Streetphoto of the Week  Exhibition* Number 1 through 52

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*STREETPHOTOS of the WEEK
First Year
(#001 to #052)
July 11, 2006 to July 3, 2007
 

What is Streetphoto of the Week?

         It’s an Art Exhibit, a weekly sharing of a single street photograph (or five) from around the globe, and sometimes there’s an essay attached giving the back-story behind the photographs. Every five years, the Streetphotos of the Week and accompanying essays issued in the previous 260 weeks will be published in volumes called: Giving Up Lent For Cake.  But no worries, because Streetphoto of the Week promises to never try to sell you anything -- -- but instead to just sprinkle a little regular Tube Candy around -- -- Guerilla Art meant solely to get overworked folks like you to Stop and Smell the Street...

*Streetphoto of the Week #1/ The Soweto Sisters/ Johannesburg, South Africa/ 2006
... new friends of mine on the streets of Africa ...

Issued on July 11, 2006
 

               *Hello All;
            This spring I returned to my studio from yet another one of my lengthy streetphoto field trips, and while catching up on all the emails to friends and associates that had piled up while I was overseas -- I began ending the reply letters with a "Streetphoto of the Day" feature. These seemed to go over pretty well -- and so while adding up my portfolio the other night for a 26-month revolving exhibition of 150 of my images called "Gary Mark Smith: A to Z", I conjured up the idea to start littering the In-Boxes of the folks on my mailing list with a new "Streetphoto of the Week" column -- which I plan to post regularly, (apparently, once a week ...) for the next several years.
Just because I can...

     And just because for one reason or another you ended up on my mailing list -- you'll now be getting immediate access to these cool global streetphotos!!

     But no worries, because "Streetphoto of the Week" promises to never try to sell you anything -- -- -- but instead to just sprinkle a little regular "tube candy" around -- -- -- guerilla art meant solely to get overworked folks like you to stop and smell the street...
In this spirit, marketing of the "Streetphoto of the Week" product line will be discouraged -- because really --, who can afford fine art these days -- -- and who really needs another bloody T-shirt anyway? However, emailing me back a comment about streetphotos you discover that you either love or hate -- and feeling free to post ones you like on your desktop or as your screen saver is encouraged.

     However, if you'd prefer that I'd stop sending these streetphotos to you -- just shoot me an email, and I'll take your email address out the "Streetphoto of the Week" group and put it into the "Needs a Life" group. No -- really --, if for whatever reason, please write to me and I'll discontinue sending the column to you the very next week...

     Cheers,
     Gary

*Streetphoto of the Week #2/ Street Sweep Allure/ Lisbon, Portugal/ 2005

Issued on July 18, 2006
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #3/ Traffic Stop on the Champs Elysees/ Paris, France/ 1990

Issued on July 25, 2006
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #4/ Washington Square Hat Napper/ New York, USA/ 1997

Issued on August 1, 2006
 

                * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #4 ...
               My contention is that Washington Square park in New York City is the center of the Earth – -- -- nay ... the center of the known universe. Everywhere you look around that place you’ll see and hear the frenetic energy of the city -- the electric infectious buzz of everyday people at play, practicing the optimism of the independent spirit of America. Parents pushing kids on playground swings. NYU students making student films. Young dancers practicing ballet in the shallows of the Washington Square fountain. You’ll see and hear dogs barking and rumbling with one another around the dog walk, vendors hawking hot dogs in front of the arch, and inline skaters or skateboarders zipping past stream-of-conscious poets having personal raves. And when the sun is out – you’ll nearly always see street buskers entertaining throngs of tourists at the south fountain sidewalk stage. You’ll see lovers kissing on benches and beat police eyeballing pot peddlers and you’re likely to hear from the chess players down on 4th Street with their often raucous games of board war.
But although Washington Square is a small place with lots of action and heightened energy, there always seems to be a space here or there in one corner or another where you’ll encounter a righteous benchnapper – come out to commune with the independent spirit of America in his favorite way ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #5/ Five on a Bench/ Warsaw, Poland/ August 1990

Issued on August 8, 2006
 

              * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #5 ...
           This week's streetphoto was made in the square of the Old Town district of Warsaw, Poland 16 years ago this week. It was Freedom Summer 1990 in Eastern Europe . The Berlin Wall had just collapsed the previous December and European Reunification Day was still two months away, but these five locals came out on a sunny August morning to sit amidst the street painters and the merchants and the tourists -- and to just play their parts in the buzz of the flow of a revolution of spirit.
     After 50 devastating years of War, Soviet domination, and Cold War limbo -- they wore their delight at their newfound optimism on their sleeves ...
... but although their cloths were bold and festive and free, their five faces could not conceal the strain of a people suddenly in transition whose surprise job it was to somehow make this freedom thing work.

*Streetphoto of the Week #6/ Drinking in a Good Book/ New York, USA/ 1982

Issued on August 15, 2006
 

            * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #6 ...
          Street photographers rarely run into restaurant service staff on the street unless they’re hustling a tray at an outdoor cafe. One rarely catches a kitchen worker in the wild taking a break in an alley, typically a quiet place away from the rush of the city that echoes at any movement and which doesn’t lend itself to territorial intrusion.
Clearly this chap knows how to get the most from a crumby dishwashing stint. Or maybe he’s a line grunt between meal rushes. No matter, having a means to an end is good and having the wisdom to skate through the day when you can manage it on a few words of wisdom and a taste of the grape is even better.
Drinking in a good book in an alley in midtown Manhattan -- an afternoon respite from the grind -- gearing up for the dinner rush -- pretending to be somewhere else ...
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #7/ Paris Sleeper Cell/ Paris, France/ 2001

Issued on August 22, 2006
 

                        *  PS: I got this note back from my friend Deb last week; "Gary, your Streetphoto series is fabulous. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to see them. I have saved them on my PC and hope that is ok. I have sent a few to Astrid. I will not share them with anyone else unless it is OK with you to do so? Thanks again for including me in this email event of your work. WOW I love them!"

     For the record:
          The several-year Streetphoto of the Week exhibition is FINE ART TUBE CANDY meant to be spread around to as many people as possible. The same regular rules and regulations apply about anyone making money off the art who isn't named Gary Mark Smith.
     That's bad.
     But otherwise, everyone I send Streetphoto of the Week to (a vastly growing list of fellow street travelers) is encouraged to forward it on at will to whomever they like -- and to encourage other fellow travelers who want to join the direct mailing list to contact me directly at gary@streetphoto.com and let me know they want in on the fun. You can also rat them out by sending me the email addresses of folks you think should be getting this column every week, but please clear it with the new victims first so I don't overload someone's dial-up system or offend anyone with occationally gritty street content.

     Or you can be like Susan Andrews of Austin , Texas -- who recently let me know that she uses each weekly image as her revolving desk top ...
     That's good!

*Streetphoto of the Week #8/ Devastatingly Beautiful/ New Orleans, USA/ 2006
the Hurricane Katrina Aftermath & the Flood of New Orleans

Issued on August 29, 2006
 

               * Hidden Metaphor Alert ...
           Please don't be so hypnotized by either the "devastation" or the "beauty" of Streetphoto of the Week #8 that you miss the whole story. That is -- if you look past the devastation and beauty (or should I say inside of it) you'll discover the subtle yet stinging hidden metaphor that makes Streetphoto of the Week #8 most compelling:
So -- please be sure to notice the two hurricane-whipped One Way Street Signs blown askew by Katrina, as well as the two reflections of the One Way Signs provided by the gooey floodwaters. These four One Way Signs (representing government, order, and the rule of law) are all pointing One Way in four different directions -- representing the tragically overwhelmed and incompetent government response to this predictable disaster that will ultimately be remembered as being far more disappointing -- and far more maddening -- than the storm itself ...

 
                * a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #8
           This week's streetphoto was made one year ago next week in the Lakeview neighborhood off Canal Street during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and the Flood of New Orleans. As a member of the Red Cross' first strike team, I gained access to the edge of this inaccessible place at this tumultuous and historic time. Then, during a rare several-hour break from helping run a shelter in Slidell , Louisiana , I volunteered to go on a pet rescue mission by boat into the floodwaters. At that time a "shoot to kill" order for looters was in effect and people were still being rescued off rooftops. Helicopters were thick in the sky, being used for both search and rescue and for the furious attempt to fix the stubborn breach in the 17th Street levy only a few blocks away from Streetphoto of the Week #8.
     Two months after I returned to my studio in Kansas, (I came back damaged and horribly spent -- because first responders became victims too -- and it took me two months to recover physically from the ordeal) I sent a copy of the photograph to my sister in New Jersey -- and it was she who came up with the title.

                         *PS:
                    Me and the three local Louisiana men whose boat I hitched a ride on to gain access to Streetphoto of the Week #8 successfully rescued four trapped cats from the wreckage of the flood. And later that fall my sister Alyssa (a nurse by trade) joined the Red Cross, went through emergency training, and ended up serving her own three-week tour in the Katrina aftermath in Alabama , Mississippi , and Louisiana.

 

*Streetphoto of the Week #9/ Businessmen on Leashes: The Carrot & The Stick/ London, England/ 2006

Issued on September 5, 2006
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #10/ 9/12/01:Killing the Messenger/ Amsterdam, Holland/ September 12, 2001

Issued on September 12, 2006
 

               *a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #10
             This murky evening streetphoto was made five years ago tonight as Janet and I became unwitting member-victims of what became known in Europe as "The 9/11 Stranded".
      There we were stuck in Amsterdam ... in Amsterdam ... ... ...
      Well, you know -- I figure you all had your own lousy September 11s watching all that horror up on the TV, and your own lousy September 12s that lasted into 2002 -- and for most of you it's still too soon after and you'll probably just want to skip ahead for a quick look at Streetphoto of the Week #10. However, if you'd still like to read on about mine and Janet's first days in this "whole new world" -- stuck in Amsterdam while New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania burned -- or just want to remember how bloody bad it all was (Never Forget!) you'll find a compelling account from my unpublished journal "White With Foam: Essays, Rumors, Field Notes and Photographs from the Edge of World War III" attached to Streetphoto of the Week #10. It's all about how the world rallied around America and Americans immediately after the attack. About how a short biblical season of global unity began.
My book White With Foam, (written in Amsterdam, Kansas, New York, and in the tribal belt on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border -- written about my brooding trips to a burning Ground Zero and my spooky streetphoto journey under the air war of Tora Bora,) is all about how things went from bad to worse ...

