diptych # 214 / civilized ku # 3087 ~ a different look

window displays ~ Manhattan, NYC, NY - • click to embiggenmop bucket ~ Les 4 Glace (ice rink) / Brassard, Qc., CA - • click to embiggen

It may be a while before my blog is ready for prime time on WordPress. I need to figure out a bunch of stuff (layout, making entries, etc.) and I am uncertain as to when I might find the time to do so - leaving tomorrow for the University Notre Dame and shortly after my return the wife and I are leaving for a couple weeks in Ireland and Scotland.

I may have a bit of non-hockey downtime at UND to utilize in working on WP stuff but in the meantime Squarespace has given me a workaround to resizing images for display but without a popup enlargement. With that workaround and by switching to a template style which allows for larger display images, I will continue to post here until; 1) I get Wp sorted out, or, 2) until (if or when) SS figures out what the hell the problem is with resizing (to include a popup).

In any event, during my recent NYC visit I visited my favorite used book store and found a different Saul Leiter book - not the Early Color book - titled Colors. I believe the book was the catalog for a 2011 Leiter exhibition at Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

While the book / exhibition featured all of the pictures as in the Early Color book, there are a few of those printed larger than in Early Color and there are also some additional pictures which were not in Early Color. And, as I discovered after purchasing and unwrapping the book (new unused book), the book contained a Saul Leiter interview.

In that interview there was a paragraph in which Leiter talked about his picturing M.O. - one which is remarkably similar to my own (read my recent entry, civilized ku # 3085 / diptych-213 ~ black and white and red all over, not to mention references to my fascination with picturing the commonplace found throughout this blog):

I take photographs in my neighborhood. I think that mysterious things things happen in familiar places. We don't always need to run to the other end of the world. I like ambiguity in a photograph. I like it when one is not certain of what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture, and we do not know what we are looking at it, all of a sudden sudden, we discover sometime that we start seeing.

Other than a feeling of validation, re; my picturing M.O., another quote came to mind when reading Leiter's words:

"...it's been quite some time since I read an artist speak so eloquently and clearly about the world beyond his/(her) own asshole. ~ Bill Jay

 

AN ASIDE: FYI, one of the reasons MAST BOOKS (66 Ave. A, NYC) is my favorite used book store is that the price of this recent purchase of a new unused out-of-print book was well below the current market price (anywhere from $93.00 - $1,041.86 USD). Also, it doesn't hurt that the store is literally right around the corner from my good friend's place where I stay when in NYC.