Much has recently been written and hoped for the “disconnection” of the U.S. credit and mortgage crises separating themselves from the European, Asian and emerging markets. There was no disconnect. The world has become tied together in all its dealings — economic, political, social, technological and violent. It’s a small world, brother.
There are places in this broad land where once there were dreams of riches, of flipped condos
and dreams of easy money, of massive developments cheek to jowl based on sub-prime sense and prime corruption.
Photo © Howard Dratch, 2007.
Weddings have been a two-sided sword in my life. Mine (ours) was considered hippy-like back in ‘69 and hated by the respective families. We eschewed having anything but a very private function in our favorite formal garden at Blithewood on the Bard College campus. It was limited to my in-laws who would have wanted a large, public gathering in suburban New York, a pair of friends from law school and the Reverend David Pierce.
David saved the day by making everyone comfortable as he invented a service that met the needs of marriage-bonding and charmed my wife’s parents with his blue eyes and flowing, blonde hair. He later “lost his calling” as an Episcopal minister, changed religions and went different ways. We became friends when he was, many years later, our editor for photographic essays of an academic bent for the Hudson River Regional Review.
The garden had been our favorite playground during college and was the place we returned each year until illness forced me to move us to Mexico. It was one of the ties that bind, a ritual pilgrimage that always brought us back to the time the bees buzzed by, David intoned all the words of bonding and the sun shone on the July blooms of the 19th c. enclosed garden.
Later, as a photographer, I shot one or two weddings a year for editors and friends. It never became a major part of my work but the intricacies of putting the wedding affair not only together but as an event that forever spells the nature of the relationship was made known to me. It ain’t easy! There are family frictions, tensions and worries, friends (and those who call themselves that) and associates and all the knots that bind those people together to each other and The Couple.
Beyond the emotional ties and bonds and the fears of actually “tying the knot” lay the myriad details of putting together a spectacular event that is to entertain everyone, please families who might not be as comfortable with each other as the wedding couple, and coordinate the food and venue, the band, flowers, honeymoon plans, Aunt Hattie and Grandmother Jill and all their needs and do it seamlessly, seemingly effortlessly and, if it all works, without anyone noticing that it was hard work to orchestrate.
And there is the photographer — picking one, paying one and being happy with the results. My rules for such a choice will be held for another time. I was a fine photographer and made, I thought, emotional and sensitive pictures in a photojournalistic fashion. But I was not a good wedding photographer because the mechanics of putting together albums and bookkeeping the thousand pictures for all those who wanted them was too far from my usual academic and industrial work. In these computer-days of digital photography, web-sites and emails, digital movement of images and services that will take digital files to create albums and send them to those who want them I might have looked for more weddings.
I was in upstate New York. Now that my time is spent in Mexico (where photography is very primitive and little understood) and in Miami which is conducive to both Miami Weddings and photography because of its sub-tropical light, exciting locations (Vizcaya comes to mind along with the Biltmore Hotel), great restaurants and a place far-flung family and friends look forward to visiting. I was directed to a web site that includes a terrific guide to creating a Miami Wedding.
This is the stuff of the modern world. The site offers up a directory of all the services needed to plan your own wedding spectacular or have a professional planner do it for you (like Geraldine Chaplin in the Robert Altman film, The Wedding). Naturally I was most interested in checking out photographers and found that they had ads for 9 photographers (in Miami — the site has scores of locations). Rodrigo Varela presented a great web presentation of photos in a sophisticated flash presentation (evocative, heart-felt pictures, too) as well as more formal photographers. The site, unlike me, also pays attention to all the details of the wedding process — bands, balloons, gowns, flowers, planning professionals, transportation services, ice sculptors, personal chefs, yachts (it is Miami, after all), Jewish wedding specialists, and, I love it!, personalized wedding chocolates.
The site is: 1 Wedding Source (.com): Miami for Miami Weddings.
This is Blithewood Garden in the Hudson Valley where we were married. Picking a spot you will want to remember and return to to celebrate a romantic time is an important wedding decision.
Google Earth came along — even for Macs — along with the Map It version and I played with it. Fun. But only recently have I realized that it could be used, as it improves, to go aerial shooting without the plane and altitude.
