At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which has the absolute coolest conservatory.

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

Mom after some early blackberries.

Old snaps, new scans!

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

I am embarrassed to say that I haven't taken any pictures in a year and a half, since I went back to school. Excuses include broken camera, broken light meter, too busy, etc. etc. But now I'm done with school! And my camera ought to be fixed! I need to pick one project to do over the next 7 months and print as I go this time. I have too many projects that failed because I didn't print along the way and think about the final product. Welcome to 2016, this blog is super chatty now. Here is something old.

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."

I guess I need a flare hood... but I liked this anyway.