South Netherlandish rosary bead, 2" in diameter, 1500-1510.

This week I learned about a species of ant whose entire colony is contained in a single hickory nut!

Image from here, at the Cloisters.

I've shared this before, but not in a video. The sheer length of this book does something all on its own.

I can't stop thinking about this movie.

From a William Eggleston book. (Which?)

Clockwise from upper left:
Tennessee, 1985
Atlanta, Georgia, mid 80's
Massachusetts, mid 80's
Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi, 1969-70

"I'm not exactly sure that anything means 'Southern' for me. I like to look, and look around, and the South is one place I am most of the time, which means that obviously what I see around me are Southern things, but I've always tried to take that out of my photographs and make them more...not based in a place. I don't see my works as 'Southern works'. ... I'm trying to – working either in the South or in a foreign environment – essentially take the same picture, which is the picture I believe in and is illustrative of my kind of working."

From this interview of Eggleston. But then John Szarkowski in his introduction to William Eggleston's Guide:

"Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions when addressing themselves to questions of content, pretending with Degas that the work has nothing to do with ballet dancers, or pretending with James Agee that it has nothing to do with artifice. Both positions have the virtue of neatness, and allow the artist to answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work. If an artist were to admit that he was uncertain as to what part of the content of his work answered to life and what part to art, and was perhaps even uncertain as to precisely where the boundary between them lay, we would probably consider him incompetent.

"I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs - the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to think so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word."

From Elisabeth Hogeman's book After the Garden, 2014.

I would have loved these photos regardless, but Ellie was in my photo classes at UVa. 

Tom Uttech, Nind Awatchige, 2003.

Tom Uttech's paintings slay me. They were in the American Art Museum's show about birds. He also takes photos!

Tom Uttech, Nin Nissingwam

Thierry Girard, Accrochage, 1944. This picture and this picture:

Robert Adams, from The New West: Along the Colorado Front Range, 1974.

And that quote versus this one about Girard:

"He photographed the landscape as it stands, as we do in living there, unvarnished, without picturesque conventions. And paradoxically, thanks to his magical talent, France is such that we love the most. We have in our memories, our very unconscious, associated with these pictures, feelings of happiness. These cold images become very emotional and a real beauty appears."

Thierry Girard's Maquis, 15 novembre 1942 from Paysages Insoumis, 2007,

Point de vue 12, 1997. From his blog.

Facebook alerted me to the work of Thierry Girard, whose work is up at New Cabell Hall back at UVa. Thank you to Google translate for the quote below.

"...whenever possible, I try to take into account the thickness of the landscape, and consider it as a kind of palimpsest, the landscape is actually the result of successive writings and intertwined in history natural and human."

Sometimes I question my life because of a comic book. These pages are from Daisuke Igarashi's Little Forest. (Read from right to left.)

What is UP with this BOOK. It's perfect.

And this artist?? Can I just start over and be Jochen Lempert?

Segment on Robert Adams from PBS.

"...I came into the darkroom and printed them, and I was really surprised. I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures.. they were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious."

Have I really never put his photos on here?

Robert Adams, from The New West: Along the Colorado Front Range.

My friend Emmanuel has taken a lot of excellent photos in China, check them out.

I didn't take many photos this month, but I did get to rewatch my favorite movie.

Oh, Mosfilm has the whole movie online with subtitles! Part 1, Part 2. Mirror is there, too. If you watch it, my advice is to put the movie on full-screen and give it your undivided attention. Yi Yi: A One and a Two was also great.

I hope that one day I can make magic like Rinko Kawauchi TT_TT

"In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.

"She speaks of the between-forest. This is because, in the same valley as her village, there are two forests which join. Yet the preposition between belongs to forests in general. It’s what they are about. A forest is what exists between trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it."

"It’s a commonplace to say that photographs interrupt or arrest the flow of time. They do it, however, in thousands of different ways. Cartier-Bresson’s 'decisive moment' is different from Atget’s slowing down to a standstill, or from Thomas Struth’s ceremonial stopping of time. What is strange about some of Jitka’s forest photos – not her photos of other subjects – is that they appear to have stopped nothing. In a space without gravity there is no weight, and these pictures of hers are, as it were, weightless in terms of time. It is as if they have been taken between times, where there is none… In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer’s imagination: for they are like another creature’s experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us, somewhere between past, present and future…"

From John Berger's introduction to Jitka Hanzlová's book Forest. Taken from here.

Some newer work by artists I love:

Eva-Fiore Kovakovsky
Eric Marth
Danielle Mericle

Keisuke Tanaka's Pieces of Mountain, 2008.

Pillar Of the World, 2006.

Goal, 2006.

Mushrooms From the Forest by Takashi Homma.

"The earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11th, 2011, near Japan’s Tohoku region, led to the catastrophic equipment failures and nuclear disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Six months later, on September 15th, the Japanese government prohibited the gathering and ingestion of any mushrooms grown in the forty-three cities of Fukushima prefecture. Traces of radiation exceeding safety limits were detected in some wild mushroom varieties. Fungi inherently absorb radiation much more rapidly than other organisms. My Geiger counter detected a greatly elevated level of radiation in the lush forests of Fukushima when compared to the region’s urban areas. The wild mushrooms in the photographs assembled here are from those forests."