      Where did all that unity go?

*Field Note:
September 16, 2001
*... a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #10

From the G. Mark Smith streetphoto journal:
White With Foam: Essays, Rumors, Field Notes and Photographs
from the Edge of World War III
Gary Mark Smith/ Pack-a-Lunch Productions (2003/2006/2016)

 
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             Headline News
             (September 12-16, 2001)
 
             I spent the first few days after the attacks contributing to a worldwide funk. Like everyone else, Janet and I spent awful hours each day out in public piecing together and processing the information that was fed to us over the 24-hour airwaves we came in contact with and in newspapers and news magazines we read and in rumors we heard by word of mouth on the streets of Amsterdam. All of us there helpless on the passive receiver sides of our CNN Breaking News Boxes. Frustrated and helpless news sponges --- out of the loop and peeking in at the grim evolving toll produced for us by the media from the broadcast sides of their TV news screens.
     Defenseless riders on a horrible TV-terror-war bus driven by preposterous politics and unimaginable violence. News bulletins sent over the airwaves and injected into the numbed funk of everyone’s battered brain matter. Brain matter like mine, that thought it had seen it all, that thought it had thoroughly trained itself to be cynical enough to stay safely outside the pain and suffering of any political TV horror show.
Yet those of us stranded in places like Amsterdam --- on the faraway overseas receiver sides of our 24-hour CNN Breaking News Screens --- remained as personally involved as anyone else on the planet. Remote but not removed. Transfixed to the media, mourning the dead, and suffering the loss of security. Fitting our old lives and beliefs around the new world we’d all just been sucker-punched into.

     Trying to figure out what this all meant for us.
     What this all meant for Janet and me.
     We were stranded in Amsterdam on the European front of a brand new terror war, and like everyone else --- especially vulnerably stranded Americans --- we were nervous.

     Because dear God, what could possibly happen next?

 
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            Breakfast Headlines & Hugs on the Street
           Everyone I encountered on this Western theater was in a similar funk as Janet and I were. It didn’t matter which of the many nationalities I encountered (in this most international of cities), no one seemed anything but trampled by what had occurred across the sea.
Even the nastiest Amsterdam beggars, the ones who operate at the tram station at Rembrandtplein, were far less hostile at being stiffed, and seemed to ignore Americans altogether just after the attack. They couldn’t bare any bitter eye contact with a species of customer (an American mark) that might look back at them with the pain of Tuesday in their eyes and whom might illicit more sympathy in the beggars than the beggars could elicit from them. An altogether unacceptable role-flipping notion in the professional sympathy racket.
     Because even the nasty beggars of the Rembrandtplein tram station saw September 11 on their CNN Breaking News Boxes and even they wanted to help out the poor Americans. So much so, that last week they found it nearly impossible to draw sympathetic attention to their own panhandler plights.

     Street vendors announced their sympathies in embarrassing fashion, especially for sophisticated Europeans. The umbrella vendor in the red light district stopped me on the street as I stumbled past his stand. He left his stock of umbrellas, crossed the brick street and gently pinched my elbow between his index finger and thumb and whispered, “I’m sorry what they did to you. You didn’t deserve that. Those people must now pay for what they did.”
     I noticed that the umbrella vendor --- usually a surly sort who’d typically not even notice you unless it was raining and you needed an umbrella, and hardly even then --- didn’t end his compassion as a question. He ended it in a firm tone that led me to believe that he wanted to make the terrorists pay for what they did on Tuesday all by himself --- with his own two hands. And as he spoke to me he gently squeezed my elbow and patted me on my back with those same two big hands. It was obvious to me that he thought that my stumbling misery was his stumbling misery too. That my bitter anger was his. That his resolve --- Those people must now pay --- was now supposed to be my resolve too. He hardly knew me but because he knew I was an American and part-time Amsterdamer, he’d left his shop and crossed the street to do what he could do. To buck me up. And lord knows, as a stranded American, I needed that.
     “Yes indeed, I said to him, those people must now pay...”

     The clerk on the Damrak who sells me my newspapers every morning when I’m in Amsterdam apologized on Wednesday for not having a USA Today in stock to sell to me, but it was really the International Herald-Tribune I was after anyway. He took my money for the newspaper and he told me how sorry he felt that, “We’ve been unjustly attacked in such cowardly fashion.” He’d referred to the attack as an attack on both of us, and he let me know that he was feeling a pain as grave as mine. That we were in this thing together.
     We shook hands. The kind of meaningful handshake that binds brothers together. Not a casual greeting among acquaintances, but a firm look-em’-in-the-eye bond at a heightened moment in world history and in the lives of men.

    Only later at Ricky’s breakfast cafe when I’d read the latest news he’d sold me did I understand the depth of that bond, and the breadth of the camaraderie I’d been sharing with all the people I’d run across on the streets of Amsterdam. The body count in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania was rising and it was reported that more than 60 and perhaps as many as 90 countries of the world had lost civilians to the attack. Including scores of Dutch, French, English, and Germans.
    We ate breakfast every weekday morning for those next few days outside at Ricky’s breakfast cafe along the canal at Oudezijds Voorburgwal, and every morning the proprietors, Ben and Ricky, let us know how much they shared our trouble. You could see heartfelt strain in both their faces as they popped in and out of their cafe to fill our sidewalk table with Amsterdam’s best Dutch breakfast.
    We sat at that table in open air along the canal at Ricky’s all those awful mornings after, eating breakfast and flipping through the grisly pages of the morning newspapers, measuring the depth of our sadness in facts from the aftermath of our trauma as we chowed down our food.

     A hard-boiled egg presented on a silver hard-boiled egg holder; NY Missing Toll Climbs to 5000, Pentagon Near 200; four pieces of fresh bread; Bush Mobilizes 50,000 Troops; (two of them white, two whole wheat); Hijackers Armed with Just Knives; butter and jam; Three Jets Carried 5 Hijackers, Jet that Crashed Carried 4; good strong Dutch coffee; Remembrance Ceremonies Held in All 15 EU Capitals; fresh-squeezed orange juice!; Many Jumped to Their Deaths; Gouda cheese; Best Friends Die on Different Flights from Boston to LA; plus a piece of breakfast ham; Multiple Terrorist Cells Participated; and really fresh tomatoes; World Air Traffic Turns Chaotic, Strands Thousands Overseas.

 
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             Cafe Chaos
           On Wednesday afternoon we wandered around the Jordaan (Amsterdam’s pub and garden district) and we ended up popping into a beer bar near the Leidseplein along the Lijnbaansgracht (canal) called Cafe Chaos, aptly named for the out-of-control state of mind our whole new world had put us all in.

Cafe Chaos was empty and the woman behind the bar took our drink and sandwich order and insisted on turning off the music and turning on the CNN Breaking News Box for us instead. We told her that wasn’t necessary, but she could tell we were just being polite and she insisted. “I want to catch up on the latest myself anyway,” she said as she put the sandwiches and beverages down at our table under the hanging television set in the corner. “I’m so very sorry for what they did to you. I’m so angry and I feel so sad for all those people. I don’t know what to do these days except to just watch the television and cry,” she said, as tears welled up in her bloodshot eyes and she reached for her apron to dab at the flow about to appear down her cheeks.

 
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               Not a Lot of Blabber
         The TV at Cafe Chaos was the same as it was everywhere else we went in Amsterdam in the days following the Tuesday attack on Washington DC and New York City --- now referred to by the media, politicians, and people on the street alike as simply September 11 or 9/11. It was day after day after day of uncontrollable staring at a CNN screen full of grim developments, more grim facts, and multiplying grim bits of factual minutia. I knew that pretty soon all we’d be getting from that TV screen would be repetitive talking heads and babbling media pundits rehashing the same facts they were giving us now in real time, over and over and over again.
     And here and there we’ll get a tiny bit of fresh news.
But there wasn’t a lot of repetitive blabber on the airwaves right now. Because right now fresh events full of fresh grim facts were coming in thick and furious across the ocean by satellite on whatever 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box receiver we’d run across while cafe hopping about Amsterdam in our fog. Hearing the sinister details about how cunning and wicked the attackers were. How the terrorists had picked four aircraft to hijack within a short time of each other to ensure a greater surprise factor and how the four planes were all bi-coastal flights, thereby insuring that they’d all be loaded down with fuel. How they used box cutters that were easy to smuggle onto the airplanes to menace or kill flight attendants as a despicable way to lure the flight crews out of their cockpits. How four cells acting independently of each other each had a trained pilot aboard, and how they’d all learned to turn off their transponders in order to avoid detection.
     Hearing about false terror alarms in America and around the world as everyone on Earth --- according to the TV people --- freaked out. The rising fire department and police force death toll at the World Trade Center, reported to me on the run as I popped into a shop for some smokes. Another account of another soul-stomping final cell phone call from the brink, heard while sitting around at Rick’s talking to our friend Mark and others about the mounting toll.
     All of it too grim and too clear and present to ignore.
The smoking post-apocalyptic ruins of the World Trade Center sticking up out of the grave of perhaps as many as 10,000 innocent souls up on the TV screen. Firemen praying over and carrying flag-draped coffins of comrades out of the smoke. Still photographs of people jumping to their deaths. Memorial candles. Grisly reports of body parts scattered in the street where so many jumpers hit the ground. Missing-person flyers multiplying everywhere, taped up on almost every wall and post between Battery Park and Washington Square. Copy-sized 8-1/2 by 11-inch appeals screaming to frantically find pictured loved ones now presumed dead in the rubble of World War III.
     Stories about box cutters, slit throats, and valor in the sky. Stories about people trapped, people on fire, people vaporized. About fighter jets patrolling Manhattan airspace.
     More sad stories about final phone calls home.
     The shock on the faces of everyone around you wherever you went who you were compelled to interact with outside your own miserable funk. They too measuring the depths of their own hangovers with all the grim new numbers they too read in the newspapers, or heard over the radio, or heard on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box, or heard on the streets --- in whichever form the bad news took.

     An American man (also stranded in Amsterdam) came into Cafe Chaos while we were there (a man about 55 or 60 years old) and he told us, “I’m too old or I’d like to help go get those bastards. If I still could, I’d sign up for another tour of duty right now. I’d like to be there when they get him ...”

