Friday, August 9, 2013
Busy Year....
Been so busy that I've not taken time to post. Up now, my Summer Update to all of my photography projects and a nice notice on my first book, LIFE DOESN'T FRIGHTEN ME, now up in a "Best Books" display at the New York Public Library. Still going strong after 20 years of publication!
The SARA JANE BOYERS PHOTO SUMMER UPDATE: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=013a28d9f024038bd399086bb&id=6f3fdb338f&e=9151fee9c4
The Update includes information on the Tyrus Wong retrospective at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco that includes several large prints of my photgraphs of Tyrus and his kites out at Santa Monica Beach. There is a beautiful exhibition catalog (see update) as well as my small book on the Kites for sale at the museum store and the catalog as well on Amazon and in bookstores.
WATER TO PAPER, PAINT TO SKY: THE ART OF TYRUS WONG opens next week, the 15th in San Francisco.
NYPL "Best Books" display featuring LIFE DOESN'T FRIGHTEN ME, my award-winning pairing of the eloquent words of Dr. Maya Angelou and the evocative art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The SARA JANE BOYERS PHOTO SUMMER UPDATE: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=013a28d9f024038bd399086bb&id=6f3fdb338f&e=9151fee9c4
Summer Fireworks, Detroit from the Detroit:Definition project
WATER TO PAPER, PAINT TO SKY: THE ART OF TYRUS WONG opens next week, the 15th in San Francisco.
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| GO FLY A KITE can be previewed online at http://issuu.com/sarajaneboyersphoto/docs/sjboyers_goflyakite_1 |
NYPL "Best Books" display featuring LIFE DOESN'T FRIGHTEN ME, my award-winning pairing of the eloquent words of Dr. Maya Angelou and the evocative art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Desert
It is hard to think about photography in the desert. So many have covered this topic, many so successfully.
This surreal landscape, even for those of us who have grown up in a desert (for isn't that what Los Angeles truly is?), fascinates most of us with its alien forms, its unrelenting sun and tones of beige sand reaching out past the horizon. As opposed to the far-reaching landscape of the marine environment where, yes, there is also the blue prevailing color that is comforting, the desert brings us feelings of unease and a bit of danger.
And for imagery, the desert is about contrast, between the loneliness and the stark landscape beauty. Between the need to see life and the desolate definition that requires hardship, struggle and lays bare not only our human, but life's need for one of its most basic elements: water.
Is it exotic? Is it safe when wherever we tread - urban desert like Palm Springs or Tuscon - or foreign of the Sahara - we search out the strange creatures that could attack us?
The American Deserts are where we go for the exotic. The empty spaces attract those who want to be our but without. Those who escape, for a time, the harrowing winters, known as the "snowbirds." Those who seek solace in the silence and in a place where the grand vistas speak to the silence.
In the desert we rarely sit inside to watch TV but venture outdoors, even in the most oppressing heat, to hike, sit on a porch to read and watch the sunset, breathe in the dry air and enter into a quiet moment, often with just ourselves. With native vegetation mostly untouched, those with holistic or mystical yearnings arrive to discover what is there in the vacant space while at the same times, themselves in a place with few distractions. The words of the "urban" desert: retreat and nature.
Even when social, the deserts are places of retreat, where one can meet together with like kind and focus. It is a place of fantasy where someone like the late multimillionaire founder of Avery labels can purchase a swath of land and commission an LA-based sculptor to create a melting pot of mythic and mesozoic and mythologial beings that one drives through like a christmas/disneyland tour, standing silent, occasionally headless due to the high desert winds, to give offerings to some great god of visual perception and tourism
This past weekend, I did exactly that: meeting with children's writer friends in Anza Borrego, one of our nation's largest state parks. Under the illusion that we were there for the wildflowers, we discovered so much more.
