NC Fair State of Mind

I've been not all that involved emotionally with shooting these last few months...did some street shooting again in NY but apparently lost momentum to work on them and post here. ..but I'm digressing, as I've been for months, mostly unfocused on doing anything new, but knowing that something has been perculating deep somewhere in the ether, not yet forming into anything I can grab onto even as a spastic leap, all akimbo, into the unknown and start swimming until I find land or whatever....

When a photographer friend told me last week he was planning to  roam around the State Fair on Sunday with his camera, I asked to go along. Luckily he happens to be a morning person so we arrived about an hour or so before church let out, giving us reasonably nice light and room to walk at a normal pace. All that changed about noon:30 when the hoards stampeded for fried everything on a stick.  The long lense I thought might work well for catching faces, etc. became the dead weight I carried the whole time in my backpack...it was so crowded it became exhausting, so after seeking out and finally finding the NC State ice cream stand that came with rave reviews,  and devouring the reallllly good stuff in a cone, we fled; but not before I nabbed the last shot of my day....a weird food stand with a big strawberry on top offering " Pig Licker Blooming Onions." Damned if I know what that's all about, and didn't even want to know....the Krispy Kreme Burger was enough to observe and watch throngs of folks waiting not patiently to throw their money down for 'em.
Looking at the stuff  I shot later at  home, I decided to work with the images as though I'd used my plastic toy camera, which is now retired.  The feel of the fair, seemed to go with a state of mind found in weird dreams and memories,  In terms of content,  I'm also very drawn to words, signs, printed  T-shirts...have been for years.  Barbara Kruger, a conceptual  artist whose signature work is made by using collages with words,  or words alone as slogans is an influence and inspiration to me, though my photos are nothing like her art. The words and context of the fair have really nothing in common with Kruger's work,  but something of her essence often follows me into the world of words.

Yup, it's really a sliced glazed Krispy Kreme donut hugging a burger!

Mmm, fried pickles...right.

Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.

Street (and Bus) Shooting in Southern India

Mid-July I went to further my study of practicing ancient healing channels taught by master Sri Sw. Kaleshwar in Penukonda, India. The ashram is located a few hours ride outside of Bangalore, ( now sometimes spelled as Bengaluru.)
We were given permission to take photographs on the ashram grounds, but not to post on the internet, which I'm respecting.

So, I think of these as memos, mementos and memories of the coming and going, much in the monsoon rain,  the short meanderings in the city, to and from........... a place that will remain a visual secret.

Saw literally 5 rainbows on the journey through the countryside

Yup, seriously.

Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India...love the high tech juxtapositions

Seriously?

Seriously!

Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.

Street Shooting in NYC

These photos were all shot in NYCa few days ago on 5th Ave, Lexington and Madison from about 54th street up to 77th. It was really hot here, so keeping myself absorbed in the visuals of the streets while walking around buying last minute items and getting money changed to rupees for my upcoming trip to India, was essential to not giving up and sitting it out in some air conditioned cafe. These images have not been "worked on" since I'm at my daughter's home here and they don't have photoshop or even cropping tool programs. Most of them are close to what I would say are finished, since I shoot with full frame in mind when I look in the viewfinder, though a little tweaking will happen down the road when I return from my adventures.























Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.

"I'm So Glad It Happened"

...was the title of a collaborative art exhibit that was put together on May 29 in a place called Cedar Grove. All I can say, without really looking it up on a map, was time in the car driving past Hillsboro,  about a half an hour in some direction from Carrboro, NC which is where a few friends met up to go.  Since I can't figure out how the hell to get the cursor to go down below the photos to say what's what here, I'll have to describe a few of the photos this way...(gotta say I hate the way this blog works...it's not user friendly to me.)   Well, anyway, the guy at the table below is artist Ken Rumble. I've never met him. 

This installation was found by following a pathway lined with a single row of shoes on either side leading to a large white wall constructed in a field with a door in the center. When you opened the door, this was  the scene.....The artist made no contact with the viewer; it made me think of the recent experience of seeing Marina Abramovic  a few weeks ago at MoMA, in NYC where she spent, was it 5 weeks, in residence 8 hours a day sitting in a chair across a table from whomever wanted to sit with her in a performance called "The Artist is Present."  In that scenario, there was continual eye contact, or face to face contact between artist and each individual viewer. I'm not attempting to link these two pieces or Rumble's intention here, it's just that these two events happened to coincide in my sphere of traipsing around in the world of art lately.  By the way, most of the shoes along the pathway were painted on, some had words and phrases on them. Many of the shoes in the pile seemed to also be decorated in the same way.

                                     Ken Rumble
                                                                                                   

Chance Murray, painter and musician. His paintings are fresh, bold, raw and what's truly amazing to me is that he just turned 20!

Chance's Grandmother

Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.