Spanish Broom

 We enjoyed a flamenco performance in Old Town's Plaza Don Luis by the Spanish Broom group on Saturday.  The dancers, singers and guitarists all performed at a high level of skill.  They will do another performance at the Casa Rondeña Winery on October 6th and will be  back in Plaza Don Luis on the 10th.  The informal setting of the little plaza combined with the excellent skills on display lent a note of authenticity to the event.

 

Photographing the action was quite a challenge due to the group's highly kinetic style; they are seldom still for even a moment.

I shot the pictures with both the normal and telephoto lenses for my Olympus Pen FT half-frame camera.  The film was some slightly outdated Acros 400 shared with me by fellow film enthusiast, Jim Grey.  His work with the film looked quite a bit better than mine, possibly because of the choice of developers.  I used the same PMK Pyro I normally use with Kentmere, and at the same time and temperature.  I think I'll try some HC110 for the next roll.

Update:

Margaret recorded a short video of the Old Town performance of Spanish Broom.

My Story

 Film photographer, Chip Greenberg, has done a marvelous job of hosting monthly Zoom meetings of our New Mexico Film Photographers group. For our September meeting he asked me to do a presentation about my history in photography. 

My Story

 (A recording of the first 30 minutes of the September meeting of the New Mexico Film Photographers.)

Photography at Museums

 I have made a lot of photographs in and around museums. That was brought home to me not long ago when I started following and contributing to the Analog Museums group on Flickr. To start that I did a search on the term "museum" in Flickr and was surprised to find I was approaching a hundred images on the subject at that photo sharing site. I made a selection of what I considered the best of those and put them in an album on the Flickr site.

Albuquerque Art Museum

My interest in museums developed early; the first book I can remember reading was one by Roy Chapman Andrews about his explorations in Mongolia and his work as a exhibit designer, curator, and ultimately the director of the Museum of Natural History in New York. My own practical awareness of museums became a reality when I lived for a time in New York.  I had an apartment just across the street from the Brooklyn Museum and visited it often.  Photographing the children of some friends earned me a membership with the Museum of Modern Art and I thereafter visited the MOMA almost weekly.

Albuquerque Art Museum

Albuquerque, where we now live, has a good number of well designed and well run museums for a city of its small size and economic resources. There are three museums within walking distance of our home.  Of those, I visit the Albuquerque Art Museum nearly every Sunday.  The Art Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History offer free entry several times monthly and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at UNM is always free to visitors. UNM has had an impressive place in the history of photography in America and it has an extensive archive of photographic works.  In recent years however the UNM Art Museum has done very little of note with the available resources.

New Mexico Hispanic Cultural Center

Restrictions on photography in museums was common in the past, but most now permit visitors to make photos with the only prohibitions being on the use of flash and tripods. In my own museum photo efforts I tend to focus mostly on making pictures which incorporate a portrayal of the museum experience by visitors.

New Mexico Museum of Natural History

 In regard to photographic techniques I have found that a wide-angle lens is often very useful when exhibits are confined to tight spaces, as well as in capturing the subjects in their over-all context.  Museum lighting is often kept at a low level in an effort to minimize light damage to objects on display, so fast films and wide apertures are helpful.

Albuquerque Art Museum

Photography as a subject of museum displays has become of increased importance in most museums over the years.  I always hope for a bit more, but our local museums have actually brought some impressive shows to town.  One of the best in recent memory was the big retrospective of Danny Lyon's work at the Art Museum which provided an opportunity to appreciate the uniquely immersive style of this long-time New Mexico resident.

PIMA Air and Space Museum, Tucson

 All of the museums in town include photo exhibits among their  offerings, and both the Natural History Museum and the Nuclear Museum  conduct yearly contests open to the participation of  local photographers.

One of my pinhole images on display at the Nuclear Museum

Broken Boxes

 The large fabric and metal sculpture near the entrance to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum drew a lot of favorable attention from visitors.  All of the pieces exhibited were expertly crafted, though their meaning  and relatability  often seemed obscure to me.

 I first photographed the mother wolf figure with the Elmar 3.5/50 lens on my Leica IIIa.  I thought the resultant image on Kentmere 400 was quite good.  However, I wanted to better show the large scale of the piece, so I went back on another day with the Jupiter 12 2.8/35mm.  That did give me some images that better illustrated the liveliness and the context and proportionality compared to human dimensions.  The very low light level made it a challenging undertaking.

