Happy New Year from Durham NC
Here’s a picture from the American Tobacco District from earlier this evening, before the security guards asked me to leave. Here are some other pictures I took this evening at American Tobacco and at Durham’s Bus Station.
Fallen Princesses
Photographer Dina Goldstein has created a series of photographs called Fallen Princesses where she looks at the next chapter in the lives of fairy tale princesses, but set in the modern world.
Cereal Killer
Terry Border recently published a book called Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things. It is three years of work and nearly 400 blog posts of attaching wires to food to personify them and illustrate a phrase or bad pun. Even Rhett and Link thought he was cool, as they interviewed him below.
Shimmer Wall Photo Backdrop at Press Conference
Photo by Ginny Skalski
My friend Ginny recently started a new job as the Social Media Strategist for Cree, the RTP-based LED lighting company. In her second week on the job, she was involved in the planning of a major company press conference when they announced the addition of 575 jobs. The governor of NC was in attendance for the announcement.
Ginny wanted an interesting backdrop for the announcement, so she asked me if she could use my photo of the Raleigh Shimmer Wall. Cree was a major sponsor of this downtown public art installation, as it is lit at night with Cree LEDs (scroll down for a night view). I was happy to oblige. Ginny posted several pictures online listing me as the photographer, like the one above of Cree CEO, Chuck Swoboda. Below is my photo, which clearly shows the Cree sponsorship banner.
From the News & Observer Editors’ Blog: Here are 5 things you may or may not have known about the company:
1. Cree chips lit up the Beijing Olympics, with 750,000 red, blue and green LEDs made by Cree helping to light up the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube buildings.
2. The company donated the $1 million LED system backlighting the shimmer wall at the Raleigh Convention Center.
3. Cree was founded in 1987 by brothers Neal and Eric Hunter, N.C. State engineering grads.
4. The company went public in February 1993. We covered it with a paragraph in our Feb. 10, 1993, edition. Market value of the company was less than $100 million.
5. Friday afternoon, Cree’s market value, as measured by the value of its stock, was nearly $4 billion.
The Best Camera
Photographer Chase Jarvis has taken loads of photographs with his iphone, and rather than continue to use a variety of post-processing apps, he developed his own. It is $2.99 from the itunes store and it has lots of positive ratings. This is first prong of his three-prong approach, which also includes a book and a photo sharing site, thebestcamera.com.
The Bain Project
The Bain Project was a site specific artwork created in the deserted and decommissioned waterworks plant south of downtown Raleigh. In the late 1930s, as Raleigh was growing, the city built a new plant to handle the water needs of the area. Here’s a link to historic information about the Bain Waterworks. This artwork project combined found objects in the plant, organic materials like branches and grass with a deteriorating industrial building. I was more interested in photographing the aging machinery and peeling paint than in the artwork, but some it made interesting photographs.
Here are the rest of my photos on Flickr and here are photos from other local photographers.
One of the most creative endeavors was a musical piece played by creating sounds on the building itself. A plant buzzer sounded, and a corps of white-coated employees marched down the main aisle and took their positions in the water holding tanks. They proceeded to shake, shudder and pound out the sounds of a working plant. Here’s some video of the piece.
100 Abandoned Houses
I found this great site, one of the handful of interesting things I have found using StumbleUpon, called 100 Abandoned Houses. It is a collection of photographs by Kevin Bauman of abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan.
The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.
Superheroes in Real Life
Mexican-born photographer Dulce Pinzón has spent much of her career dealing with issues related to the duality of Mexican immigrants trying to find their way in the US. Her Superhero project shows Mexican immigrants who toil away in regular jobs, normally unnoticed, but dressed as American and Mexican superheros for the photos. For many of them their real superpower is to provide money for their family back home, each caption includes the amount each sends home each month.
Baby and the King Cake
Tuesday at work we had a Mardi Gras celebration before our morning agency meeting. This is a picture of the King Cake with the baby.
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