I love planes and altitude and had been doing some aerial photography in a pal’s plane when jobs came along to pay our way. But my heart attack put an end to any altitude and would probably balk at aerobatics for fun. And fun they were.
So I finally began to explore Google Earth as a means to recover some of the beauty and fun of aerial photography. No camera. No plane. No wind in my face. No rolls to catch a straight-down shot. No gravity with which to fight. Less fun but pictures nonetheless.
The days here should be lazy and free, swinging hammocks and tropical drinks. Here, on the edge of the jungle, a toucan flew by me yesterday as I swam. Never had I seen one here but, now that I began reading about them, they are the national bird of Belize and Belize is 20 minutes from here, perhaps 25 miles. The bird doesn’t have to go through the hassles of the Belizean border inspection and cross-examination.
The toucan had a less colorful beak but it is hard to not notice that beak preceding the bird itself. Parrots often flap by squawking as they go. I am not a birder and know nothing of them. They are, instead, friends and dwellers in this harsh land.
Creature comforts elude me. The house is beautiful, the lagoon a spectacular view but the furnishings sparse, the windows bare. It has been a difficult year and many things suffered, wore out. As I plan for some move when the house is sold I begin to think about making a more elegant nest more suitable for the 21st century.
This house has a terrazzo tile, flecks of stone embedded in a tile-like surface. In Mèrida the homes often have beautiful (or fascinatingly ugly) tile floors in the Colonial tradition. Mexican colors and Moorish design swirl together.
Rugs here are area rugs. Carpeting would just give the lizards, the geckos more places to play and hide.
Shopping on the ‘Net has been fascinating me. My life here seems to have been put on hold so I can look at pictures of apartments I could rent in Miami if I was there and houses in Mèrida if I was there. Now I have begun to look at furnishings, lights, designs so I can make up a dream life and furnish it well.
Retail shopping for larger items like rugs over the ‘Net is new. For someone far away from home it is a strange but tempting thing. The rug dealer, Superior Rugs.com, offers some amazingly traditional designs in silk with a 15 year guarantee and free shipping. On-line businesses can also be judged on their web site. This one has great pictures of the rugs — large, sharp, clear, lighted. It helps.
I began a little blog off to the side a bit, back on Blogger, about the process of preparing the house for sale and the emotional twists of the decision.
Today yet another would-be tenant appeared. She seemed to be appropriate although I still prefer my privacy. However, I slipped getting out of the pool today and thought about the fact that, living alone, it could be a good portion of time before anyone came to my rescue. There are limitations to life alone in the torrid zone.
There are also contemporary rugs available like this one:
This game that seems as if it would go so quickly and seldom does lets me post a photo in a more elegant manner, more often. The HPOD today is a recent shot of a rainbow. There were others to be seen here and on the gallery of my house on the market for sale that were less rainbow-ish. This one at this point in time made the perfect arch for me underneath the Mayan sun, near the water and filled with hope and absolution.
It is mounted in a gallery page to itself at HPOD: RAINBOW.
An update of the Page for a Gallery Menu is due since these Picture of the Day galleries and adding up until I find a better alternative.
Photo © Howard Dratch, 2007.
The view is from the terrace of my home on the shore of the Lagoon. It is now, formally, on the market. Real estate agencies are listing and featuring it and presenting it as an excellent choice for a Bed&Breakfast. Given the advances being made on the highway down from Tulum, Playa del Carmen and Cancun (which has already been finished from Chetumal and Belize up to Bacalar and then to Limones which is the turn-off to the Costa Maya and Xcalak Peninsula; developers and investors have already made an appearance. The real estate “bubble” here has just begun to inflate unlike Miami, Tampa and the other over-built cities in the midst of the housing/credit crisis.
Contact me at hfd@7colorlagoon.com for more information or follow the links to the trusted agencies that are offering the property: Mexico International
and Mexico Caribbean.
I have been taken over by the vicissitudes of the stock market and have been riding its volatile waves for a time. It seemed a necessity to by more active and aggressive but the fact of the matter is that it is no place for a man with a weakened heart. Especially not recently.