     The International Herald-Tribune newspaper speculated that about 10,000 people had been killed and the guy on CNN wasn’t sure if the lack of injured treated immediately after the attack was a good sign or a bad sign. More than 350 police officers and firemen were missing and the Mayor of New York had begun wearing a memorial FDNY baseball cap at his news conferences from a place the media’s begun calling Ground Zero.
     All professional baseball and football games have been canceled in America until further notice, we heard over the news. Canceled because of the funk. The Eiffel Tower and most other landmarks in Europe have been closed down until further notice, we read in a newspaper. Closed out of anxiety and fear. Obvious targets closed to the public and events canceled because of the over-powering misery and omnipresent mourning and the absorption of all the depressing minutia in all our daily newspapers and 24-hours a day on all those television sets all over town. Canceled and closed down due to public grief and loss of public appetite for fun and fantasy. And because gathering 65,000 people together in one place until our funk fades away enough to properly secure such a crowd in this new all-out/no-holds-barred terror war world (enough to keep it safe from the sleeper cell mad dogs reputedly in our midst’s) would be imprudent.

     Eventually the hangover will go away enough for us to all get on with it. But damn, it’ll probably take a long while for that. It'll probably seem like September 12th forever. And damn if we're not going to actually be forced into dealing with this mess whether we want to or not. Even those of us who thought all these years that we’d properly prepared ourselves with an adequate armor of cynical indifference. I-used-to-be-disgusted/now-I’m-just-amused Americans are now going to be forced by circumstances (just like everyone else) to work collectively at healing, when just a few days ago we’d been contentedly focused on our own selfish post-Cold War heres and nows.

     So horrible and intrusive this thing is.
     So overwhelming in all regard for fair-weather Americans and fair-weather allies alike ...

 
Headline News:
(September 12-16, 2001)

Terror Strikes America
Hijacked Jets Hit Trade Towers in NY and Plow into Pentagon
Both Skyscrapers Collapse; Huge Causalities Feared
Death Grips the Heart of Lower Manhattan
Many Jumped to Their Death
Couple Held Hands as They Fell to Their Deaths
Blast From Crash at Pentagon Sends Washington Reeling
Near Towers, Scenes of Chaos and Fear
Hijackers Wore Red Bandannas: Armed with Just Knives
Crashed Plane Commandeered by Passengers?
Amid Horror and Disbelief, a Nation Shuts Down.
Multiple Terrorist Cells Participated
World Air Traffic Turns Chaotic
Last Calls From Victims Haunts Tragedy

America Unites in Wake of Terror
NY Missing Toll Climbs to 5000; Pentagon Near 200
Victim Families Searching NY with Flyers for Loved Ones
Attack Broke Deeply Imbedded Illusion That America Safe
Amid the Rubble, Firefighters Grieve for Lost Brothers
Three Jets Carried 5 Hijackers, Jet that Crashed Carried 4
Best Friends Die on Different Flights to LA
Foreign Nationals Missing or Dead: Toll Under Rubble Grows
Europe Rallies to America’s Side for Long Joint Struggle
Eiffel Tower Closed to Public Until Further Notice
5 Firefighters Found Alive in SUV
Hopes Diminish for NY Survivors
Companies Rush to Account for Staff
World Leaders Unite in Condemnation of Terror Attack
A Global Outpouring of Grief and Solidarity
Palestinians, Iraqis, Pakistanis Celebrate NY Carnage
Bush Vows to Hunt Down Terrorists
Bush Assails ‘Act of War’: Early Clues Point to bin Laden
Bush Denounces ‘Cowardly Act,’ Vows to ‘Lead World to Victory’
Amid Chaos, Wall Street Journal Published
Sustained Fight Against Terrorism Promised
Taliban Say World Court Should Deal with bin Laden
UN Evacuating Staff From Afghanistan

Families Begin Burying Dead
NATO Commits to Retaliatory Strikes
Bush Issues Call to Arms; We’re at War, Tells Troops, Get Ready
Allies Declare Support: Attack Directed at All of Us
America in For Long Fight After Delusion of Invincibility
US Pitted Against Stateless Enemy in ‘Gray War’

Hunt For Conspirators Widens
Armed Forces Enlistments Jump:
Option for Young and Angry to Get Involved
US Muslims Hope they Are Not Blamed
Among American Muslims, Outrage Mingles With Fear
Pakistan Gives Anti-Terror Backing: Despite 80-percent Pakistani Approval of Taliban
US Reopens its Skies
Airspace in US Closed Again; Threat Proves Vague
FBI Targets Terror Suspects
Extreme Heat, ‘Pancaking’ Doomed Towers
US Deploys Warships and Planes, Calls up Reserves
NFL Games Called Off
Sports World on Hold; Salt Lake Security Will be Reviewed

Remembrance Ceremonies Held in All 15 EU Capitals
On A Day of Tribute in Europe, National Difference Fades
European Soccer Tries to Understand; Keeps Playing Games, Then Stops.
International Airlines Resume Flights to US
From Afar, US Expatriates Try to Sort Out Tragedy
Shuttle Astronauts Watched WTC Attack from Space
Afghanistan Refuses to Give bin Laden Up
Bush Mobilizes 50,000 Troops
Afghans Brace for US Attack
US Markets to Resume Trading Monday
Diverted Passengers Left in Daze

Amsterdam Aftermath: A Gathering Wave of Global Unity
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #11/ Close Call
   The Volcanic Eruption on Montserrat/ Salem, Montserrat/ (September 22, 1997)
10:46 am

Issued on September 19, 2006

 
* If you're in the Oklahoma City area in the next few weeks you can still catch Streetphoto of the Week #11 and three other G. Mark Smith streetscapes live at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, included as part of the four-month-long Crossroads international invitational street photography exhibition curated by New York art critic Mason Resnik, former editor at Modern Photography, Popular Photography, and ShutterBug Magazines. For more detail go to:                                         http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/jul/01/exhibit_features_work_lawrence_photographer/

 
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                   * a backstory to Streetphotos in Time ...
                I call my favorite streetphoto portfolio Streetphotos in Time because it's the only collection of streetphotos I issue to the public that were made during the enactment of history and the only portfolio where you'll find a date more specific than the year attached to the title. This slice of the calendar is thick with historical anniversaries for me -- significant places and significant historical events I've been lucky enough to attend around the globe.
     Streets I've photographed in their times.
     Out of the first 13 Streetphotos of the Week (up to and including the October 3rd issue of Streetphoto of the Week #13 to be sent out two weeks from today) five are attached to historical events that occurred on or around the date of issue at the location of the photograph. Streetphoto of the Week #5 was an image made 16 years ago in Warsaw, Poland during Freedom Summer 1990. Streetphoto of the Week #8 was from the Flood of New Orleans at the one-year anniversary of last year's disaster and Streetphoto of the Week #9 was from the five-year anniversary of the day after 9/11. And today's Streetphoto of the Week #11 is from nine years ago this Friday when street photography provided me the most spectacular moment of my life at the scary end of a fierce volcanic eruption in the Eastern Caribbean.
     The #5 Warsaw photo (Five on a Bench) was defined by a season in a year.
     The #8 New Orleans flood photo (Devastatingly Beautiful) was defined by a fortnight in a year.
     The #9 September 12 photo (Killing the Messenger) was defined by a date.
     The #13 St. Petersburg, Russia and Cologne, Germany photos that will be featured in the October 3 diptych issue will also be defined by a day in a year (the date that Leningrad was was renamed St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution of 1991 and the same date a year earlier in 1990 when Germany and Europe reunited).
     But as with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions are not defined in time by just the year or just a season or even by just the date -- they are instead defined by date and year and also by the precise time the event occurred. In 1982 a 7.0 earthquake nearly got me in El Salvador and thus I'll never forget that it happened at 2:22 am. Likewise, I'll always remember that my first significant volcanic eruption from frighteningly close range occurred at 10:46 am -- -- -- on September 22, 1997.

Field Note:
September 22, 1997
* a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #11 ...
               From the G. Mark Smith streetphoto journal: Molten Memoirs: Essays, Rumors, Field Notes and
Photographs from the Edge of Fury

Gary Mark Smith/ Pack-a-Lunch Productions (1999)

 
-------------------------------

 
                 I finished my banking business over at Woodlands and reworked myself back into the Death Zone around a far more serious army checkpoint than I’d weaseled past all week. More serious since the weekend eruptions and especially since all those new dire warnings came out last night. I got back to the cafe -- and having missed breakfast -- I’d just ordered an early lunch and was having a discussion with Kilimanjaro at the bar about Eric Clapton’s “Guitar God status” ---- ---- ---- and suddenly Alfred's dogs started barking wildly and Chicken Joe’s free-range chickens started squawking and someone on the street screamed “MOUNTAIN”---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- and I was about to get way more volcano than I’d bargained for...

 
*10:46 a.m.
 

 
                I was right near the open door and I stepped outside at once ---- ---- ---- and just about pissed my pants.
The mountain I was on began exploding near the top, and although so much happened in the next few seconds, it seemed to progress in slow motion and to take much longer then it actually did. It wasn’t quite as much of a time warp as when I fell off that ice cliff in Quebec in 1974, but it came close at times. The top of the mountain opened up and a column of exploded mountain, ash, pumice, and superheated gases rose so fast and so high that it was as if someone had turned on a fire hose inside the mountain. The rising column sucked the clouds into its vortex (dissipating them) like a black hole must do to light. The first half mile of the eruption column was accompanied by volcanic missiles of some size that arced out with black smoke tracers and returned to earth or splashed into the sea in a two or three-kilometer vicinity of the peak. The shooting column rose incessantly and when it’s friction and heat hit the crucial height, the air around the column exploded with volcanic lightning (St. Elmo's Fire), flashes that were not so much like bolts as they were like huge (momentary) children’s sparklers. We could hear the mountain gushing and rumbling and the muffled bangs of repeated explosions, but in hindsight, it was much quieter (surrealistically quiet) up close than you’d think such a violent and huge thing should be. And then a small but rarely detectable earthquake shook us slightly for a moment or two. The eruption column accelerated in its undaunted rising and by then it had made it up to about two miles high, when we noticed the new distant sound of far-away jet engines. And then an incandescent white dot appeared two miles back down the eruption column near the dome, and it instantly dropped all our heads away from the column and the sparkling lightning overhead.
     Even though the roar of the mountain and the reports of the thunder continued and grew a bit louder, the holdouts of Salem could hear nothing for the next minute or so except the beating of our own hearts in our throats. Even though I’d come to Montserrat of my own free will and was fully aware of the possibilities, and even though I felt the heat of yesterday’s flow as it oozed on the flats and into the sea, the thought of me being in the path of one of these barreling and boiling and tumbling killers sickened me.
     However terrible it was, the scene was also breathtakingly beautiful. To me, it was spiritually enlightening and was surely the object of my volcano quest. Yet it was rushing at me and overwhelming me and it was sure to kill me.
     I didn’t see how anyone could be ready for that kind of slap on the face, and there it came...
I did not panic, but I was in despair. I thought I’d reached the end of the line. The incandescent glowing stream (usually too ground-hugging and low to photograph from a “safe” distance), grew longer and closer and I knew from its speed that it was too late to flee and I honestly thought then and for the next long minute or three that I was a dead street photographer.

