So Miss Mia has somehow messed up my computer screen and it is now so dark I can just barely readit. I've tried readjusting the brightness, etc., but no dice. The light meter on my camera is also acting strange, making my photographs much darker than they ought to be. All of the sudden, the world seems to have plunged into darkness....Thought I'd post this picture to try and brighten my day a bit. I took it here in Berlin on Marheineke Platz and I find it such a lovely example of urban grit mixed with niceness. Hope it might brighten your day too! :)
Let's face it: Writing a blog is a pretty vain thing to do. The idea that you gather together your thoughts, musings, rants, beliefs and photographs and then post them on the web for other people to read definitely involves a fair degree of self-love. There are also those who monetize, adding advertisements to make a little money (or a lot) on the side. Vanity mixed in with greed equals two mortal sins for the price of one.
I will be the first to admit that I am indeed vain (hence, the blog...) Another way my vanity has always shown is with the self-portraits. Ever since I got my first camera at 15 I've been taking them. My first digital camera I bought when I was 30 and, for the past 5 years my computer has gradually been filling up with pictures I took of myself. I have it programmed so that the screen saver is a slide show. Inevitably the slide show goes like this: Photograph of me, me, me, a tree, a street in Berlin, me, me and Mia, Lilly, the pacific ocean, Noe Valley, me, me, me......
I have noticed in pictures taken of me by other people that I look a)fatter and b)less intense than I do in my self-portraits. The logical conclusion would of course be that I AM fatter and less intense than I imagine, but I prefer to believe that only I can take real pictures of myself. Silliness aside, there is also a somewhat serious side to the portrait snapping. I've always admired the photographer Cindy Sherman. Although I would never go as far as to dress up in costume and then take photographs of myself, I can appreciate the idea of using your own body as a prop. In front of the camera you're always on stage. You can be anyone you want.
The following are six self-portraits, one for each year from the age of 30 to my current ripe old age of 35.
Of course, the fair thing to do would be to add another picture taken by someone else for comparison but, no, I'd rather not. After all, this is my blog where, as should be, my alter-ego always trumps the everyday. ;)
A lot of people must have them. Those pictures you find somewhere on the internet that you save on your computer. You don't really know why you do it. You're not going to use them for anything and don't really look at them that often. But they are pictures that you liked. Pictures you found funny. Pictures that moved you. Here are some of mine. What are yours?
I just thought I'd post some of my husband's photographs on this wet, dreay late Sunday afternoon. A lawyer by day, he is also an aspiring photographer. I may add some of the photographs to my shop Schaufenster just to see what happens. If any sell, then I told him I will take him out for a nice dinner!
Yep, I'm at it again with the photo stitching. I liked one of them so much that I just had to frame it and keep it for myself. It is now hanging in my kitchen.
Last year I came to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that I am not a talented seamstress. When I was a child, I loved to do cross-stich with my mother. I found creating little rows of colored stiches to be a relaxing, peacful thing to do. All of my adult life I also fantisied about one day making my own clothes or at least altering pieces myself. Last March I decided to finally learn how to use a sewing machine. I took a course at the Volkshochschule here in Berlin (like an Adult School) and realized quite soon that I was missing some key inherent skills to get me going: I cannot, and never could, fold things neatly and cannot draw a straight line to save my life. The teacher was often exasperated when I accidently sewed something onto the wrong side or bought the wrong kind of cloth for a project (some of this can be blamed on language misunderstandings. Although my German is fluent, there were certain sewing and cloth terms that I would probably not even know in English let alone a foreign language!) Of course, if I was very patient I was still able to get the job done but I found I didn't really enjoy it. Lack of pleasure, combined with the fact that the second-hand sewing machine I bought (literally!)blew up, caused me to draw the conclusion that sewing with a machine just wasn't for me. Being, in some ways, inherently 19th century, it makes sense that I still like to do it by hand. My newest project has been taking something else I love, vintage photos, and stitching parts of them where I would like to emphasise an angle or add color. I'm adding some pictures of two I have done recently. Probably they will find their way into some collage and then will continue on to my shop, Schaufenster. Time will tell....