It is time to take care of pictures and words as well and even to make myself something less of a hermit. That part is difficult in Mexico but there are pictures to be made and places left to explore.
Don’t forget the gallery of recent digital pictures
Plus a few more from cruising from Miami to Mexico. I indulged in an encyclopedic start of work vessels — living near a port would be fun — a design game with the cruise ship accoutrements and mechanisms and a shot of yet another condo project still under construction in Miami which is one of the top 10 cities for foreclosures with a highly over-built housing stock. Which should help for renting or buying there as the mortgage crisis begins to hit bottom sometime in the next year or so.
There was also the great display of work vessels while leaving Miami Harbor. They are just as much fun as the years of shooting everything that moved on New York highways.
Back in June I began what was to be a series of gallery pages showing off recently done photographs not yet put in other galleries. The first one worked and then I moved on to other projects. There was also the problem of using out-dated technology, film-based photography. This has been one of those technological advances much like the move from Daguerre’s invention to the other thread of photography: paper, glass and, finally, film. Daguerre had a great process that made beautifully sharp, life-like one-off originals. It was elegant and doomed.
Had I known how quickly and how totally a digital camera would become that which I wanted to choose first; I would have spent even more for a more advanced model Nikon. Film, especially here in Mexico where the labs are few, non-existent or just incompetent, is useless for me. Even the D40X I bought is pleasing me immensely. It is light and quick and seems to be providing usable results with its inexpensive lens and with the few Nikon lenses I have that work on it — though those (the 60mm/2.8, 85mm/1.8 and 135/2.8) were the last and mostly the best. Except for my beloved 105mm/2.5 that I had AI’d from its original state, heavy with brass and with perfect glass. It was a hold-over from the first days of freelancing photography in 1981, one of the first lenses I bought at a loft-store in the Photo District of New York, one of the first days snugged up to the counter of lens-deals and camera-deals and negotiating as a “professional”. And it was one of those great buys whether I paid too much or too little because it earned me thousands of dollars and more over the next 20 years or so.
THERE IS NOW A NEW PAGE OF RECENT IMAGES: GALLERY: RECENTSCANS.
There are 10 pictures on subjects of which I have written here, some previously shown and some not. There are a few from the recent sea trips to and from Miami on Carnival’s Fascination and Imagination. The shot of the Leger at MAM and — turn behind you Howard to see what it was you didn’t see — is a collection of planes and a wall of glass with a cloud happening by that pleased me. The scarecrows were appropriate for this Day of the Dead in Mexico and there is one of my first work on a series of hieroglyphs on the streets and walks of Miami left by an ancient civilization much as the Mayans and Egyptians left behind their signs. An infinity symbol for the ages.
The town hall of North Salem, New York makes a sunset appearance/disappearance and there is a one of an encyclopedic series begun of water vessels. I particularly like shooting work vessels.
That general said that as he took back the Phillipines on the way to Japan.
My return is less spectacular but filled with culture-shock. I am back in Bacalar, still kicking albeit weakly and in Spanish. For a time I closed the walls of the property around the house and closed the house around me. I needed my hermit-like privacy. Now I begin to function.
The culture shock was shocking in its dual feelings of foreign-ness in both this alien country where I live and in my own, changed America. This, after all, was America’s good-bye and bon voyage to the M/S Fascination as we left Miami under guard. Two jet-skiers headed with whoops of glee would have played in the wake of the ship but for being headed off by a serious looking USCG craft escorting the floating hotel to the high seas.
Photo ©Howard Dratch, 2007
Let me plug a nifty (that is the appropriate word) little application, iGlasses. It adds huge functionality and fun to Apple’s Photo Booth. Since I don’t do and haven’t the bandwidth for video messaging, it is still great fun with my series of self-portraits from the MacBook Pro’s built-in lens in the screen. 
10 to the First Power or The Power of 10: Miami Art Museum’s collection is increased by gifts of collectors.
The Miami Art Museum, which they want to call MAM, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. It is not old for a museum — not even for an American museum. But Florida, when I grew up here in the 1950s and part of the 60s, was not noted for its culture. It still is much better at presenting amusement parks and ball games than museums or the performing arts.