 
-------------------------------

 
          About 100 Salem holdouts (roughly half of the total amount) fled north in speeding cars during the first few seconds of the flow. The people I was photographing took a long hard look at doing the same. At one moment I photographed several of them subconsciously touching the only thing that might save them, a car. (see photo)But they decided to stay and they were my study, so I stayed with them, and it was all eyes on the thing that would kill us within a half minute.
     A visiting safe-zoner came flying down the ash-covered road from the Desert Storm kiosk bar observatory in her car, slamming on the breaks and sliding to a halt, jumping out and screaming at us to “FLEE TO THE NORTH! ---- FLEE TO THE NORTH! ---- FLEE TO THE NORTH!”
     She was justifiably hysterical. If I hadn’t had a mission that I still thought I had to concentrate on (and even stay still to perform), I’d have joined her. A late-morning patron of the bar stepped up and hugged and comforted his friend and he repeated to her in a steady voice, “It’s too late. It’s too late.”
     The white hot flow was now at a size that was perfect for the 50-mm image I’d been preparing for all my life. At the same time, I was about to be incinerated by the subject of my last photos, and I squeezed my own quiet panic into a split second as I prepared for the moment (I thought about Janet and the cats).
     Since it appeared I was going to die, I figured I might as well go down swinging. I made a shot of the pair as they broke apart a bit and as they refocused their attentions on the thing that was doing us all in ---- ---- ---- and then in an instant, the flow took an unmistakable turn toward the western shore. The man’s right arm shot up in joyful hope (See Streetphoto of the Week #11), and I also made that photograph, as the ten of us on that street instantaneously cheered in a chorus. I was happy because I knew I had just photographically raised the bar on any of those other great moments I’d captured during the eruptions on Saturday or Sunday as part of my mission here. And now the deadly 1000-degree ground hurricane had turned down another valley where nobody lives anymore.
     However, the sickening 400-degree+ gray surge of ash and suffocating gas already airborne (the thing the scientist’s said would kill us) didn’t turn and it kept barreling and boiling and tumbling right toward us, disappearing the incandescent flow behind it with its curtain of debris and heat.

    The surge continued to assault us, eventually stopping, but so close to the broken front door of my tent we could all (one way or another) feel the heat of it. As the black wall of the surge loomed in front of us dangerously close to burning Salem, Kilimanjaro exclaimed to no one in particular “That’s it! Too close for me! I’m outa-here!” He turned his back on the near miss and he began to walk north with a purpose. And now there were less than 100 holdouts in Salem, pacing around, arms folded and thinking about tomorrow again. On his way out of town Kilimanjaro looked up and then pointed directly above our heads (see photo). I made that photo and I followed his point and also re-focused on the eruption column, which had leveled off in the high-altitude winds at 12,000 to 20,000 feet and had mushroomed out from the volcano and had now expanded its front past Salem in width and was directly over our heads. The column was big, so impressively huge, that I could only capture a slice of it with my camera (see photo).

     I was too close, too close ...

    And then as the the blood flowed back to everyone's faces and the tension eased and we all dared to imagine again that we might see tomorrow -- -- -- the eruption warning sirens began blaring in Salem ( a minute late, as it were) and everyone still holding out in the Death Zone laughed the nervous laugh of an insecure survivor.
Still petrified by the fury -- but now also cynically amused by the folly of man ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #12a
Bareback Rickshaw SPAM-Scape: The day the SPAM-Mobile came to town ...
Bonner Springs, Kansas/ (2006)
 

Issued on September 26, 2006

 
... and dedicated to my dad who grew me up on Spam ...

*(bonus) Streetphoto of the Week #12b
Pondering America?: Classic!; It's All About the SPAM !!
Bonner Springs, Kansas/ (2006)

... caught in the wild while making street photography ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #13a/ Reunification Kiss
    Koln (Cologne), United Germany/ (October 3, 1990)

Issued on October 3, 2006

 
    Good Day.
    Today is October 3rd
    A Very Significant Date in the Contemporary History of the Streets of the World ...
 
    It's the date Germany and Europe reunified (see first attachment), the date in the eyes of those from St. Petersburg, Russia that the Soviet Union fell (see second attachment), and it's probably the date the terror war era began --- --- --- we just didn't know that yet...
 

 
                    * a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #13a ...
            Streetphoto of the week #13a was made 16 years ago today in the first minute of German and European Reunification at 12:01 a.m. at the base of the colossal Koln Cathedral.
    As I was taking the photograph, I was reminded of that picture made in Times Square in New York in August of 1945 (VJ Day) -- the one by esteemed photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt -- that famous streetphoto of the American Sailor dipping and kissing the American WAC (nurse) in the first minutes of the just-announced end of World War II.
    And as I pressed the shutter I realized that by capturing this German man dipping and kissing this German woman, that I'd made an image of the end of World War II for the defeated Germans 45 years after our victory -- an image that mirrored (if not even coming close to matching) that famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph.
    Then a couple of years later in New York (in 1992,) on returning from a bathroom break during a portfolio review with the International Center of Photography reviewer Ruth Fahl -- a portfolio review that included Streetphoto of the Week #13 -- Ms. Fahl (evidently a well-connected woman) handed me the telephone. I said "Hello?" and on the other end of the line was Mr. Alfred Eisenstaedt himself. He told me that, "Ruth has told me all about your work and your kiss photo from Reunification," and then he asked me if I might leave a copy of it at the ICP so he could see it. Of course, I agreed, and I told him how honored I was that he'd asked. He thanked me, and I thanked him back again, and then (stunned) I hung up the telephone to resume my portfolio review.
Later, a few weeks after I'd returned to my studio in Kansas, the photo showed up in my mailbox with a short note to me from Ms. Fahl extending Mr. Eisenstaedt appreciation ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #13b/ A Russian Clean Sweep
    Leningrad to St. Petersburg/ the Soviet Union to Russia/ (October 3, 1991)

Issued on October 3, 2006

 
                    * a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #13b ...
             Streetphoto of the week #13b was made 15 years ago today in the early hours of the day that post-Soviet Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg -- as the deposed empire fell and the Russian Revolution of 1991 cleaned house and bloomed ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #14/ Diet Sleep/ Florence, Italy/ (1990)

Issued on October 10, 2006

        * a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #14 ...
             The man in the waiting room at the train station in Florence came dressed for a nap, what -- with two stars and a quarter moon embroidered on his shirt. Perhaps a long wait for his train inspired the man to close his eyes and the woman sleeping hard on his right may have inspired him to stretch out a bit to the adjoining seat. The glass wall between the tracks and the cafe supported two Coke advertisements, one directed at cafe patrons inside, and the other beckoning those in the waiting room outside. And perhaps the Diet Coke ad facing out had subliminally inspired the matching pose of my diet sleeper.
    I was so inspired by the complex connection of thought accidentally occurring between fashion, people, infrastructure, and product -- that I was willing to miss my train to Venice to nail the moment.
    Diet sleep.
    Hurry up and wait.
    It’s what we get when we’re on the run – and we always take what we can get ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #15/ Ipanema Art Fair Rain Kiss/ Rio de Janeiro, Brazil/ (2004)

Issued on October 17, 2006

*Streetphoto of the Week #16/ Fighting For a Seat
     In a late-night New York City subway car under Harlem, USA/ (1986)

Issued on October 24, 2006

*
Happy Halloween !!
*Streetphoto of the Week #17/ Odd Man Out/ Toronto, Ontario Canada/ (1994)

Issued on October 31, 2006

*Streetphoto of the Week #18/ Tangier Blue Woman/ Tangier, Morocco/ (2005)

Issued on November 7, 2006

              * a backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #18 ...
                   After issuing Streetphoto of the Week #18 during the 2006 midterm elections, a hard-at-work journalist friend of mine and I had the following exchange about the photograph:

 
Gary,
I’m sitting here in the office watching election results, and your photo was a welcome arrival. I always wonder about the people in your (pictures). In this case, where is the “Tangier Blue Woman” going, and why did she choose blue? I choose colors to brighten up my life; I wonder if she does the same?
               Jan.

Jan,
I have one TV tuned to the Jayhawks and one to the election returns. It appears that I'll feel like a winner every which way tonight. Except that I voted all the judges out of office, and I doubt I'll get much satisfaction there ...

I often wish a photograph could be an instantaneous movie short -- so I could show all at once what's around the corners from the compositions. If you walked into the photo and took a left and walked 50 yards in the direction the Tangier Blue Woman came from, you'd encounter a very small square (any size opening in the narrow closed-in streets of the Kasbah qualifies as a "square") with a public water fountain and a couple of palm trees. It was a quiet place during the ten minutes I was there with only several people per minute passing through or using the well, and the sound of the water splashing from a hole in an ancient rock and masonry wall into the fountain bath below was soothing and exotic.
 If you walked into the photo and followed the Tangier Blue Woman to the right, after only about 100 yards of strolling past several hashish parlors -- you'd spill out of the Kasbah at the bustling port of Tangier, and the sudden open sight of so many huge oceangoing ships on the vast blue Mediterranean Sea along with dozens of dock cranes poking the huge sky for miles would startle you -- after having spent a couple of days wandering the four-to-eight foot wide medina "streets" where sky was often hard to find. Then you'd notice that the dank and dusky odor of the walled-in city had evaporated with open sea breezes and with the wafting aromas of street vendor's treats.

 
 It's your best guess why on that day she chose blue.
All I can figure is that she sensed the moment and appeared in the blue purposely, just to compliment the orange/yellow scene I was stalking and giving the canvas the color harmony and spunk it needed to transcend to Streetphoto of the Week material.
 Well, probably not ...
        ... but that's how it feels when I'm working in the zone -- like I was on that day last year in the Kasbah of Tangier ...

