A tour of Rowan Oak: William “Wild Bill” Faulkner’s Estate
Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi: Where Faulkner outranks fiction 2:1
GW Bridge Part II
Walking across the George Washington Bridge
Inspired by Creative Time’s KEY TO THE CITY project, in which participants are presented with a key that unlocks interesting places around New York City, Greg, Lizzie and I decided to walk across George Washington Bridge. The key was supposed to unlock the gate to a normally-closed pedestrian walkway, but we arrived to find it already unlocked, with pedestrians streaming across. Nevertheless, the views were spectacular.
It also gave me a chance to use a technique that I’ve been playing with in subtler ways for quite some time: vertical panoramas. On a vertically-oriented webpage like a blog, I think the results speak for themselves:
More vertical panos in future posts: putting a few of them in a single one just crashed my browser…
Clarksdale, Mississippi
Home of the Blues.
Inexplicably, given the amount of space for more horizontally-oriented buildings, Clarksdale is home to a many-story windowless structure
Many more photos after the jump:
Hypothesis
Shortly after beginning my transition from film to digital (insofar as I have made one), I realized that on-site and in-camera editing often destroyed the best images from my shoots. There are exceptions – if I know exactly the shot I need and don’t yet have it; if I’m on so tight a deadline that speed is more important than the best possible quality; if my subject blinks or decides to contort themselves in the last 60th of a second – but I still forbid myself to delete photos from my camera. It is very difficult to correctly make final editing decision on the fly.
I’m sure much of the difficulty stems from the general psychological need for distance in making good judgments, but it occurs to me that there may be a physical/physiological component as well. It takes a long time for our eyes to adjust between one light condition and another, and if we are so immersed in a condition as to be capable of taking good pictures then we are probably not able to correctly judge how the colors and contrasts will look when an image is displayed in totally different conditions. No doubt most of this gap is made up by the visual/mental gymnastics required to take non-automatic photos at all – but so much of what makes a good photo is precisely that subtle, striking color/light contrast that it shouldn’t surprise us to see how digital, despite its promise, has failed to eliminate the traditional divide between shooting and editing.
Southern Sunflowers
Who can resist stopping at the occasional sunflower field?
Click through for larger panoramic image
BONUS:
Lizzie Wade, under the W A D E Tractor sign outside of Clarksdale
Elvis Land
The incompetence of American Airlines kept us in Dallas overnight, so we missed out on the Marshall Space Flight Center – but since we were rafting down the Cahaba River within six hours of landing in Birmingham it’s hard to complain too much about the start of the trip.
One of the last surviving Bluesmobiles from John Belushi and Dan Akroyd's 1980 film is housed at the Hopson Plantation, outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi
A slight detour on the drive from Birmingham to Clarksdale took us through two of the three major Elvis-related attractions in the South: Tupelo, Elvis’s birthplace, and Graceland Too, the home of Elvis’s greatest fan and memorabilia collector, Paul McLeod.
Elvis bought his first guitar at Tupelo Hardware Co in 1945
DEEP SOUTH ROAD TRIP
On Wednesday, Lizzie and I will fly to Birmingham, Alabama and begin a week-long road trip across the deep south with our longtime friend Margaret Eby.
After driving 15,000 miles last summer, even the normally intimidating 1,100 or so of this trip seems like a piece of cake. We will unfortunately miss the 50th anniversary celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird in Monroeville, Alabama, since it is a state and a half away from an event we’ll be attending in Clarksdale, Mississippi. But I am excited that our route (as planned) will inscribe an enormous cross on Mississippi – and about the fact that when it’s all over I will have visited forty-three out of America’s glorious fifty states.
A. Birmingham, Alabama: the town of Margaret’s youth and current summer residence.
B. Huntsville, Alabama: home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Depending on how our visit goes, it could be a test case for the continuation of the summer of science beyond our lab visits during the summer of 2009.
C. Tupelo, Mississippi: Elvis’s hometown.
D. Oxford, Mississippi: Faulkner’s hometown.
E. Clarksdale, Mississippi: we’ll be just in time to catch The Most Southern Weekend on Earth, a “two-day shindig of Southern music and spirits in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.” Clarksdale is also home to Morgan Freeman’s juke-joint and a great deal of blues history.
F. Holly Springs, Mississippi: the site of Graceland Too – a vast, personally curated house/museum dedicated to whom else but Elvis Presley.
G. Jackson, Mississippi: the present home of Margaret’s parents, we will use Jackson as a temporary base of operations for the rest of the trip. Eudora Welty’s house is also located here.
H. Vicksburg, Mississippi: really the only Civil War battlefield in the deep south – most of the fighting happened either further north in Tennessee or further east in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia – Vicksburg was the site of Grant’s successful capture of the Mississippi River on July 4th, 1963.
I. New Orleans, Louisiana: no trip to the south would be complete without a stop in New Orleans.
I(a). Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico: I’m definitely trying to get some photos of the Gulf spill – or, as the case might be, of BP’s attempts to stop people from getting photos of the Gulf spill.
J. Jackson, Mississippi (again): our last stop. Lizzie and I fly out of Jackson for Washington, DC on July 14th.
Stay tuned for photos!
An Inaugural Post
After spending most of the last year working on The Summer of Science with Lizzie Wade, other side-projects have started to build up without a good place to go. Thus: a new blog. This theme has a considerably wider text column than my previous platforms, which will allow for more photo-heavy posts. Expect a few cross-posts from the summer of science as that project winds to a close (or continues, as the case may be), followed by photos and writing about whatever I’m working on.
One thing I can promise: this won’t be just another personal blog.
Visual Textuality: Nick Russell's weblog 