The focal point for its’ tourism success is a huge amusement park in the center of the state based on a cartoon mouse. Mouseworld tries to create a mythological America that never existed. It is the symbol of Florida. They even put one in France and an original in California. Symbols of America like golden arches. Symbols and myths do not always deliver cultural benefits, educational excellence. Florida also boasts a beer garden for the kindergarten set in Tampa and multiple arenas for the worship of football and baseball, some terrific racing of cars, hydroplanes and other beautiful things that go fast.
Miami has both the pop boat shows, grand prix racing and a new performing arts center, growing galleries, the “Design District” and some museums. MAM sits in the center of the Downtown and is planning to break ground for a massive new facility in 2008 in what is to become Miami’s Cultural District.
The plan was to report on the Tamayo show at MAM that ran from June through September 23. The plan was to report on it before it was taken down but some surgery got in the way of my writing energies. Still, the show (Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted) was organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art together with the Consejo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporàneo in Mexico City. In Miami the Consulate General of Mexico also helped present it.
If you get a chance to catch it in a different gallery or museum, do it. Tamayo was known to me, some of his works familiar from the Modern and, I seem to recall, works in an L.A. museum and in books looked at in that great pile in my memory that have lost their titles and where I found, borrowed, bought or merely looked at them. Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo (Mexicans have not only wonderful names but lots of them) was Oaxacan even though he ended up painting in both Mexico and the United States.
His history mirrors many other artists through the ages who were destined and groomed for some useful and responsible profession. His mother died in 1911 when he was 12 and was moved with an aunt to Mexico City. She put him in accounting school (someone once suggested I become an accountant rather than photographer and, luckily, I demurred) so that he could do the financial reporting for the family fruit-selling business. He wisely followed the muse to the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes where he sat in on classes until they took him in officially in 1917.
The early paintings are dark and heavily influenced by both European movements — Cubism, Fauvism, Neo-impressionism and other rising isms of the new century. He threw in Mexico’s indigenous facets and the violence of the Revolution of 1910. Then he stirred in his hopes and dreams and the power of the isms and out of the cauldron came Mexican forces labeled him traitor to the Revolution which helped propel him into the New York of the 20s and, later, the late 30s and 40s.
Sadly, some of MAM’s galleries, particularly for these earlier works, were poorly lighted. The lighting appeared to be an on-going problem which, we can assume, will be addressed in the building for which ground will be broken next year. Not all the pieces were impressive but the jewels that were among the choices were just that, jewels of his own modernism infused with the spirit of Abstract Expressionism of post-war New York. There are Mexican women of Tehuantepec drawn Cubist style that still smell of chiles and emanate hot tropical style unknown to Picasso. There are supernatural figures with glowing eyes, phantoms of the post-war apocalyptic fears of nuclear annihilation that threaten to escape from the confines of the canvas frame and symbolic birds with tropical colors and universal hopes and fears.
He was still painting in the 1970s and 80s although death had become one of the motifs in his work. We are not surprised since that angel, that seductive temptress that comes for us all, hovered with his muse and he made his peace with her. He shows it in his work. He shows, too, the love for his wife of many decades in the portrait of her that embodies so much in so little. Luckily these later pieces, the supernatural, the birds of the Cold War are the ones that I found in the better-lit galleries. MAM impresses in a state usually in love with the new and pop, chain stores and art on velvet.
Tamayo is gone from Miami but, wherever the show lands next, I hope you get to see it. If not dive into a mound of art books and pull some of the images out to imprint in the galleries of your mind.
Ten to the first power at MAM. Yes, MAM. The show at the Miami Art Museum is called the <i>Power of Ten</i>. This one runs through 23 October and you can still get there to celebrate gifts the museum has received during the first 10 years of its life as a “collecting institution”. Are they all good? Are they equal in vision in quality? They are gifts, mind you, and we all have a closet with some ties that didn’t make the grade, a pair of multi-colored golfing slacks along with the treasures without which our life would be lessened. So it must be with museums. (more…)