     PS.
 Democrats 225 - Republicans 195 (incomplete)
 KU Jayhawks 90 -Emporia Sate 55 (Final)
                    gms.

*Streetphoto of the Week #19/ Lady Luck?/ Las Vegas, Nevada USA/ (2004)

Issued on November 14, 2006

 
                  * ... a short Vegas tale
              I think being cynical about Las Vegas while you’re having fun there is a good thing. If you can’t be cynical about Las Vegas, what can you be cynical about? Of course we all eventually get there -- and WOW -- it sure is something, isn’t it?
A freaking Disneyland for adults chasing smarmy virtual fantasy and meaningless lifelike fun.
    Whenever I find myself in Las Vegas I do what most folks do. I peal off a hundred dollar bill to blow at the tables, a hundred dollar bill to blow at the bars, a hundred dollar bill to blow on bad entertainment -- -- -- and then I squander the rest on food and water.

    The last time I was in Las Vegas I stalked the corner of Fourth and Fremont for more than an hour waiting for just the right Las Vegan to wander into my downtown Lady Luck free fire zone -- hoping to illustrate my ongoing “Streets of Las Vegas” thought process. That is -- trying to capture in a patient single image one of the notions about Las Vegas I typically carry around with me as I gamble and drink and scratch my head about what the world is coming to. About how enticingly phony and embarrassingly fake this over-hyped dream is and about how (by mission) it’s rigged by false hope to take my money and run ...
    And then suddenly out of nowhere, the street sweep appeared -- -- -- a Real blue collar symbol of the global street that I enjoy featuring in my concepts wherever I work in this world. Like when I'm shooting under the Real Eiffel Tower in Paris; or while I'm in the Real New York City; or while I'm astride the Real canals in the heart of the Real Venice.

    I think being cynical about Las Vegas is a good thing ...

       *another backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #19 ...
         After issuing Streetphoto of the Week #19, I had the following internet exchange about the photograph with a like-minded friend:

 
Gary,
    That was perfect, that shot!
    I can't even bring myself to go there once...it makes me too depressed.
    Talk about cynical.
             Kristin.

 
Kristin,
   Because I live in a constant acute state of cynicism, whenever I hear that I'm being forced through circumstance to end up on the streets of Las Vegas. I'm a little less disconcerted than I should be. The last time I heard I'd be going there (due to a Janet phone convention) I actually laughed out loud and said something like, "So be it --- now let's make the best of it ..."
   You see, there is one silver lining to getting stuck in the place for a few days drinking and gambling and scratching my head about what it's all coming to. That's because when I'm here in Kansas -- or any other actual place -- I have to internalize my constant acute cynicism for the good of the people, for the good of everyone around me.
   However, in Vegas -- for just a few days -- I feel free to be cynical out loud -- and that can be therapeutic ...
                gms.

*Streetphoto of the Week #20/ the windy Holiday Flag Pole Pop Dog SkateScape collection
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
New York, USA/ (1996)

Issued on November 21, 2006

*Have a Better Thanksgiving than Snoopy:
 

*... Police investigators report that a juvenile repeat offender identified as
Bart Jojo Simpson
has been remanded into custody as a
'person of interest'

*Streetphoto of the Week #21/(Being There) At The Movies
Peshawar, Pakistan/ December 15, 2001

Issued on November 28, 2006
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #22/Dog Tired/King's Cross Station, Sydney Australia
(1995) 

Issued on December 5, 2006
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #23/Taliban Escape
Pakistan-Afghanistan border near Peshawar, Pakistan/December 13, 2001

Issued on December 12, 2006
 

                                                                    Five Years Ago Today...

                              At the Pakistan/Afghanistan border at the height of the US bombing at nearby Tora Bora

*[As far as we're aware, this is the only photograph made along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during the battle of Tora Bora that depicts a Taliban militia as he escapes US bombers into Pakistan.]

* A Special Announcement (about a quiet Online book launch ... ... ... ) The dramatic field note attached below about the making of Streetphoto of the Week #23 (dated December 13, 2001) is an excerpt from my book: White With Foam: Essays, Rumors, Field Notes and Photographs From the Edge of World War III. The book (375 pages/ 175 photographs) is a non-fiction journal I researched, wrote, and illustrated between September 10, 2001 and September 12, 2002. About what that awful year was like for regular Americans and global street photographers alike. Written and photographed on the streets of Amsterdam, Kansas, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Las Vegas and in New York at a still-smoldering Ground Zero -- this compelling and sometimes up-close-and-personal account of that time is fierce with the memory of how bad it really was, yet somehow entertaining in its cynical zero-tolerance journey portraying all of our shared experience as we watched TV and (due to extraordinary events) were twisted around in our belief systems like pretzels.
From the time I conceived this project on September 12, 2001 (the morning after), I've intended to release this one-of-a-kind volume in print form at the 15th or 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack. In the spirit of "Never Forgetting" and all -- and as a complete history willing to refute sanitized and abridged revisionist accounts which will undoubtedly make it seem like that year wasn't so bad after all. But by popular demand, beginning today -- -- -- the entire journal is now available Online at no charge in it's pre-printed form @ http://www.streetphoto.com/wwf0.htm

                          * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #23 ...
Book Excerpt: < December 13, 2001
Peshawar, Pakistan to the Afghan border refugee camps in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Tribal Belt

                We drove northwest on the border (along the CNN red line), and I made a few rural road shots along the way. Common camp street scenes of trucks driving past us overloaded with dozens of people (mostly men) standing and hanging off every conceivable space and every hand or foot hold --- the tires of the trucks about to rub their sunken undercarriages. After awhile we crossed back over the border a short distance to a refugee school housed in buildings along a canal that brings Peshawar water from the Kabul River in the Afghan mountains. Just as we were driving up and parking at the school across the street from the canal, I looked through the windshield and coming straight at me was a Taliban loyalist from Afghanistan hauling a sack of belongings over his shoulder. I was astounded, --- --- --- but what did I expect being at that place, at this time? So I seized the moment, and working with the street elements at hand in the two seconds I had to respond, I composed a shot that would (if he continued walking toward me) squeeze him between a windshield wiper and a windshield sticker. To express my idea about how such a person must feel at this point in his desperate war; squeezed and under incredible pressure and strain. And when he walked into the composition, I captured that important historical streetphoto. (See photo: Escape from Afghanistan)

“Isn’t that a Taliban,” I asked everyone in the car as soon as I’d fired off the shot and as he passed by me about a foot from my car door, already knowing it was by the shape, color, and tie of his turban and by his general fierce and hyper-focused demeanor. And all three exclaimed “yes!” at once --- they too amazed and curious to see this man who we’ve all been hearing so much about the past week on our TV news reports. The Taliban fleeing away from Afghanistan --- defeated. The Taliban everyone was looking for, to capture or kill or re-educate. For going overboard with his conservative and suppressive extremist fervor and for shielding Osama bin Laden from his deserved September 11 justice.
I got out of the car, and I watched him trudge down the road toward Peshawar. Me standing there on the border street shaking my head at the wonderment of having gotten to a place like this at a time like this. To have watched and to have photographed a momentary encounter like that, another of the intrinsic dream shots I imagined could happen right in front of me while conceiving the possibilities of this streetphoto project in Kansas.
We entered the school (the Eagle Eye High School for Displaced Afghan Youth) and Shahid surprised me by asking me if I’d consider giving a short speech to the whole school (250 students plus two dozen faculty) and I asked, “About what?” And Shahid suggested that since the whole school was currently studying human rights, and that since I was an American, might I speak about that?
“Of course,” I blurted right out with a grin, always game for incredible last minute, once-in-a-lifetime challenges.
I didn’t want to say anything that might offend (or get me stoned to death) because I was told that I would be the first American that any of the nearly 275 men and boys had ever met in person. That responsibility alone was almost as enormous as was the responsibility not to offend as I gave my off-the-cuff address to nearly 275 people whose country was currently having the shit bombed out of it by my country. And then, at that moment, I inconveniently chose to recall that article I’d just read in the local newspaper last night about the British journalist from the Independent who’d been maimed and nearly stoned to death by Afghani refugees just a few days ago when his car broke down on the road between Quetta and Chaman.
I was a little bit intimidated as I climbed the stairwell to the roof, the only place large enough to hold a school assembly. But not so intimidated that I wasn’t bemused by a poster I noticed that was hung on the wall at the stairwell landing titled; “The 17 Steps to Human Rights.” The poster listed the 17 steps in order, and number one on the list was “religion.” Well --- I’m sorry --- but I’ve just seen too many horrible examples over the years across the world of religion being politicized (particularly in the context of this god-awful religious terror war) and used as a human rights wedge instead of a first step toward human rights. Christianity used as a motivation for battle (God is with us). And this bloody jihad-gone-amuck used as justification for evil.
I didn’t want to be stoned to death, but I just couldn’t let that one slide by. But instead of challenging religion (as that would make me no friends in this place at this time) I focused on what I thought was the first step toward building human rights.
A solid education.

A surprise Human Rights Speech by an American Global Street Artist
at an Afghanistan Refugee Camp High School (at the time of and in the vicinity of the battle of Tora Bora)
... and interrupted by the roar of the war...

