After a line of afternoon thunderstorms rolled through town, I was home
grilling a nice halibut steak and picked up the macro to shoot this image above of the rainwater on a hydrangea on our porch. Amazing that just yesterday that plant looked like it was going to croak from the 90+ degree weather we’ve been having. That rainstorm was just the ticket! I also like the colors and raindrops in this other image of the plant’s blooms.
Parents of kids entering the Cabbagetown campus of the Grant Park Cooperative Preschool gathered again this weekend to move from demolition into construction. Highlights for me – working with Dave to put up the beadboard in the entryway – and learning to use the nail gun. Good times. Gallery is here.
My good buddy Warren Hutmacher received a great write-up in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today, as he’s just been announced as the first-ever city manager of Norcross, a northern suburb of Atlanta. He’s had a great run in the nice little town of Avondale Estates, and we won’t hold this ‘OTP’ posting against him. Trouble is, Friday night dinner parties are going to require advance planning, a GPS or two, and probably food and water to make that trip. Ah, what we’ll do for our friends. Seriously – big congrats to Warren, Emily and Heather!
I’ll have to find a way to see this show when I’m in NYC in a few weeks. The International Center of Photography is holidng a retrospective exhibit of over 100 images by the official photographer of Murder, Inc – Arthur Felig, aka Weegee. The New York Times has a good review (registration required) of the show and the history of the archetypal spot-news photgrapher who often arrived at the scene of a homicide before the NYPD in the 40s and 50s, and whose work has been printed by a good friend of my brother, Sid Kaplan – one of the last masters of the black-and-white print in the world. Most of these images have never been seen before. The Times does, I believe, get one thing wrong. They suggest he took the name ‘Weegee’ to mimic the future-telling power of the Oujia board. I’d always heard that the name came from his time spent as a gopher in a photo lab early in his career, when a printer would yell for the ‘Squeegee!’ – and in would run Arthur to clear excess water from the just-washed prints – so his name became the onomatopoeiaic ‘Weegee’. Either way, it’s a great story of a unique character.
I love this particular image, as it’s very similar to a photo I took back in the early 90s in Savannah at the scene of a multiple homicide. In that image (which I’ll have to scan one day), a father is covering his son’s eyes as the bodies are removed from a car – that image took first place in spot news that year for the state, and is one of my favorite, though not so cheerful images from my photojournalism career. Like Weegee, photojournalists of today step from scenes of society’s highbrow to horrendous settings of pain and anguish in an instant – and the best ones capture something close to what Felig captured years ago.