Winters in Berlin are tough. Grey skies everyday, frozen dog shit all over the street (frozen if you're lucky that is!), grim faces... A native California girl, I've never liked it even before I had kids. Now that I have two young children, the season is basically unbearable. A double stroller, two sets of snowsuits, no car....Cars are expensive to have in Berlin and since we live in a great urban neighborhood we don't really need one (we can borrow my brother-in-law's if need be...) But still, babies, a heavy stroller, a subway system where nearly NO station has an elevator and only sometimes an escalator (very steep stairs in their place)I almost never leave the neighborhood. I've been keeping myself busy with creative projects so I don't go crazy. Jewelry making, collages, etc. for my two etsy shops. Still, there is a problem with light. In order to post the items I have made to offer them for sale in Schaufenster and Rose, red Rose I have to take photographs. Though lovely, our apartment doesn't get very good light. Many an afternoon I've driven myself crazy taken blurry picture after blurry picture. Occasionally I set up things in the courtyard in the back, but it's not really much fun even if the light is better. Yesterday I had a revelation: I need to take photographs and get out of the house a little bit. Why not go to one of the graveyards nearby? There are two really nice ones (including one where Brahms and Schumann are buried.) When Mia was in pre-school I packed up baby Lilly and headed to the one on Bergmannstrasse. The sun was actually shining and I got some great shots of both the necklace and two collages which was great. Photographs plus small winter outing equals sucess. Hooray!
In 2005-2006 I had the coolest job: I got to go to various cities in Germany (Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg, Hannover)several times to teach workshops for the Deutsche Bahn (German Railway.) They were preparing for the Soccer World Cup, which was hosted in Berlin, and they wanted to make sure (or at least be able to brag on paper) that their service employees and train announcers could speak passable English. I was sent to each of these cities 3 or 4 times to teach relatively well-paid 3 day workshops and also had my hotel and train expenses covered. The teaching itself was rather tedious. The students all worked at low level service jobs, were mostly middle aged and, although friendly for the most part, were not at all interested in learning English (only a few of them could really speak it passably.) Sometimes it felt more like highly paid babysitting for people thrilled to gossip and take lots of smoke breaks because they weren't technically at work. Still, I got through the days fairly easily and had so much fun in the evenings, roaming the streets of the various cities alone, armed with curiosity and a camera. It's funny how seldom we just wander for hours in the places we live. I remember getting visitors when I lived in the S.F. Bay Area and doing things with them that I simply had never done before: it was always there. I could go tomorrow if I felt like it. And yet, I never really did. Being in another city on business alone is the perfect opportunity for exploration because you have nothing else to do and NOTHING is more boring than sitting in the mid-range hotel room all by your lonesome....Anyway, I took a lot of great photos and am planning on using them for various art projects: collages, digitally enhanced/altered photographs and series of magnets. I already have some of them on offer in Etsy shop and am working on a couple of others. Here is a slide show of the photographs I know I want to do something with at some point. (I have already worked with and altered some which I have on offer in my shop Schaufenster, but the photographs shown here are the originals.) By the way, Hamburg was by far my most favorite of the cities. A big city (at least a million), it has a cool vibe and is really ethnically mixed and of course has its seedy edges with the Reeperbahn, the famous sailor red-light district where the Beatles got there start. Hannover is the least interesting (a city without a face, my husband says)but there was amazing stormy weather one of the times that I was there and the light just blew me away. That's when I took the series of Light and Longing self portraits (see blog below). Leipzig and Dresden are both cool, smaller cities but, except for one self-portrait in Leipzig, they proved uninspiring....Or maybe I forgot my camera when I went to Dresden. I don't remember anymore. Anyway, enjoy the show!
it. I've tried readjusting the brightness, etc., but no dice. The light meter on my camera is also acting strange, making my photographs much darker than they ought to be. All of the sudden, the world seems to have plunged into darkness....Thought I'd post this picture to try and brighten my day a bit. I took it here in Berlin on Marheineke Platz and I find it such a lovely example of urban grit mixed with niceness. Hope it might brighten your day too! :)
