Over at Serial Photo, Mr. Tingle is currently showing a series of old family photos, including a selection from the first roll of film he ever shot, back when he was 9.
The pictures are surprisingly good for a nine-year-old — I’m especially into this one of his cousin Dudley, and I like the framing of this one. There’s also the added sensation I like of getting a live feed from Mr. Tingle’s memory bank. (When I was 9 I blew a roll of film taking pictures of pigeons in Boston. I hadn’t seen pigeons before, or probably more accurately, hadn’t noted them, and thought they were luminscent and beautiful. The pictures came out as a blurred series of beady-eyed dour birds standing on a dark sidewalk, as seen from an aerial vantage, in groupings of one and two and three. My mom was pissed.)
While I was on blog sabbatical, I neglected to point out that Mr. Tingle’s son was a guest-blogger at Serial Photo for a week. His photos begin here, and then continue forward with the “next>>” button (with one in the middle of the series by his friend Joel). I usually call Dan by his nickname Linus on this blog, just to protect his privacy a bit, but his are the pictures signed Daniel Mabry Allen. He’s a senior in college. He has a pretty awesome aesthetic, like his dad — you should look and appreciate.
That Billy Budd story is sweet!
You are totally bringing back memories of the photos my brothers and I took with our cheap cameras when we were kids. It was my mom’s despair–hardly any shots of people, instead all blurry animals (a whole roll of Highland cattle–Highland ‘coos’ as we called them–from a trip to see family in Scotland, for instance; and the ever-popular pigeon shots, tens or possibly even hundreds of them, taken over many years; or in my case, bleary photos of my beloved cat Lamb Chop).
Comment by Jenny D — 11/11/2005 @ 2:37 pm
I’m going to try to work “Highland coos” into at least five conversations before the end of the day. I have to get some beef at the grocery store, and will ask if it is “Highland coo.”
Oh, and I had forgotten about the photos of pets! So funny. Mine were Polaroids of the beloved Lacey Lady, a Lhasa Apso who looked in life like a roving bit of gray carpet, and who always looked deflated and undefined in photos.
We have a cat now, the Kitty, who is a great hunter and tortoiseshell and incredibly beautiful (really, it is generally remarked) but who doesn’t photograph well. Something about her markings and the shape of her skull; she goes chiaroscuro in photos and looks, how to say?, wild-eyed and psychotic. Lowell and I want to do a calendar that would feature 12 photographs of her in various alarming and psychotic poses.
Comment by caaf — 11/11/2005 @ 3:09 pm