For me, so long now into photography the gathering brought me back to my writing roots. It returned me to family memories of a visit 20 years past with children not yet even teens, driving off-road with un-licensed children at the wheel - one so small that she had to sit in front of me to gain the proximity to even reach the pedals. The desert is a place of breaking the codes.
Most essential, brought me to childhood, from scents of orange blossoms on the highway - no freeway - drives through the inland empire, stopping at the tracks for the trains to race through, to lush manufactured oasis' in Palm Springs where mountains turned obsidian in the night and dry hot air determined one's activities for the day.
Hope, stuff get abandoned in the desert. We arrive full of hope. Some of us leave full of despair. The artifacts remain, faded, sun-drenched. In Southern California we even have a natural 20th Century artifact, the Salton Sea. Man-made, if not by design, but achieving a natural state, then subsiding, literally and figuratively, until both commerce and the environment combine to demonstrate its death toll until it, like the dcaying structures that surround it tell what we most wish not to hear: that man and his environment fades, no matter what we do.
I find it ironic that, although there are deserts worldwide and, in fact, we share a large part of our Western deserts - the Sonoran - with the middle east and probably elsewhere, there is a true American sensability to the Southwestern desert.
This surreal landscape, even for those of us who have grown up in a desert (for isn't that what Los Angeles truly is?), fascinates most of us with its alien forms, its unrelenting sun and tones of beige sand reaching out past the horizon. As opposed to the far-reaching landscape of the marine environment where, yes, there is also the blue prevailing color that is comforting, the desert brings us feelings of unease and a bit of danger.
And for imagery, the desert is about contrast, between the loneliness and the stark landscape beauty. Between the need to see life and the desolate definition that requires hardship, struggle and lays bare not only our human, but life's need for one of its most basic elements: water.
Is it exotic? Is it safe when wherever we tread - urban desert like Palm Springs or Tuscon - or foreign of the Sahara - we search out the strange creatures that could attack us?
The American Deserts are where we go for the exotic. The empty spaces attract those who want to be our but without. Those who escape, for a time, the harrowing winters, known as the "snowbirds." Those who seek solace in the silence and in a place where the grand vistas speak to the silence.
In the desert we rarely sit inside to watch TV but venture outdoors, even in the most oppressing heat, to hike, sit on a porch to read and watch the sunset, breathe in the dry air and enter into a quiet moment, often with just ourselves. With native vegetation mostly untouched, those with holistic or mystical yearnings arrive to discover what is there in the vacant space while at the same times, themselves in a place with few distractions. The words of the "urban" desert: retreat and nature.
Even when social, the deserts are places of retreat, where one can meet together with like kind and focus. It is a place of fantasy where someone like the late multimillionaire founder of Avery labels can purchase a swath of land and commission an LA-based sculptor to create a melting pot of mythic and mesozoic and mythologial beings that one drives through like a christmas/disneyland tour, standing silent, occasionally headless due to the high desert winds, to give offerings to some great god of visual perception and tourism
This past weekend, I did exactly that: meeting with children's writer friends in Anza Borrego, one of our nation's largest state parks. Under the illusion that we were there for the wildflowers, we discovered so much more.
For me, so long now into photography the gathering brought me back to my writing roots. It returned me to family memories of a visit 20 years past with children not yet even teens, driving off-road with un-licensed children at the wheel - one so small that she had to sit in front of me to gain the proximity to even reach the pedals. The desert is a place of breaking the codes.
Most essential, brought me to childhood, from scents of orange blossoms on the highway - no freeway - drives through the inland empire, stopping at the tracks for the trains to race through, to lush manufactured oasis' in Palm Springs where mountains turned obsidian in the night and dry hot air determined one's activities for the day.
Hope, stuff get abandoned in the desert. We arrive full of hope. Some of us leave full of despair. The artifacts remain, faded, sun-drenched. In Southern California we even have a natural 20th Century artifact, the Salton Sea. Man-made, if not by design, but achieving a natural state, then subsiding, literally and figuratively, until both commerce and the environment combine to demonstrate its death toll until it, like the dcaying structures that surround it tell what we most wish not to hear: that man and his environment fades, no matter what we do.