 The "Broken Boxes" title of the exhibit came from a podcast consisting of ten years of interviews with artists, including those in the current exhibition.  Even after reading some of the explanations on site, the show title still required some clarification for me.  A friend who is a docent at the museum suggested that the title terms could be similar to the concept of "out of the box" as the artists were all indigenous and were challenging prevalent ideas about their cultures.

The artists that created the wolf sculpture are Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt.

Encounters in Old Town

 The first thing I noticed strolling into the Plaza Vieja on Friday morning was some very loud music and this dog sitting beside the gazebo.  The vest indicated he was a service dog and it appeared one of his service talents was musical appreciation.

I stopped to pet the dog, and got talking with his owner who was wielding the highly amplified guitar.  I learned the dog's name was Papito, and his real mission in life was the pursuit of the cloth frisbee seen lying in the shadow to the lower right.  I tossed the frisbee as instructed and it was clear that this was an activity with unlimited possibilities.

Papito's owner related a bit of his life story, including an addiction to gambling which had resulted in a recent large loss and some thought of putting out his hat next to the gazebo for some grocery money.  I snapped a quick shot up through the railing of the gazebo and then walked past a funeral in progress at San Felipe de Neri and on to Church Street.  

I heard my name called and there was our friend, Mary, with her four sisters from Silver City, mid-way through their own Old Town stroll.  It seemed an extraordinary event.  I had not recalled that she had mentioned coming from such a large family of sisters.  They must have been a phenomenon while growing up in that little New Mexico town.

Back to the Rail Yards (and beyond)

 There is some intense construction activity at this large building behind those which accommodate the Sunday farmers' market.  I believe it to be the one destined to house the new film-making school.

 My purpose on a Tuesday morning was to visit the Wheels Museum which occupies a long, low building at the south end of the Rail Yards.  The narrow, high-ceiling rooms are not particularly well suited to housing the bulky transportation machinery on display.

 The collection contains plenty of documents and images to satisfy those with an interest in the fine details of the region's transportation history.  For most visitors though I think the personal memories triggered by the vehicles on display are the main attraction.

 The Dodge Power Wagon was my trigger. It seemed very like one of a long string of vehicles in which I travelled in 1959 from near Seattle to Leticia in southern Colombia.  That adventure, which has often come to mind lately, started with a single-engine plane taking off from the Bellevue airfield, and progressed to other large and small aircraft, some river launches and a series of ever-smaller dugout canoes which eventually got me to the headwaters of a minor tributary of the Amazon River in southern Colombia.

After landing at Leticia's airfield in a two-engine Curtiss C-46 my three companions and I hitched a ride into the little Amazon port town, seated in the Power Wagon's bed with all our gear.  I vividly recall our entry into the town right after a tropical downpour which left the dirt road under two feet of water.  A number of the town's residents stood in front of their modest homes watching us pass by, up to their knees in water.

Michael Tsalickis Obituary (2018) - St. Petersburg, FL - Tampa Bay Times

 The Power Wagon belonged to Leticia's most prominent resident, Mike Tsalickis, an American expatriate who had founded a business there exporting wild animals and tropical fish. Mike generously gave us space in his warehouse to hang our hammocks, as well as free run of his house. He also was a great help in introducing us to the region and assisting with arrangements to get to our final destination on the Rio Miriti-Parana where we filmed an indigenous harvest celebration.

The Tsalickis business seemed at the time to be a very successful enterprise.  Mike often staged publicity pictures of himself wrestling in the river with large Anacondas, but the  wild animal trapping and fish catching was actually accomplished by villagers throughout the region, including many indigenous people. Cages and tanks at the Leticia facility held the captives until they could be transported to Miami, usually in WWII-era surplus bombers. That all went well for about two decades and resulted in a great many municipal improvements to the town promoted by Mike, including the building of a hospital and expansion of the airport.

The Tsalickis empire was eventually brought to an end, partly by the decision of the Colombian government to forbid the export of native animals. Also, the real economic engine of the region by then was the illicit drug trade which paid much higher wages than did wild animal trapping.  Mike and his family moved back to Florida where he started a shipping business.  Unfortunately for Mike, one of his warehoused shipments of lumber was found also to contain 9,000 pounds of cocaine.  A jury found Mike culpable of involvement in the drug smuggling and he got twenty years in a federal prison.