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.

Revisiting

Last summer I took a road trip up north to Allentown and New Tripoli, Pennsylvania for a few weeks to make images at night at the home where I grew up and the farmhouse I came back from Northern California to live in for five years many years later.

The idea for this project began to form after receiving a grant to fund a large format printer on which I proposed to print a limited edition portfolio of night photographs. What set apart his series of night shots, which I'd been doing for about three years at that point, was these would be introducing lighting and enhanced ambiance...Needless to say, at the time, I had no idea what I was going to shoot.

Somehow, in a moment between minutes while laying on a sofa at a friend's house, the idea drifted up of revisiting my past, creating scenarios of vague memories, some of which I assumed would surface or be informed when faced with the present state of the locations...

I'm still not quite sure how "successful" the photos are to the emotional past they were to reflect or conjure up. The process of doing them was worthwhile: production support contributed by my friends that lives in the area made for wonderful adventures and enjoyable shoots....

Meeting the odd man who now lives in the Allentown home, alone, amidst an amazing mess of 10 years of clutter left, he said, from when his father died and he hasn't gotten around to getting rid of it.....

A lovely large family now occupies the farmhouse, having turned sparsely artist furnished rooms that my then husband and I inhabited with our infant daughter into a home befitting children of this century, but for the kitchen, that still bore a resemblance to the memories I had of it.

As far as making "art" within that intention of journey back? Quite honestly, creating images, instead of recognizing them as I more readily and easily can do, may not be my forte, nor will I probably follow further the direction these took me, but....

Revisiting a past that I knew could never possibly exist in the present was a launching pad for new experiences that make new memories creating an intriguing interlocking between the past memories, the present, and the future of how I might think about such matters.