I find it ironic that, although there are deserts worldwide and, in fact, we share a large part of our Western deserts - the Sonoran - with the middle east and probably elsewhere, there is a true American sensability to the Southwestern desert.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Gun Hay Fat Choy! The Lunar New Year
The Lunar New Year celebration has just ended.
In many Asian countries and communities, it is a fifteen day ceremony that commences the Lunar calendar. As a part of my long-term project, FINDING CHINATOWN:An American Story, I pay an annual visit to the "chinatowns" in the greater Los Angeles area.
An account of this year's visit, the Year of the Black Water Snake, is posted on my FINDING CHINATOWN Blogspot, http://findingchinatown.blogspot.com/
In many Asian countries and communities, it is a fifteen day ceremony that commences the Lunar calendar. As a part of my long-term project, FINDING CHINATOWN:An American Story, I pay an annual visit to the "chinatowns" in the greater Los Angeles area.
An account of this year's visit, the Year of the Black Water Snake, is posted on my FINDING CHINATOWN Blogspot, http://findingchinatown.blogspot.com/
Monday, December 31, 2012
Holiday Reflection
The last of 2012. Quiet. In between the xmas parties and tonight, the last, fittingly at a neighbor's to celebrate the coming of the New Year.
New Years Eve Day seems a quiet day. The frenzy is gone. We've eaten quite enough. In two days, our work year begins, again. That's ok as for me, a new year is full of challenge and surprise and I would wish that for all of my friends and associates.
Today I am taking down our tree. It was beautiful even though not as large nor as full as those of latter years when we filled our two story space with the biggest, bestest and freshest ever.
Development has robbed us of the xmas tree stands by the trainyards downtown where we would stand at auction with all of Los Angeles, vying for trees brought down from a mythical Northwest forest where there was actually snow, still caught in some fir branches. Gone with this holiday trek is the annual breakfast at Vickmans before and, after our leisurely drive with tree atop car from Alameda west along Olympic Boulevard to the sea, watching the slow development of Koreatown, the continuing evolution of our city.
That part of our life, even the larger closer family that used to gather for the holidays, is no more as older friends and family are lost and younger generations ofttimes too fade away into other lives. There remains a sadness and an ache for once was, yet we count ourselves lucky to remain included in communities that make up so much of the sustenance of life.
There remains throughout a continuous thread that binds all this together.
The year end is a reflective time and, as I remove ornaments from the tree, I am finding glittery mementos from the fabric of my life brightly shining here, permitting me once more some of those moments.
There are the beaded eggs - some now shattered, others faded - I so patiently threaded and carefully wrapped around blown shells over three decades ago, sitting in the "women's lounge" - hard to believe such a lounge would still exist - of my law school. And the next year there: the styrofoam covered balls, with long straight pins dangerously falling on the floor. All so much more fun than law school... and definitely part of the reason I became a writer and photographer.
Throughout there were the holiday gift from friends, wonderful imaginative objets d'art, including delights from those with whom I worked, like the handmade crocheted stars from a co-worker at United Artists.
Felt ornaments of Sesame Street & other characters found so long ago in New England craft fairs, traditional German glass decorations, and other beautiful or strange stuff that it just doesn't hurt to hang up there once more.
And always ribbons, some historic like the red decorative ones with
gold threads that I grabbed when I. Magnin, a historic San Francisco and
then Southern California retail chain, went out of business. And the
others, like the ones that my Aunt Lillian always scooped up to use for
the next year. My aunt is also gone and today I am the one saving
ribbons, but not the used wrapping paper!
Opened up in the frenzy of holiday preparation, then more leisurely wrapped away in the same boxes, year to year, the ornaments return me to family and friends; lives, loves and experiences from year to year, many as tarnished and ragged as the boxes themselves, taped and re-taped but holding still.
