Nertz!

Nuts! he might say, if the Pioneer Food Store happened to be all out of his favorite rolling paper. It's 12:45 in the universe. From Kepes/Lynch.

Harvard Bridge, pre-Smoot

The single-most unusual aspect of this shot is its revealing of a view that has changed very little in over 50 years. I walk the same walk. From Kepes/Lynch.

Watch yer parking meters

Don't wanna be a bum, ya better chew gum. Taste the sun on the metal. Nickels only. From Kepes/Lynch.

Tree + reader

Today's Kepes/Lynch image looks like late afternoon; the reader is backlit: a skillful exposure, and cunningly composed in space and rectangle to convey solitude. It's not a book he holds. Is it a newspaper? A racing form? A man's magazine, like Argosy? Or True?

Dead girls are easy

My amour fou.

Today's selection from The Kepes/Lynch Photograph Collection is composed within an inch of its life, but a row of fluorescents visible through the window hints of interior doings on that bright mid-morning, 10:45 AM, March 14, 1956.

Corns medicine

A dangling reminder/remainder of slow clapboard days in Cambridge, Mass. Corns Medicine a buck a bottle when you pick up the laundry. From The Kepes/Lynch Photograph Collection.

Another from The Kepes/Lynch Photograph Collection and one of my favorites. Would Mondrian have liked this image? Not enough boogie-woogie for Piet, perhaps, but a fascinating play of placement, right angles, and parallelisms, regardless. This is neither painterly space nor warm pictorialism, but a chilly graphic consideration on ground glass, something that must've looked, upside down, like some kind of perfection. The shadows aslant the stairs say it's after Noon. The photographer noted time of exposure as 2:00 PM, April 19, 1957. The clock in the window says 1:50.

Boston in the fifties

Thanks to the glorious Kepes/Lynch Photography Collection, we experience intimately, down to the cigarette butts in the gutter, Boston in the years between 1954 and 1959. Taken with a 4X5 view camera by Nishan Bichajian, the 1,906 black and white images were made to support the city planning theories of MIT professor Kevin Lynch, who used research garnered from this study, The Perpetural Form of the City (co-organized by MIT professor, Gyorgy Kepes), to inform his seminal work, The Image of the City. Fifty years ago the sun shone no differently, but the guys wore fedoras and the old Hancock was the tallest building in Boston.

Childhood detritus

My first post, and this time a simple archiving of things one is afraid of forgetting, such as Big Chief writing tablet, reminder of grade school tedium, torn newsprint, tongue-darkened graphite points, dead flies in fliptop desk (late spring), and greasy pit of stomach fear transversing corn field on walk home.

Remembering too the 1949 Ford, premiering the year after my birth, but it and later iterations still very much on the road in early and mid-fifties on toward '60.