Human rights are the same all over the world. That’s why they call them human rights, not Afghani, Pakistani, or American rights. It’s human rights.
“Human rights are the rights that lead us to happiness and protect our happiness, and I believe that maintaining happiness is the equivalent of attaining genius.
“For me, happiness means to have the lifelong opportunity and freedom to travel and wander wherever I want to around the world. Pakistan was the 49th country I’d ever wandered to and photographed in my life, and now Afghanistan is the 50th.
“Being here to meet you at this moment makes me happy.
“And I believe that human rights and the happiness that subscribing and adhering to a code of human rights provides --- begins with education.
“Education is hard and ignorance is easy.
“Education leads in the end to an adherence of human rights which leads us to the genius of maintaining happiness. In short, education leads us to peace, security, and contentment which leads us to happiness --- while ignorance leads us to insecurity, poverty, and war which leads us to hopelessness and unhappiness.
(Serendipitously, and seemingly on cue --- --- --- a coalition bomber roared high overhead the open air assembly with its Tora Bora load and then two American fighter jets playfully ripped the sky much lower, one seeming to celebrate a successful run at the enemy with a three-quarter barrel roll and a wing-wag directly over our heads, which diverted my attention from my speech to the assembly. Although the sound of the roaring war jets shook the walls of the school and shut my speech down for about eight to ten seconds, when I looked back down to continue my talk, not one of the audience seemed to even notice the war above them that had stopped me in mid speech. As if it were normal, or by now too typical to wonder about for them any more.)
I continued:
“Education is hard. But it leads us toward peace, which plants a seed to grow us toward the genius of happiness. Ignorance is easy. But it leads us to war and unhappiness.
“Even now we can hear the roar of the warplanes overhead, and we can see the white streaks of their exhaust, and we can look straight up over our heads and watch all these war machines I helped pay for by paying my taxes heading to or returning from dropping bombs and missiles on your homeland, Afghanistan.
“Well, I’m here today to try to inspire you to become educated men and to make a lifetime commitment to preferring education over ignorance and peace over war. And I’m here to challenge you not to just educate yourselves, but to educate all those around you as well --- even the girls.”
(A smattering of giggles and a murmuring arose from the audience, and I continued...)
“Education is difficult.
“Ignorance is easy.
“And I challenge each of you to choose the difficult path of a lifetime of education. Because if you do decide to become an educated man, educated enough to become a happy genius --- and perhaps even wealthy enough --- you might one day chose to exercise your human right to travel as freely around the world as I do. And then you might even choose to travel to the United States of America to visit me and to stay with me in my house there in Kansas.
“And if you ever do end up knocking on my front door, then perhaps by that time my government and your government may have worked together well enough so that together we’ll be able to build a lasting peace. A peace so strong and stable all over the world that together we’ll be able to disable the warplanes of all nations forever because they’ll no longer be needed to assure human rights.
‘So you’re all invited over to my house in America, and if you travel there to see me, then maybe you and I can find those war jets that just flew over us and that bomber you can still hear right now,” (I pointed toward the sky with my index finger,) “and together we can chain them all down to their runways forever.
“Education is hard.
“Ignorance is easy.
“Choose the difficult but intelligent path toward education over the easy but counterproductive road to ignorance, and together we will distance ourselves from the unhappiness of war and poverty and embrace the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness --- thereby achieving security, and along with security, the global human contentment of liberty and personal satisfaction.”

I Think They Will Bomb All of Afghanistan to Bits (see photo)

After the speech (which was translated into both Uzbeki and Pashtun dialects by two advanced students who knew English, and which was met by thunderous applause from the audience, embarrassing me) I was treated like a liberator rather than the observer I thought I was. And afterward, each of the nearly 275 men and young men insisted on standing on line to shake my hand. I even saw a few of the more enthusiastic students sneak back into line to shake my hand again, so I probably shook more than 300 hands altogether in the ten minutes following the speech.
It had been among the most astounding hours of my astounding life.
Later, on my way down the stairs and out the door, I noticed three faculty and about 25 students crowded around that “17 Steps to Human Rights” poster, examining it in light of what I’d just told them about education --- which it turned out was number two on their list.
Back out on the street at the car while we were leaving, I asked one young man (the one who’d acted as my Pashtun translator for the speech) what he thought about all the war jets overhead and what was happening up the road at Tora Bora and he answered with a grimace, “I think they will bomb all of Afghanistan to bits.”
On the way back out of the refugee camps I re-donned and tweaked my disguise for the authorities, and we went through the checkpoint (I just mostly starred ahead and occasionally nodded during question time from the uptight well-armed Pakistani Army soldiers), and afterward the four of us giggled for having put one over on the government.
It truly is easier to apologize than it is to ask permission, I quipped. And I had to figure that working around bureaucracy is pretty much the same in every culture (an international sport) because after I made that quip it took the three of them close to a minute to stop laughing. While I bitterly sat there recalling my Monday in Islamabad when I spent six hours asking permission. Almost a whole day getting my freaking permission slip stamped in my passport that I never even had to use once today hopscotching back and forth across the border. “However, perhaps I’d need it tomorrow,” I reasoned to myself, “if I get that chance to make that run over the Khyber Pass and up the Grand Trunk Road toward Jalalabad...”
As we were driving back into Peshawar from the camps I flipped through a copy of a Displaced Afghan Youth School Magazine I’d picked up at the school after the speech (put out by Shahid and his wife and called Babloo Bably), and on the title page it was written:
“No country can afford to not adopt, connect, and adjust to globalization.
“Can we afford being left behind?
“NOT AT ALL!
“So now we all must abide by the international laws and codes of human rights!”


Streetphotos in Time.
You'll find about 100 more of them @ http://www.streetphoto.com/PhotosInTime.htm .
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #24/Jerez Festival Aftermath/Jerez, Spain/ (2005) 

Issued on December 19, 2006
 

                                                   

            * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #24 ...

                Every year the city of Jerez de la Frontera on the southern tip of Spain hosts the annual Feria del Caballo (horse fair) which draws thousands out on the streets to party in public and revel down festival midways.
Public revelry can be a lot of fun, especially when you revel in public with a lover. However, after a long-partying night of riding roller coasters and Carthusian horses -- and after having walked for hours through dusty paddocks and having twirled a time or ten around the dance floor -- -- and after having had too much fair food and perhaps just a taste too much of the highly-coveted local sherries -- -- revelry needs a rest.

I was en route by all-night bus, ferry, and train to Fez, Morocco from Lisbon, Portugal in May 2005 when the attached benchscape and my streetphoto cameras crossed paths at first morning’s light in Jerez de la Frontera. In this case, all-night revelry had found its rest at the entrance of the local bus station where I captured this Sleeping in the City image of these three people on that sun-bleached bench.

Three people?
Correct!

The charming young couple (of course), as well as a latent third person who was now missing from their seat -- -- defined by the empty space they’d occupied at the time the lovers collapsed and crashed -- -- but who’d since caught a bus for the coast ...


... A current selection from the www.streetphoto.com.  See the entire Sleeping in the City portfolio .

*Streetphoto of the Week #25/Picadilly Circus Sideshow: Double Decker Bus: Fashion vs Style
London, England/(2006) 

Issued on December 26, 2006

                                                       

                                                                                                Happy Boxing Day!
            * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #25 ...

                Boxing Day History (and the origin of the phrase: "Having a Smashing Time")

Boxing Day takes its name from the ancient practice of opening boxes that contained money given to those who had given their service during the year. It was also the day when alms boxes, placed in churches on Christmas Day, were opened. The money was then given to the priest or used to help the poor and needy. Another name for Boxing Day used to be Offering Day.

The earliest boxes of all were not box shaped, as you might imagine, nor were they made of wood. They were, in fact, earthenware containers with a slit in the top (rather like piggy banks.) These earthenware ‘boxes’ were used by the Romans for collecting money to help pay for the festivities at the winter Saturnalia celebrations.

During the seventeenth century it became the custom for apprentices to ask their master’s customers for money at Christmas time. They collected this money in earthenware containers, which could be opened only by being smashed, and on Boxing Day the apprentices would eagerly have a ‘smashing time’, hence the expression, seeing how much they had collected.

A later tradition, and the one which has survived to this day, was the distribution of Christmas ‘boxes’, gifts of money to people who had provided services throughout the year – the postman, the lamp-lighter, parish beadles, parish watchmen, dustmen and turn-cocks – which happened on the day after Christmas Day.

*Streetphoto of the Week #26/Hazyview Quadruped UmbrellaScape/
Hazyview, South Africa/(2006) 

Issued on January 2, 2007
 

 

           * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #26 ...

                The richest experience I’ve had in all my travels around Africa came when my travel partner and I gave a woman named Malina a long lift from her crafts shop at Kruger National Park through a rainstorm to her home in Hazyview, South Africa. Along the way she taught us all about the wild Big Five animals we’d just photographed in the park. About the Water Buffalo, the Rhino, and the majestic Leopard. How the Elephants get drunk in the summer by eating the fruit of the Marula tree (it’s no myth, she swore) and how they then stagger comically about. How the Lions roam free and fierce in the park, but why they know never to leave its boundaries. Why the fierce Hippopotamus (the top killer of people among African animals) never ranked in the Big Five of dangerous game trophies: (“Because who’d want to put that ugly mug up on their wall back home ...”).

We arrived at Hazyview and to thank us for the lift through the rain, Malina presented us several of her hand made wooden crafts as gifts, blessed us for our kindness, and wished that I'd find as much good luck with my street photography as I’d found in the park with “her” animals. The next day on our way to begin a three-day leopard safari in Kruger Park, we stopped for a snack just down the road from where we'd dropped Malina the evening before, and I spotted two of her Hazyview neighbors sharing an umbrella and walking past a typically African roadside call center -- and thick with karma, the spirit of Africa, and the best wishes of Malina, I captured one of my favorite umbrella streetphotos I’ve ever made.

*A Half Year of Streetphoto of the Week
Streetphoto of the Week #26 marks the half-year point of this ambitious 10-year Online exhibition.
We're five percent of the way through -- and the best is still yet to come.

Just in case you were curious, here are some statistics about the first half year:
Number of Streetphotos of the Weeks Issued so far * 26
Number of StreetPhotos included in the exhibition so far * 34
Number of Countries depicted so far * 19
Number of Cities depicted so far * 21
Number of Different GMS Portfolio Years sampled from so far * 12
Number of Continents represented so far * 6

Thanks for all your emails !!
Hearing from you is always appreciated ...
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #27/Paris Accordion-Scape/Paris, France/(1998)

Issued on January 9, 2007
 

          * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #27 ...

                Paris has its own trademarked street sounds, but as far as I'm concerned -- the rumble of an accordion band isn’t one of them. The notion of the accordion – bellows of air vibrating reeds to make sound -- began in China ages ago, was imported to Russia a long time ago, migrated to Europe some time back, and centuries ago began evolving in Austria and Germany into the keyboard music machine we now recognize.
Sure -- in 1832 the first accordion instruction manual featuring familiar accordion tunes was published in Paris, exposing this sometimes beautiful and sometimes annoying instrument to the masses. I suppose the riotous racquet-of-fun that is the accordion is as at home on the streets of Paris as it is Beijing, but after having traveled through and having studied more than five dozen countries up close, it’s hard for me to pin down the accordion capitol of the world.
I’m baffled. I’ve seen and photographed accordion buskers on the streets of Amsterdam, Warsaw, Sydney, and San Francisco. Heck – I’ve even encountered the accordion on the streets of Fiji in the South Pacific.

Accordion Capitol of the World ?

Help me out.
Where do you think it is ?