Christmas and the start of the New Year gift us with the opportunity to remind ourselves what is the best of us, both when we reach out to others in support and good wishes and when we turn into ourselves to hold dear and strong what we have lived and learned and then, go forward to use those memories and actions to make our lives and those of others glitter throughout the next year.
A HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.
New Years Eve Day seems a quiet day. The frenzy is gone. We've eaten quite enough. In two days, our work year begins, again. That's ok as for me, a new year is full of challenge and surprise and I would wish that for all of my friends and associates.
Today I am taking down our tree. It was beautiful even though not as large nor as full as those of latter years when we filled our two story space with the biggest, bestest and freshest ever.
Development has robbed us of the xmas tree stands by the trainyards downtown where we would stand at auction with all of Los Angeles, vying for trees brought down from a mythical Northwest forest where there was actually snow, still caught in some fir branches. Gone with this holiday trek is the annual breakfast at Vickmans before and, after our leisurely drive with tree atop car from Alameda west along Olympic Boulevard to the sea, watching the slow development of Koreatown, the continuing evolution of our city.
That part of our life, even the larger closer family that used to gather for the holidays, is no more as older friends and family are lost and younger generations ofttimes too fade away into other lives. There remains a sadness and an ache for once was, yet we count ourselves lucky to remain included in communities that make up so much of the sustenance of life.
There remains throughout a continuous thread that binds all this together.
The year end is a reflective time and, as I remove ornaments from the tree, I am finding glittery mementos from the fabric of my life brightly shining here, permitting me once more some of those moments.
My handmade sachets and hand-sewn whimsical Marimekko-fabric'd animals that we hung on the tree or gave to friends in those years with little money to spend on presents.
In the halcyon music industry years, the time I used album label cutouts to decorate the tree.
Soon, the tree was filled with my children's art and photos, hung proudly year by happy year.
A few of the
lovely silk animal ornaments that would
decorate Mom's little tree the years before she died remain for me to
hang, a vivid simple reminder of her interests in Asian art and order.
A HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Best for the Holidays
It has been a busy year, filled with some fascinating photographic activity, participation in several terrific exhibitions and seeing others - Paris Photo, FIAC, Art Platform, PhotoLA among the biggies and local and friend's work and exhibitions among the even more important - PLUS two very positive review sessions: Palm Springs Photo Festival and Lens/Culture/FotoFest/Paris.
Loved being in the community of photographers, curators, gallerists, writers and making new friends and loved doing the work. Stay tuned for my Winter Update, reports from the Detroit:Definition project when I return to Detroit in the Spring and for some other exciting news!
Loved as well enjoying my friends and family as yet another year passes that has brought me memories to cherish and a future to look forward to.
Happy Holidays to All.
Sara Jane Boyers
Fall at Schloss Neuhaus, Austria ©Copyright2012 Sara Jane Boyers
Loved being in the community of photographers, curators, gallerists, writers and making new friends and loved doing the work. Stay tuned for my Winter Update, reports from the Detroit:Definition project when I return to Detroit in the Spring and for some other exciting news!
Loved as well enjoying my friends and family as yet another year passes that has brought me memories to cherish and a future to look forward to.
Happy Holidays to All.
Sara Jane Boyers
Fall at Schloss Neuhaus, Austria ©Copyright2012 Sara Jane Boyers
Friday, December 14, 2012
Traffic Jams, Solved
While it is true I seem to be looking for traffic for my GRIDLOCK series, at the same time I am keenly intrigued by the many solutions to be found for this more than annoying issue, especially in my home city of Los Angeles where, depending upon the time of day and circumstances, a drive from the beach to downtown can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours....
Here, from a TEDx TALK about Stockholm: Traffic Jams, Solved http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/12/traffic-jams-solved/4160/
and the full TEDx Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams.html
The comments are also quite good.
and the full TEDx Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams.html
The comments are also quite good.
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