Copyright © 2009 Theresa Lynn

I am completely enchanted with this set of photos by simple moth on flickr. I could stare at these photos all day.

This won’t come as a surprise to some readers, but Greg & I just started a foodblog about our eating habits and research and health in general, because aside from photography and websites, respectively, those topics are what we spend a lot of time researching and talking about. I came up with the name The Casual Vegan, because it describes what we are in a few words. In more than a few words, we eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet and generally do not eat meat or dairy, but we are not strict vegans. We’re terribly passionate about things like whole grains and the error of a daily diet of meat and dairy, and rather than having to explain this extemporaneously in social situations and annoy friends endlessly, it’s nice to have a website that we can point to and say, Uhh, just go there and read our articles. So, uh, go there and read our articles.

© Joe Kirschling

My neighborhood, aka Jackowo, according to Wikipedia. I’ve never heard my Polish-speaking friend, who also lives here, mention it having a different name. This is a neighborhood in Chicago that even long-time Chicago residents have never heard of, so I tell everyone that I live in the adjacent neighborhood.

The red swing has been disassembled in the unprofessional sense of the word. The ropes are still there, dangling from the beam. Pictures forthcoming if my Holga worked this morning on the way to work. I’m pleased that we had our moment with it.

I saw the Aaron Siskind exhibition today at the Smart Museum, and I was underwhelmed. But I enjoyed the museum itself, especially seeing a big Rothko they have there, and spent a moment vibrating with the purple and red canvas. And walking around the campus of the University of Chicago and through Washington Park from the Green Line was very pleasant on a brisk, but relatively mild day (still sporting the long johns under the jeans until next week).

I came home to receive this Granta in the mail that I ordered two days ago, and with any luck, I’ll spend a good amount of time reading it over the next few days. Granta is my favorite literary journal, and this issue promises a few pieces written around photographs of the writers’ fathers. They usually have nice photo essays, and it’s also the magazine where I first encountered the writing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which I thank the editors!

Also, this weekend brings the visit of one Emily Porter for holiday festivities, as she has many friends here in Chicago. So, perhaps I’ll partake in a little unusually-timed spirits tomorrow for the opportunity to chat with my lovely and talented internet friend! Maybe she’ll let us geek out on Star Trek talk for a few minutes, because along with being a wildly successful photographer, Emily is also a fellow Star Trek fan. I find it slightly amusing that in my effort to finish watching the Voyager series sequentially (I was at first unwilling, but find the later seasons to be more appealing), coincidence had me watching a really corny episode tonight in which the characters spend a lot of time with Irish holodeck holograms. Seems fitting for the eve of the St. Patrick’s day parade, and also means that I’ve been writing this entire post with an Irish accent in my mind — I had to resist the urge to write “a fine lass” more than once. And then I gave in.

Last October, Kodak discontinued their line of surface “E” Supra Endura papers due to the “declining sales” of this particular paper. I, however, didn’t know this and had recently started to use E as an alternative to my normal N surface when Central Camera had been out of stock. I found it a most agreeable and even preferable alternative. Well, those days are over, because Central Camera in Chicago is officially out of this discontinued surface and we’ll all have to make do with its close match, the semi-matte surface N.

While this is a.) old news and b.) not very interesting to most people (unlike renaming the Sears Tower - wth?), it was undereported! As color darkroom users, we don’t have all that many options as it is. (How I would love to be able to purchase a pack of color paper smaller than 8×10.) So for those of you with some E left in your yellow boxes, enjoy it while it lasts! (Although it appears that it’s still available at other vendors in unknown quantities.)

While out riding my bicycle last week, I happened upon a strange sight/site underneath the train in Bucktown: a wooden swing dangling from the el tracks. What else need I say? It’s perfectly placed, across the street from a small and well-used park, near the intersection of Milwaukee and Leavitt. It’s hung slightly crooked, but swings well enough as Greg and I found out, hopping off our bikes for a swing with our helmets still on, feeling a little silly but evoking smiles from passersby. And it’s quite thrilling to be swinging from the el structure as a long train passes you overhead. This is definitely the kind of place that I consider to be a tourist attraction.

Read more about the redswingproject at redswingproject.org

Marlaina Read was kind enough to include me in the first issue of her new online publication. Noel’s in there too.