If you're the one who convinces me best, I’ll plan during the next year or three to fly over there (wherever there turns out to be) and I’ll make a full street photography study of the “Accordion-Scapes of (Wherever)”, and when I get back to the States -- I’ll send you a signed print of the best image I get while I’m there.

Let us know at gary@streetphoto.com

... A current selection from the www.streetphoto.com
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #28/An Accordion Riot on Le Metro/Paris, France/(1998)

Issued on January 16, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #29a /Accordingly Asleep/Prague, Czechoslovakia/(1990)

Issued on January 23, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #29b/Accordion Beer Buskers/Amsterdam, Netherlands/(2002)
 

                                                               

                * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #29 ...
                    The attached Sleeping in the City streetphoto of an accordion busker and his charming dog is part of my "Streets of Global Change: Part One" street photography project culled from the heart of the Central American Cold War battle zones of the early 1980s through peace breaking out in Europe during the early 1990s. That volume of work was widely viewed at that time and many of the dramatic images from this poignant and far-flung series were winners in several significant art and photography competitions sponsored by auspicious national and international entities. But it's the simpler images from this body of work (the less violent and less dramatic ones) that are my favorites. Like that one featuring the soft transition of the old St. Petersburg street sweep and the woman walking behind him carrying fresh flowers (in Streetphoto of the Week #13b) taken as the USSR fell in 1991 . Or that one made the year before in 1990 showing the quiet resolve of those five festively dressed folks on that Warsaw, Poland park bench in Streetphoto of the Week #5 as they sat and watched the gathering bustle of change.

This week's featured Streetphoto of the Week was made that same year on the famous Charles Bridge spanning the Vitava River in Prague, Czechoslovakia -- where suddenly emboldened black marketeers (including street buskers) were testing their freedoms of expression and trade. It was taken from the second tier of the Old Town bridge tower, an equally as famous and magnificent gothic structure on the old side of the river.

ALSO:
Don't miss this week's
BONUS ACCORDION STREETPHOTO:
Streetphoto of the Week #29b:
"Accordion Beer Buskers"
Amsterdam, Netherlands
(2002)
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #30 /Redemption: Working to Live in Rio"/Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2005)

Issued on January 30, 2007
 

                                                   

          * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #30 ...

             Jesus is big in Brazil.
In fact, the one they keep up on the top of Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, the monumental Christ o Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) stands 30 meters tall and hovers 750 meters over the lively and sometimes decadent Copacabana Beach.
People from nearby Sao Paulo, a harder working lot they tell me, say that the statue of Jesus over Rio has his arms stretched all the way out and his hands are all the way open so on weekday mornings he can clap his hands together to wake up all the lazy Cariocas and get them off to work.

It’s said that people from Sao Paulo live to work and people from Rio work to live.
“So be it,” admitted a friend of mine from Ipanema. “They don’t have our beaches to distract them like we do -- -- -- and so now that my work is finished for today you must excuse me -- -- -- because Jesus' father just sent me a revelation telling me it's time for a swim...”

*Streetphoto of the Week #31/Just Do It/Atlanta Summer Olympics/(1996)

Issued on February 6, 2007

        * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #31 ...

                                                                                                Just do it.

            Commerce imitating art -- or art imitating commerce?
Did Nike take a can-do, at-all-cost philosophy and make it their own? Or did the can-do and at-all-cost philosophy rampant in Oregon at the time of its founding make Nike its loudspeaker?
These inane questions are important to dwell on for some, but not for a five-year-old kid suddenly coming across a giant basketball shoe while skulking the streets of the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. This magical giant thing, this shoe, had to be touched immediately – HAD TO BE TOUCHED!
Just do it.

The kid probably knew nothing about the best way to battle terrorism and he probably didn’t know much about the deadly bomb that went off on that Olympic street just a couple of days before ...
... but his parents knew, and on the morning the park reopened -- despite the lingering danger and uncertainty, they brought Junior downtown so he could ignore caution and touch a giant shoe -- and so they could kick sand in the faces of bullies ...

Just Do It!
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #32/
Happy Valentine
to all who are lucky enough to feel loved ...
Amsterdam. Holland
(2000)

Issued on February 13, 2007
 

/
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #33/Please Don’t Go!/Amsterdam, Holland/(2006)

Issued on February 20, 2007
 

  

               * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #33 ...
                                                        *“Please don’t go.”

                That’s what I imagined the young Dutch woman on the curb moaning to the young Dutch man on the bike as he dropped her off at Leidseplein in central Amsterdam and I made a streetphoto of the notion. “Please don’t leave me here all day and all by myself where I’ll be swallowed up by the unruly masses – alone – alone – alone -- without you ...”

Just one of a zillion charming interactions occurring at tens of thousands of gathering points on the streets of this Earth every hour. Lovers tearing themselves apart; Cab drivers shooting each other nasty looks; Food vendors barking up their grub to a favorite customer coming down the street; You and I tipping hats at each other as we pass by. These interactions are precious, but rarely last longer than an instant or two -- and a street photographer has got to anticipate and be quick to recognize the moment and compose the emotion.

“But doll face, if you don’t let go of me soon you’ll be late for work and you'll get fired – and then the landlord will throw us out on the streets – leaving us out in the cold and homeless with no other choice but to cuddle in the wild together under our favorite bridge at Vondel Park ...”

“yea -- I know -- -- -- but please don’t go...”
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #34/Raspberry LoungeScape/Soho, London, England/(2006)

Issued on February 27, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #35/Higuëy Street Tender/Higuëy, Dominican Republic/(2004)

Issued on March 6, 2007
 

          * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #35 ...

              Back in the old days of street photography (the mid 1800s) photographers would almost always capture their subjects in an environmental camera-aware pose among the tools of their trade -- -- -- rather than in the act of living out their lives, or as in the case of Streetphoto of the Week #35, working at repairing their local streets. Late last year a new friend of mine in the fine art reference field sent me an interesting book he knew of called; "Humble Work & Mad Wanderings; Street Life in the Machine Age." The book (by photography collector Ken Appollo) was mostly comprised of this type of camera-aware street portraits, and the collection reminded me of Streetphoto of the Week #35 -- -- -- probably the only image in my entire portfolio that is reminiscent of that era.
* A Backstory to Streetphoto of the Week #35:
I had gotten myself stuck for an extended time at a luxury all-inclusive resort at Punta Cana on Dominican Republic's isolated Costa del Coco with no way to escape the awesome decadence of complete pampered beach sloth other than to hire an expensive tour which would only wind a frustrated street photographer up trapped in a tour bus anyway -- broke and wishing he had some control. But I have a plan B that I always carry around with me as I travel the world, so I used it. I walked a quarter mile from the resort and flagged down a guy on a small motor cycle (really, a big scooter more than a small motor cycle) and offered to pay him $15 to take me on a five-hour scooter ride on rutted roads to the streets of the nearest city a hundred kilometers away. Hours later we ended up at my driver's favorite back alley restaurant in Higuëy (which couldn't have passed health inspection, but which sure could put out some grub) where I made this 19th century-inspired street portrait of a fellow diner as we were both on the way out of the joint. He to fix the streets, and me to meet my driver's impoverished family at his hard-scrapple farm on the way back to a couple more days of all-inclusive pampered bliss at Costa del Coco ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #36a/Amsterdam Umbrella Dog 1/Amsterdam, the Netherlands/(1996)

Issued on March 13, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #36b/Amsterdam Umbrella Dog 2/Amsterdam, the Netherlands/ (1996)

        * a back story to Streetphotos of the Week #36a&b ...

                One day in 1996 my travel partner Janet Cinelli and I were bopping around the streets of Amsterdam looking for trouble -- and we found it.

I was working on my street photography Master's Thesis at Purdue University and I decided to include the notion of placing black and white lead actors on the street and surrounding them by the color of a supporting city. So we flew off to Amsterdam (an equally compelling place in both color and black and white) and Janet threw on her black and white outfit and we grabbed the black and white umbrellas and we took a stroll down Leidsestraat. When we were a few blocks from Leidseplein we ran into this very colorful billpost flurry advertising a club party and I made an umbrella pose or three of Janet there (with black wooden Tulips) and we moved on down the street. But a half block away I noticed a couple of guys walking their black and white dog toward where we came from. So I turned Janet around, approached the gentlemen, got access to the dog, and then took the whole black and white cast around the corner, and set up Streetphoto of the Week #36a.

And that's where the fun began...

A moment after I made "Amsterdam Umbrella Dog 1" (featured last year in a four-month-long exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art), I made "Amsterdam Umbrella Dog 2" (Streetphoto of the Week #36b). There I was, in the middle of the brick street, my partner Janet posing with the umbrellas and the Tulips and the Dog and the girl in her little red dresses, and charging down the street right toward me (from the right of the picture) came a massive black and white horse pulling a handsome cab. The clatter of the carriage wheels on the bricks hurried me along as I made the first image and when the dog stood up and had a good shake I made the second and was about to step out of the way of the approaching horse when the dog (typical of Dalmatians I'm told) went hyper at the commotion of the approaching rumble. First he yanked Janet (who'd wrapped the leash around her hand) directly toward me and onto the sidewalk and over the curb, tearing her black hosiery and bruising her knee. Then he yanked the leash out of her hand as she rolled on the ground, running right out into the street to my right as the umbrella left Janet's hand and blew past me in the wind to my left tumbling toward the canal behind me. A street photographer ('tourist') hesitating to leave the street as a handsome cab approaches is typically seen by Amsterdam cabbies as a target to speed up for rather then a reason to slow down in the least for (much less stop for) -- -- -- but two frantic gay men screaming at and chasing after a stampeding dog plus a rolling black and white woman plus a tumbling black and white umbrella plus a lingering street photographer was another matter. The horseman pulled back on the reins and the horse stopped abruptly about 15 feet from me and about 10 feet from the crossing dog, rising up on his hind legs and waving his front hooves high in the air above the whole scene like the hero's horse at the end of a TV western.

I stood there frozen to the same spot I'd taken Streetphotos of the Week #36a&b from moments earlier and I worried about the dog who had now lost himself in the crowd. I worried about the frantic owners who'd kindly lent me their black and white dog and I worried about the tumbling black and white umbrella (which made it to the canal and was lost) and about the stressed out black and white horse and about his now pissed off (beet-red-faced) driver who'd begun yelling at me in black and white Dutch. But mostly I was so worried about the grounded black and white model, my lead actress who'd just done a bang-up job posing for Streetphotos of the Week #36a&b, my travel mate, my partner, my wife Janet -- who'd torn her stockings and skinned her knee in the line of duty for the sake of art -- that I never even got a single shot of that absurd happening.

