There’s Just No Place Like Home

William Hogarth: The Strodes Family

The Idea of the Home

During holiday times, such as the winter season of festivities that many of us are enjoying right now, a substantial number of people travel sometimes large distances to re-connect and celebrate with other relatives back at their families’ homes.  This led to my reflecting not so much about the reality of the home, as the idea of the home.  The conception of the home, or “hominess,” evolved over a period of many centuries.  By the early 1500s, domestic life was rather austere, but had come to reflect a sense of intimacy and privacy.  On the other hand, if we were to have asked any of them if they felt comfortable where they lived, they would have been puzzled by the question and unable to answer.  The first appearance of the word “comfort” to mean a level of domestic contentment is not reported until the eighteenth century.

One illustration of this new found sense of domestic comfort is shown above in William Hogarth’s painting of an early Georgian interior.  Notice how the softened furniture complemented the rich costumes of the time and served as counterparts to the billowing gowns worn by women, as well as to the finely embroidered coats and wigs of the men.

The slightly pompous interiors also reflected the clothing fashions of the time.  Skirted chairs and gathered draperies reflected the details of how cloth had come to be used in skirts and gowns; wallpaper often copied the designs used in fabrics. The lavish Art Deco furniture reflected the homeowners’ own luxurious garments.

My personal thought for each of you who has been able to spend time re-connecting with loved ones is to always remember that home is where all of us started from.  I very deeply hope that going back provided you with strong feelings of warmth and deep affection.

There’s Just No Place Like Home

Michael Buble: Home

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My Faves for Saturday, December 15, 2007

Realizing That I Need You, Felt Like I Just Woke Up « Et Cetera: Publick and Privat Curiosities

“Realizing That I Need You, Felt Like I Just Woke Up.” This piece presents engaging, sensual shadowed photographs on the theme of our yearnings for an affectionate, loving relationship with another. It’s accompanied by an extremely touching music video. I hope that you’ll take a look at this and enjoy it!

[tags: art, design, photographs, love, gay, sexy, music, video]

 

Chicago Photographer Worsom: Expressing What They Can’t Say « Et Cetera: Publick and Privat Curiosities

Worsom grew up on the rough Westside streets of Chicago and sold drugs from the age of 15 into his twenties. Finally, he became desperate to escape that lifestyle. He wanted to do something that he loved, which was photography. Now, he is well known for photography that captures what people in the Black community can’t express themselves.

Stunning, beautiful photographs and a moving photo-gallery are included.

[tags: art, design, photographs, Chicago, Worsom]

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Chicago Photographer Worsom: Expressing What They Can’t Say

The Early Years on Chicago’s Rough Streets

Everyone on Chicago’s Westside knows Worsom, who is the sole photographer for The Chicago Defender. The Defender is one of the oldest African-American newspapers in the country, and Worsom’s camera is usually present at any community, political or sporting event of any importance. Worsom is without a doubt a modern day “Picture Man.”

Worsom was raised on the rough Westside streets of Chicago and began selling drugs at the age of 15, continuing to be a dealer into his twenties. “My parents weren’t poor but I wanted my own money. You just couldn’t ask your parents for $100 back then. But my friends were walking around with that much money in their pockets and they told me I could too. That’s how it started,” he’s said. “I knew I was doing wrong. This was back in the early 80’s when crack was first coming and I saw what it was doing to the people in our neighborhood. But we justified it to ourselves by saying that these cigarette and gun companies are killing people and they weren’t under any obligation not to do business, so why shouldn’t we do business? That is what we were telling ourselves.”

“But finally you get tired. You get tired of everything. You get tired of looking over your shoulder, you get tired of not trusting anybody, not your girlfriends, not your friends, nobody. In the back of your head, you know that no matter how good you are, the drug trade can only end one of two ways: you get caught or you get killed. And everyone was getting killed, all your friends, everyone you grew up with. People were getting killed all around me. I had reached a point in my life where I knew I wanted something else. I was desperate to find a way out of that lifestyle. For the first time, I wanted to try to find something that I loved to do. And what I liked to do and I what I seemed to be good at was taking pictures.”