Download the premiere issue of INVISIBLE CITY at http://www.invisiblecity.org

Contributors: Marlaina Read Alexander Binder Aaron McElroy Olivia Locher Noel Ruiz Alejandro Cartagena Michael Scaringe Kristen Heldmann Benjamin Reich Carey Macarthur Chih-Han Hsu Jason Reed Jordan Tate Daniel Farnum Susanne Willuhn Grace Kim Bruno Roels Aaron Joel Santos Carlo Dulla Stephen Donnelly Andrew P. Marcinek Nicola Trethowan Vladimir Zykov M Kitchell Kris T Kahn

I will be honest here and admit that the only reason I send mail is to receive mail. I mean, what’s better than getting art and letters made from tangible materials in your mailbox, right? With this in mind, I can’t express how much I value two photographer friends that I’ve made who live on opposite ends of the country and who occasionally grace my mailbox with incredibly generous donations to my aesthetic life. This week, I was happily surprised to find such a package from Shannon, filled with a hefty stack of prints varying in size and color, including a large helping of 11 x 14 prints.

Shannon’s work has been inspiring me for years, before I knew how to use a camera, and even when I wasn’t able to view it on the internet or in my hands, it was there as an idea in my mind. She is so fluidly a documentarian and experimental. She shows no fear, which as a photographer, I think especially, is an obstacle I have had to overcome and still do. She makes more work than anyone I know, save for our friend, Noel Ruiz, but without the kind of warped and incessant need to show everything that I know I feel on  a daily basis. And I admire that (assuming it’s even true), because I really no longer know what it’s like to be left alone with your art. To sit in a room with it and not have the room be a portal to other peoples’ opinions. There’s sincerity there in that space, and a beauty that is imbued in the images from knowing them so well.

Shannon has several bodies of work so it’s hard for me to begin writing about my thoughts regarding the images. I see them individually, but also how they fit into the larger ideas. And I don’t know how much I should share, as it’s not up on the internet for everyone to see. Maybe one day she’ll let me go through her work with her and we’ll make a website and write about it. Her self-portraits, her work in the Tenderloin, Nepal, her images of childhood, her paintings and drawings, her accompanying stories written about the images, and her newer photo project that I think I’m seeing a bit of in a couple of these images.

If I ever have any doubt about being a photographer, I can put it aside for the moment and trust in my friend Mimi, age 2, who was inspired to remember me all the way from Kansas the other day, after having only met me once at the tender age of 20 months , and who according to her mother asked her to “Draw Kristen, Kristen has a camera, draw Kristen’s camera.” Some of the most thoughtful people I know. At any age.

Copyright © 2009 Liz Kuball

Liz Kuball gets three crowd-sourced recommendations on the 20×200 blog. Were I on Twitter, I would’ve added a 4th. (Dare I join Twitter? I’m already swimming in my Google Reader.) Anyway, she totally wins. I was poking around her website and blog to find an accompanying photo, but ran into the trouble of finding too many to choose from! Liz’s blog is a must-read/see as she updates frequently with gorgeous images from her work in Southern California.

Copyright © 2009 Liz Kuball

From Bookslut:

A while back I was left in charge of my nephew, who was being fussy. I was exhausted, and tried singing the song that was echoing in my head to the boy: “I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years.” It wasn’t until I hit the first verse that I realized I was singing “Venus in Furs” to a three-month-old.

My dad visited Chicago last week for a TV interview his publisher set up with Lou Manfredini and the producers of House Smarts on HGTV. It was lovely to spend an afternoon and the better part of a day with my dad, since our visits per year are few, and it was really neat to be with him on the set while he was talking about his book, Be Your Own House Contractor, and his website, buildyourownhouse.com on camera. My dad knows his stuff, and he puts a ton of work into updating his website with really valuable information about building your own house, being a general contractor, and estimating costs before building. It’s a field of knowledge that I have yet to put to use in my own life, but when I’m ready, I’ll know just what to read to prepare me for it.

A friend of mine was working on a graduate school project a couple of weeks ago for her project management class, and she called me up to tell me that she had just spent a good deal of time on byoh.com, having found it in google, before she realized that the guy in the website’s photo is my dad, Carl Heldmann, who she’s known since elementary school as “Skip,” his nickname. She was really excited and said that the website saved her a ton of time on her project and it was such a fun coincidence. Reason #reallybignumber why I’ll never stop loving the internet.

Here is my favorite shot from the taping: