I’m stepping away from the blog entirely for a few days, and will be dialing down my participation for awhile thereafter. My divided attentions are needed on some major projects, but I also need to recharge a bit, or at least work up the energy to be a control freak on some other stuff, and reinvest myself in some other interests. And catch up on correspondence (private to lots of people: sorry). So you should, in my stead, start seeing some other Reader voices on here, which I trust will keep you entertained.
Oh, and: I haven’t posted any pictures in awhile, so I wanted to draw your attention to a couple lovely, humane galleries of portraits by only-connect, taken at Pitchfork and Sherman Park. Here are a couple, but you won’t get the full effect without browsing the galleries. These kind of pictures make me want to be less of an agoraphobe.
To get all poor-man’s-Susan-Sontag for a moment: I think the beauty of them is their stasis. Most festival and concert pictures are about mass and movement (like this one, from the same set), about lots of people doing crazy things, so they emphasize action. By shooting in tight focus, from the neck up, and, most importantly, with total, “boring” symmetry (asymmetry, as Blair Kamin emphasizes, creates motion), these photos are about individual people and stillness, an unconventional and riveting choice for an event like Pitchfork.