Worsom Gets His Start in Pictures

He started with his uncle’s camera at family gatherings when he was 12, taking pictures of my family and the pets. Everyone kept telling him how much they liked his photos, but all they really were was just in focus. Even during the time that he was selling drugs, he was still taking photographs with his uncle’s camera. His cousin kept telling him that he had a real talent, and that he could get paid to take photos. But for a while, Worsom didn’t believe him, thinking, “Who would to pay money for these photos?”

A little later, Worsom went to a pawn shop and bought his own camera. For the next year he went just everywhere, teaching himself how to be a better photographer. He went to the beach, to basketball games, on the street, and just took lots of photographs. His first paid jobs were at the parties of friends, where he would charge them $100 for two rolls of film. People liked the photos, so more and more people started hiring him, buying his next camera just off the money he made from photographing at the parties.

Around this time, a photographer for one of the city’s newspapers advised to invest in a nicer camera, so that he could have more control over the way he wanted his images to appear. So he did, and soon he was getting so much word-of-mouth portrait work that he managed to save enough money to build a photo studio in his apartment and start doing family and children portraits. After a few years, his sports photography had reached the level where he was able to begin freelancing for some newspapers (Worsom has had photos published in Sports Illustrated, and Ebony Magazine), and finally The Chicago Defender offered him a full-time job.

Some Wise Words for Following Generations

Worsom says that, “This job is not just about the money. The Defender work is important to me because I feel I am shooting for the black community. When I go places, they know who I am and why I am there. They know that my photography is speaking for them. I am trying to capture what they can’t say. I feel like I am recording our current history, people will look to my photographs to see what life was like in Chicago for blacks during this period, everything from everyday to Jena 6 to Obama.”

The Art of Chicago Photographer Worsom

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An Oedipal Storyline: You Won’t Remember This

The Animated Life: You Won’t Remember This

Jeffrey Scher is an artist who is fascinated with vision, in particular the persistence of vision, the ability of the human mind to create the illusion of movement from disparate images. The New York-based filmmaker defines himself not as an animator, but rather as a painter working in motion. Scher’s montages, or “collisions” of visuals and sound, are dizzying arrays of color, light, figures, and forms that flit about like unruly thoughts, tricking the eye and revealing unexpected visual harmonies.

You Won’t Remember This is a piece that was inspired by his 18-month-old son, a rotoscoped re-creation of the evolution of vision during the first years of life. “I’ve tried to reproduce those early primal visuals from the infant’s point of view,” he has said, “by examining the way optical focus and color perception develop, and how the figurative and the abstract blur together and get sorted out over time.”

The film is a portrait of his son, Buster, from his first week of life until he was a few years old. The film came from the impression that Buster wouldn’t remember these years, as, indeed, he doesn’t seem to, but the more Scher drew the more he realized that he didn’t remember them as clearly as he thought he would, either. From Scher’s perspective, there is something about the omnivorous now in parenting, the constantly shifting challenges and demands of the moment, that creates a kind of rolling amnesia for everything yesterday. This film is an attempt to hold onto some of these moments and also to share them with Buster, who is now an articulate, opinionated, sugar- and movie-obsessed seven-year-old.

Scher’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He’s always searching for new ways of seeing. “How images layer up on the eye and the relationship between image and afterimage are triggers for powerful emotions,” he’s observed. “I want to make people feel, so I create aesthetic meals for the eyes.”

You Won’t Remember This

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Randy Pausch Visits Oprah: A Lecture on Living

Randy Pausch didn’t want his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University to be about dying, but he is, sadly, dying of pancreatic cancer. He knows it’s a painful way to go. When he gave his final lecture last month, he wanted to demonstrate that his focus remains, as always, on living, or on living in the process of dying. Today, he appeared on The Oprah Winphrey Show, and this is what he had to say:

Randy Pausch Visits Oprah Winphrey: No Self-Pity

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