One of Niki de Saint Phalle's series of sculptures at the Missouri Botanical Garden is called the skinnies. They are almost two-dimensional, but not quite. This work is full of her characteristic wit. I like the dinosaurs facing off against one another, the small human figure riding a giraffe and the baby hanging in space. What details in this appeal to you?
Third eye, four eyes, eye candy. Hard to tell just how many eyes this radiant Buddha by Niki de Saint Phalle has to observe this world and all others. It seems right that it has been placed outside the Temperate House at the Missouri Botanical Garden: all in moderation, nothing to extremes. Except, maybe, the design.
A new sculpture installation opened yesterday at the gorgeous Missouri Botanical Garden, featuring the work of French-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. It's huge, it's whimsical and it has found a perfect setting. This work is called La Cabeza, the head. It looks more like a skull. Children are invited to climb on and through it. A Lensbaby pumps up its weirdness. More of Niki in the garden to come.
At the Cardinals baseball game yesterday afternoon: punk fandom shows its red colors. Those who attend games here are usually Midwestern nice-family types but we accept anyone with the price of a ticket. If he had been wearing an Astros jersey, his reception might have been different. The Cardinals won 4-3 with a rally in the bottom of the ninth.
Cowboy Chris isn't from Texas or Oklahoma. He lives on the edge of the St. Louis metropolitan area. We don't have actual cowboys here, not day-to-day working ones. Although, come to think of it, when I was about to leave my high school in New York City for college in distant St. Louis, a couple of my friends actually thought there was some risk of Indian attack way out here. Chris must have got his certification elsewhere. He does have an official lariat. Now he makes and sells gourmet barbecue sauce. I met him at his booth at the Earth Day festivities last week.
Just driving aimlessly around town, looking for something to shoot. (For the locals, I was just east of the Washington University medical center, southbound on Boyle, barely north of the Metrolink track. More about that soon.)
If you stare up at this thing long enough you will get dizzy.
Most of us live in societies where we get to vote for our government. Some countries have a Green Party, whose principal goal is environmental protection. It's negligible in the U.S. Americans don't know how to react to a party named after the tint of chloroplasts. There are a limited number of green things to chew at McDonald's.
Sunday was the annual Earth Day festival in Forest Park. A fabulous variety of images was all around. A very non-Middle Eastern group of belly dancers helped things take off.
The blog demands new material week after week. Because my workdays are long, I have to get out on the weekend to shoot. Sometimes I don't have any ideas for topics. When that happens, I usually go to tthe riverfront or Forest Park.
This young woman was sitting in a downtown plaza, writing in a notebook, on a pleasant spring afternoon. It was a quick snap. When I was editing the picture in Photoshop, I zoomed in to fix some details and found that she was writing in Spanish. A surprise - we don't have a big Hispanic population here, unlike many American cities. Perhaps she is a student or a visitor. I can make out some of it (my Spanish is weak but more than nothing) in the high-resolution original. You can't in this version and that's partly on purpose.
We here in the Midwest are under the crossroads of the American skies. I saw this in my neighborhood as I returned from work Wednesday night. An asterisk often leads to a footnote or comment. Sometimes is is a substitute for indelicate letters, as in f*** or its cousins.
Self-portrait with a segment of a 192 m tall stainless steel catenary curve.
The cloud forest in El Yunque National Forest, near the eastern end of Puerto Rico. Got home Tuesday night. Back to the routine.
The beach at Bosque Piñones Pine Woods) Park, a forest preserve east of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on a drizzly day. I like the layers of color. Below, the plams behind the beach glower on a dark day.
Dia del Juegos - Youth Day. A group of school children on a field trip in Old San Juan. As they marched down the sidewalk, a teacher called out a Latin dance beat: cha-cha cha-cha cha, and then, on the last beat, the children shouted CHA! and jumped in the air.
The city wall of old San Juan, looking north and, beyond, the Atlantic Ocean. Do you like it better in color or black and white? Each has its merits.
San Juan, Puerto Rico, does not have a city center, a downtown. A collection of neighborhoods and villages blended into one another as the area grew. However, what is now called Old San Juan is the city founded by Spain in the early 16th Century, a finger of land surrounded by water on three sides. Americans will understand what I mean when I say that in a way it reminds me of the French Quarter in New Orleans (without drunks weaving down the street) or Boston's North End (without the Red Sox caps), but very tropical and very Hispanic. Some touristy, some quiet, beautiful and lined with old homes of local people. Little groups of cats run in and out of vacant buildings, feral and thin. They belong to the neighborhood.
My wife and I got into San Juan, Puerto Rico, very late last night, thanks to the mess American Airlines is in. I'll be out with my camera shortly, but for now, you can set 'em up and knock 'em down in our city center. A very modern design for an old passtime.
After a year of posting weekly photos of the Arch, I sometimes feel I have nothing else to say about it. Then I go by on a Sunday afternoon and there is something a little different. In this picture, shot with a 17 mm lens, a woman takes a picture of her husband and son. The Arch is so much much taller than it looks in this shot.
Well, not exactly. A meeting place in downtown STL is the statue The Runner in Kiener Plaza. People often dump colors in the fountain around it. It's common to have red for the Cardinals baseball team or the namesake shade of the St. Louis Blues hockey franchise. I have no idea what this orange is about and it's been there nearly a month, which means that someone is refreshing the dye. The runner's right foot looks like it is pushing through a wall of fire but the lower picture shows that theory is all wet.
TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series
Found on the antenna of a car parked near the baseball stadium during a game. Do any other countries besides us and maybe Canada have antenna balls?
A zoom on the video display of the Busch Stadium scoreboard, looking like a cheap analog television. The stadium announcer declared a moment of silence in memory of a long-time Cardinals executive who died during during the off-season. Fredbird, the Cardinals' mascot, stands in shallow center field in a mocking imitation of mourning.
Newer baseball stadiums--certainly including ours--are saturated with color, jiggling electronic movement and noise. I think it's annoying but you can screen out most of it if you are interested in the game. It might be interesting to pick out details and convert them to quiet black and white.
The pre-game scene on the patio of a popular restaurant and bar facing the baseball stadium.
On a concourse at Busch Stadium, while heavy rain delayed a Cardinals baseball game.
This looks to me like it could have been a magazine photo from the 60s, before color pictures were common. Mid-sized city, mid-sized buildings, big famous monument. There is a little figure-ground trick going on here, with the light on the triangular legs of the Arch and one foot in the trees. If you look at the bottom two-thirds, the Arch could be parallel or perpendicular to the river. If your eye drifts to the top the ambiguity goes away, but that itself is confusing. I like ambiguity a whole lot. It's a sensible way of thinking.
The pre-game ceremonies before an attempt at opening day of the baseball season in St. Louis. With the Cardinals leading the Colorado Rockies 5-1 in the bottom of the third, the heavens opened their collective spigots and the game was rained out. Here, the introduction of the Cardinals' great star, Albert Pujols, is reported on the scoreboard. Let those who have eyes, see. Let those who have ears, hear.
TURN AROUND !
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