January 30, 2008

Beauty Abounds

I will return to writing soon but for now my musings will manifest themselves as photographs. Thanks to my lovely wife I now have a camera that allows me to have as much or as little control over the images as I desire. With these photos I am exploring the everydayness of my community here deep in southeast Georgia. Hidden amongst the old and the new, between the rusted and the recently painted are images of great beauty. The more I look the more I see.

The top photo is of an Episcopal church on the next block. In daylight it looks much less foreboding. The second photo was taken at an old Baptist church out where the roads are not paved and the silence palpable. The third photo is of the entrance to an old liquor store filled with spirits of days long past. The fourth is the door frame to an old movie theatre that stands now as a frail shell emptied of its stars flickering on the silver screen but still full of memories hiding in the chinks. The last photo was taken just across the street from my home. It is a nondescript two-story tin-sided warehouse. The beauty is here, I just just have to coax it into focus.

For me the photos and the writing are all fingers on the same hand trying to scratch the creative itch.

January 26, 2008

Silent Saturday

Most of these photographs were taken over the past few days (and nights) in and around where I live. I live close to the Old Dixie Highway (US Highway 17) which is lined by the husks of old businesses left bereft by the opening of I-95 and by homes both old and new. I am intrigued by the notion of seeing old things in a new way, in finding patterns, shapes and forms in the artifacts that surround us