Too worried about the model who I began dating 20 years ago this hour when she showed up at a Friday the 13th party at my house. I love her more than street photography, world travel, and college basketball put together.

Of all the things I love, I love her best of all.
Happy anniversary baby ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #37/A Tattered Flurry of Spring/Amsterdam, Holland/(2000)

Issued on March 20, 2007
 

            * Speculation about Streetphoto of the Week #37 ...

                 Vernal equinox in Amsterdam’s Wallen (the Red Light District) puts a spring in an Amsterdamer’s step.
That long and nasty winter is over at last and the temperature is rising. It’s finally mild enough -- with a few sun-breaks here and there and a quick stop off on the way to work for a cup of coffee -- to wear that favorite outfit. That tattered yet feel-good one she hadn't worn since October -- just before most of the tourists left town and all the outdoor cafes stowed away their terrace tables for the Winter. Sure, it’s raining today on her way to work – but that never hurt anyone, did it? And the spirits are very clear about how to handle this favorable turn of climate. So, the most festive umbrella she could muster in hand, out the door of her flat and out onto the street in her alluring outfit she went (worn to please herself in celebration of the season -- but sure to please the cliental at her Red Light District night job too).  
Queensday is only a few weeks away, and the streets will soon be jammed with this year’s tourist throng. The Coots are all mating and nesting about abandoned boats on the canals and the trees are beginning to bud their way toward Summer. Rock and Roll music trickles out of open cafe doors as she walks by them thinking about the Coots on the canals and the Swans she saw this morning out on the harbor. Sometimes she's jealous of them and she just wants to fly away from her crummy job – like many people she knows. But not today, because Springtime began for her when this afternoon bloomed mild with a few light showers instead of icy with fierce winds off the North Sea and the accompanying mood-killing cold. And so today she put on her favorite outfit – the one she wore the last time in Autumn, and with a spring in her step she walked to work through the Wallen in a drizzle ... ... ... and there I was with my streetphoto camera ... ... ... left alone in my thoughts ... ... ... wondering to myself ... ... ... and wandering about the Wallen in the rain ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #38/Survive and Advance/Kansas City, Missouri/2005)

Issued on March 27, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #39/New York Minute/Central Park, New York/(1984)

Issued on April 3, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #40/Sunseek Athens/Athens, Greece/1990)

Issued on April 10, 2007
 

               Street photographs that succeed in freezing several (often fleeting) elements of the ongoing rush of city life into composed thought -- into visually compelling short story lines that speak in thicker terms to the nature of the place in question as well as my nature too -- these are my favorites.

The recipe for such success as found in Streetphoto of the Week #40:

(1) Begin with one ripped Grecian sunbather out in public for a tan in full Speedo -- and soon fast asleep on a park bench.
(2) Add one garden tree and one mischievous global street photographer looking for a way to document both the heat and
sophistication of urban Athens.
(3) Mix in locally specific infrastructure (the whitewashed walls and the advertisements in Greek).
(4) Wait patiently for 10 minutes or so to give serendipity the opportunity to rise ...
(5) Then top it all off by capturing the bold emergence of a momentary passerby peeking toward the mystery created by the mischievous street photographer and the garden tree, suggesting a comic diversion that is certainly Mediterranean in nature.

Let cool.
Serve at room temperature ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #41a/The Beach Boy and the Fisher Men/Buzios, Brazil
(2005)

Issued on April 17, 2007
 

                                                   

                                * a back story to Streetphotos of the Week #41a&b ...

                 I made this colorfully compelling streetphoto from my perch on a bench in Buzios, Brazil one afternoon two years ago while chatting with a couple of fishermen using a lone tree to mend their nets at the shoreline. The beach boy pulled up in his red beach buggy, hopped out, and unintentionally posed himself for me at the Telemar phone booth. And so there it was -- everything in one picture that a modern Atlantic shoreline has to offer. The antiquity of the surviving fishing trade mixed in with the land-loving flow of the modern non-fishing world. The hard work of fisher men, the easy play of a beach boy caught in their net, backed by a couple of coastal guest houses for the tourists.

Anyway, the only thing missing from the composition was the shoreline itself. So on the following morning I rose with the fishermen, went to the same bench where I'd made Streetphoto of the Week #41a, turned my camera around 180-degrees toward the ocean, and made Streetphoto of the Week #41b. And I thought you'd enjoy seeing both perspectives -- the streets of Buzios and the streets of Armação Bay from the same spot 14 hours later.

*Streetphoto of the Week #41b/Morning Commute on Armação Bay/ off Buzios, Brazil/
(2005)

*Streetphoto of the Week #42/
Ipanema Umbrella Clown Dance #1/A Portrait of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2004)

Issued on April 24, 2007
 

* Streetphoto.com is off to take a crack at the Streets of the Northern Andes over the next five weeks. Brand new streetphotos from Ecuador will begin appearing in this space thereafter.
Adios,
Streetphoto of the Week...

*Streetphoto of the Week #43/
Ipanema Umbrella Clown Dance #2/A Portrait of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2004)

Issued on April 24, 2007

*Streetphoto of the Week #44/
Ipanema Umbrella Clown Dance #3/A Portrait of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2004)

Issued on April 24, 2007

*Streetphoto of the Week #45/
Ipanema Umbrella Clown Dance #4/A Portrait of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2004)

Issued on April 24, 2007

*Streetphoto of the Week #46/
Ipanema Umbrella Clown Dance #5/A Portrait of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(2004)

Issued on April 24, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #47/Otavalo Marketeer #1/Otavalo, Ecuador/(last week)

Issued on May 29, 2007
 

           * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #47 ...

                For a month I'd been hunting and stalking the streets of Ecuador for the must-have street photograph of an Andean woman carrying home greens from the morning market on her back. Ecuadorians are hard workers, particularly the women, and I needed that street photograph to properly express that important trait in my portfolio.
The first week in Quito I had a chance or two, but both times were spoiled when the women with the greenery on their backs headed indoors too soon to capture them in the wild in all their glory. Then during the second week (under the erupting Tungurahua volcano at Banos) the market women carrying greenery kept appearing every confounding time a battery wore down or every confounding time a photo card filled up.
During the third week while photographing the streets of impoverished mountain villages extremely high up in the Andes, the women carrying greenery were a curse to me -- either appearing and disappearing too quickly to properly capture, or appearing while I was cooped up in a bus, or mysteriously appearing one time just as the camera decided to break down for the day (it giving me an error message to look up in the instruction manual instead of a suitable Woman Carrying Greenery on Her Back photograph).
The last week wasn't going any better in this regard and I was crushed when the best Woman Carrying Greenery on Her Back opportunity I'd had all month slipped by me on Sunday evening while changing cards on the streets of Otavalo. I was so desperate to get that particular shot that I even moaned my frustrations about it aloud to my friends at the Hostal Dona Esther -- laying out the conspiracy theory about the apparent curse and about my many failures over the past few weeks. I only had two days left in Ecuador and I was leaving Otavalo on a bus for Quito in an hour -- so I went out for one last try last Monday morning -- -- -- and low and behold -- -- -- I didn't just end up getting the best Woman Carrying Greenery On Her Back photo of my Ecuador trip -- -- -- I got the best darned Woman Carrying Greenery on Her Back (in a RED! sash) While Wearing Cool Golden Jewelry and Toting an Iconic Chicken streetphoto I recon' I'll ever be blessed to have the opportunity to get anywhere ...

*Streetphoto of the Week #48/Guamote Marketeer #1/Guamote, Ecuador/(last month)

Issued on June 5, 2007
 

          * a back story to Streetphoto of the Week #48 ...

                  Ecuador is a very cool and exotic place to be, way up there in the Andes. It's got perhaps the most colorful people I've ever photographed out on the streets of the world, anywhere (see today's "Streetphoto of the Week"). Up in the mountains it's fairly tranquil. Sure, there's some crime in Quito and elsewhere (like in any other place), but rarely does it turn violent. Both the men and women of most of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador dress out in bright colors (sometimes astounding combinations of them) and both women and men are partial to sporting a highly brushed and primped wide-brimmed hat with a feather or two in it. And aside from being perhaps the most interestingly attired people on Earth, they have great common sense -- even the non-indigenous of Ecuador choosing to forgo the multiple cheek kissing fashions of the old county, choosing instead to greet and part from one another with a single peck on one cheek. They take mayonnaise on their french fries and prefer popcorn in their soup instead of crackers. Ecuadorians are very friendly and polite and extremely hard working. They use the American dollar in Ecuador and seem plenty capable of managing a robust economy, although it's difficult for them to keep a president -- having gone through about a dozen of them since the mid 1990s (it's hard to keep count).
In my month in the Ecuadorian Andes I worked hard enough and was fortunate enough to have captured a fairly thick portfolio of visually bold samples of what one sees on the streets of the big city (Quito/15-day shoot), the small city (Otavalo/5-day shoot), the volcano town (Banos/5-day shoot), and the high-altitude Andes Mountain farming village (Jatari Campesino/ 5-day shoot). So during the next couple of months Streetphoto of the Week will be dominated by street photography from and a few stories about the streets of Ecuador. I hope you'll enjoy looking at these photographs, checking out the people of these places and trying to imagine their lives and the depths of their experiences. Just like you do whenever you throw yourselves out on the streets of the world to go people watching.
After awhile (around Autumn) I'll get back to the rest of the globe, but just before I do, I'll end the Ecuador blitz with a month-long spate of NEW!1 ACCORDION STREETPHOTOS -- because I ran across a bunch of accordion players in the old colonial section of Quito and I made it home with four or five wonderful new accordion streetphotos.
I don't think Quito, Ecuador is the the 'Accordion Capital of the World' that I was looking for -- but it could be ...
Adios.

*Streetphoto of the Week #49/Guamote Wheel Man/Guamote, Ecuador/(last month)

Issued on June 12, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #50
Otavalo Marketeer #2/ A Woven Matt Vendor Heads to Market
Otavalo, Ecuador/(last month)

Issued on June 19, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #51/ Guamote Blue Woman/ Guamote, Ecuador

Issued on June 26, 2007
 

*Streetphoto of the Week #52/ Armed for Another Work Cycle/ Banos, Ecuador

Issued on July 3, 2007
 

To The Next 52 SPotWeeks
 

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