming lack of interest in his own literary and artistic concerns. So, in 1928, at the age of 24, Walker Evans acquired a vest pocket camera. At the time, he had only a modest knowledge of and very limited respect for the camera's achievements. Appropriately then, he found himself drawn to a very particular kind of photography, one "so plain and common, so free of personal handwriting, that it seemed almost the antithesis of art: the kind of photography seen in newspapers and newsreels, on picture postcards, and in windows or real-estate dealers"; photography that spoke with a blunt and simple vocabulary.
In 1935, Evans shot a photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He continued to do work for the RA and later the Farm Securities Administration (FSA), primarily in the southern states. His work for the FSA led him to co-publish a ground-breaking book in 1941 titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book contains a series of photographs by Evans combined with text by James Agee, detailing the two men's journey throughout the rural South during the Great Depression. It serves as a detailed account of three farming families, and paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Evans used a large-format 8 x 10-inch camera to capture the "fragility of the capitalist system." It is for his work for the FSA in documenting the effects of the Great Depression that Walker Evans is most famous.
In 1938, Evans discontinued his work for the FSA and in the same year, an exhibition was held at the Musuem of Modern Art in New York called, Walker Evans: American Photographs. This was the first exhibition in the museum to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans' photographs were admired for the quiet, magisterial beauty they evoked, and for his ability to create visual irony while backing the irony with valid social points. Evans stated that his goal as a photographer was simply to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendant." It seems he did just that. And aside from being a successful photographer, Evans was also a passionate reader and writer. In 1945, he became a staff writer at Time magazine and shortly after, became editor at Fortune magazine, where he remained through 1965. That year, he became the professor of photography on faculty for the Graphic Design department at the Yale University School of Art. He died in his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975.

Walker Evans Emulation

The following photographs were taken in Selma, Alabama for my artist emulation. I was hoping to capture the same simplicity and honesty as Walker Evans did when photographing rural Alabama. It was amazing to look through the lens at a town so seemingly unchanged by the times and to imagine that perhaps I was seeing things exactly as they were when Evans travelled through Selma.

Spring Assignment

This group of three pictures was taken at Aldridge Gardens to fulfill the 'spring' assignment. I performed basic editing maneuvers on all three, adjustments like cropping, hue/saturation, curves, shadow/highlights, exposure, and sharpening. All contain some combination of the above. To attain the color on the first two shots, I cranked up the saturation and then added another hue/saturation layer that was more desaturated and played with opacity until I found the look I liked.

Maggie-Taylor Inspiration