© 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.

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.