This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” books, or more accurately, “I kind of thought of that but never got around to doing it” books. Doug Rickard travels the country via Google Street View and creates a virtual street photography from the massive library of automatically generated images. Rickard gravitates to images of more or less distressed locations that include people, which means he is drawing from a small percentage of available pictures. I’m impressed with the patience this must require. As the book notes, his approach lets him show places he’s never been and would
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Short Review: David Plowden’s A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America
David Plowden’s photos in A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America are marvelously evocative as always. His introductory text moves them to a dimension beyond ruin porn. Usually when you see pictures of rural decay you respond to that evocativeness and to the formal beauty of the scenes. Plowdwn connects you to the stories behind these mostly Midwestern images in the same way that he’s connected, by talking about what these places (and the people who once populated them) were like when he first photographed them years ago. There really is a narrative behind almost every ruined farmhouse or boarded-up store.
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Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Cross Purposes
Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011), a Polish book keeper turned metal worker and then artist after arriving in the United States, gave no indication of being particularly religious, but he did like making crosses. A prolific creator of objects from scrap stainless steel, always demonstrating over-the-top imagination, Szwarc made hundreds of crosses, if not thousands. He produced jewelry, he made crosses to be hung on the wall, and he crafted cruciform objects with no apparent use other than to be carriers of his endless combinations of geometric shapes. Szwarc liked to say that no two of his objects, be they crosses, vases, key fobs or boxes, were alike. The evidence plainly supports that contention while demonstrating a virtuosic artistic vision
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Vernacular Art Spectacular, DuSable High School
This group of drawings turned up at Maxwell Street some years ago. With the possible exception of “Take your cross and follow me,” which is an earlier piece, they were executed by students of Ethel Nolan, an artist and art teacher at DuSable High School on Chicago’s South Side. I’m guessing she might have saved the best of her students’ work, as represented here. Super fine vernacular art.
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Inside the Fireworks: A July 4 Light Show
Interesting things become visible if you get really up close to a July 4 fireworks display.
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Business Name Failures
Perhaps you don’t really want to name these businesses after yourself: Sam N Ella’s River Club Bar & Grill, Kankakee; Bates Motel, Coeur d’Alene. More weird business names.
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Wall Art: Generations of Jessica’s
Three generations of great roadside art signage on the wall at Jessica’s Western Wear, Clark near Lunt, Chicago. The art continues to deteriorate, and the store is now called Jessica’s Fashion, but there is still some cowboy gear in the window. What I really want to know, however, is where the Jetsons came in.
Continue readingWeird Store Names: Questionably Gross
Not the grossest business ever. What about B&M Waste management? And more oddities.
Continue readingKedzie Avenue Gems
Kedzie Avenue is one of my favorite Chicago streets. It runs the length of the city and far south to 206th Street in Olympia Fields. It’s got a great name, for an early real estate developer. And of course there is a lot of fine signage along the way.
Continue readingReview: Louis Wain’s Cats
Louis Wain would have been important if he had only been the greatest master ever of cute and anthropomorphic felinity, which, around the turn of the 20th Century, he was. His images of kitties were cranked out and reproduced in vast numbers, creating an inexhaustible reservoir of catty charm. Wain would have been important if he were only known for the increasingly bizarre and (before the term was coined) psychedelic cat images he produced toward the end of his life while institutionalized as a schizophrenic. And Wain would have been fascinating if only for the ceramic cats he designed in
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