Special places
Each month I add another link to this page. I enjoy web sites that speak about their authors' special regard for places. I hope you too enjoy my little collection.
Warning: some of these sites are rich and complex — you weren't planning to do anything else today, were you?
Nothing to see here
This website takes the form of a blog, with short posts about obscure places. It’s the work of Anne Ward and a group of collaborators. The about page cautions that attractions that may not be all that attractive, among other delights, can be found here.
The fact that a Dormouse Hunting Museum exists at all is reason enough to buy a plane ticket to Slovenia. The collection covers the myth and culture of the Dormouse in Slovenian national identity, as well as practical examples and diagrams showing trapping methods. The Dormouse was hunted for its pelts, which were used in dandies’ hats, but the meat wasn’t wasted, and the fat is apparently semi-liquid. The displays are well-laid out vitrines, given a backdrop of leaves and logs, and enlarged engravings of dormouse lore, including an image of the devil seemingly herding the dormouse, to some end.[This text, and the photo in the screen shot below, by Dan Eastwell].
Brazillian rainforest photographed from a kite
I have spent more hours than I like to admit browsing the website of Nicolas Chorier, a French photographer who specialises in kite photography. There is much else to see, but I suggest you start with his pictures of the disappearing rainforest of Brazil. The website does not allow a direct link, so here are directions: in the navigation list on the left of the page, click nature, then brazil. Then click the thumbnail images that appear on the right.
Disappearing Scotland
This is a pool of photographs contributed by members of flickr, the very sociable and democratic website for the sharing of images.
A group dedicated to documenting the breadth and beauty of scotland before it disappears forever.
Subject matter includes abandoned or threatened architecture, the story behind the facade, rural, coastal and urban, long forgotton lives, fading grandure, industrial dreams, atmospheric interiors, portraits, and awe-inspiring landscapes. Film or digital, you decide the rest.
Hemingway’s house
This story published in The Guardian (Bell tolls for Hemingway treasures as Cuban house caught in sanctions trap, by Conor Clarke and Ewan MacAskill) includes an audio slideshow: a tour of Hemingway’s house.
Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, 10 miles east of Havana, is the place Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960, and it is there that the author’s abundant tastes, in literature and in life, are on display. Visitors can see where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, where he dined with Errol Flynn and where Ava Gardner was reported to have skinnydipped…
…For the past two years, a group of American organisations has been working to restore the battered house and save the manuscripts and books. But US sanctions against Cuba have hindered the group’s attempts to collaborate with the Cuban government. The Bush administration’s response has been mixed, flitting between acquiescence and obstruction.
Minutes to midnight
With these photographs from a journey across Australia, Trent Parke has made an intense, autobiographical piece, specific in time and place. It’s presented as a web slide show with narrative voice-over. As the intro says:
The work is both a document of a changing nation, uneasy with its identity and its place in the world, and a work of fiction which when combined suggests the build-up, aftermath and rebirth of an apocalyptic world. In its making, Trent pupated from documenting an emotional black and white world to one of color.
This body of work is about the emotion of the time that we live in. It’s not about a physical sense, it’s about an emotional sense and the subconscious, and the thought of what might happen. It’s a document, but it’s a fiction in a sense as well. I look at ‘Minutes to midnight’ as — the way that I wanted to create it was almost like a film clip. I find it amazing to see how much imagery you can pack into a three minute song, and how effective that can be. And so ‘Minutes to midnight’ was that sort of style of work. I was trying to get images that had no real connection, and then making a fictional personal story out of them, I suppose. There were like, fragments of dreams, and nightmares, and all this imagery that, sort of, somehow, sinks to the back of your mind, and gets pulled back up at certain times… [Trent Parke, transcript of start of narration to the segment A document & a fiction.]
Architecture of density
On the website of photographer Michael Wolf is this set of photos of the dense residential buildings of Hong Kong. The photographs are formal and abstracted. People are not shown, but one knows they are there.
