Friday, February 18, 2011

General view of Sarasota trailer park alongside baseball park, Sarasota, Florida 
Marion Post Wolcott, 1941

A Friday Miscellany
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Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training this week. It felt a bit like spring here in Charlottesville today with temperatures reaching the low seventies. Baseball and Spring are right around the corner. Opening day is six weeks from today.
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Over on The Photographers' Railroad Page, Kevin Scanlon tells about his first trip to West Virginia to photograph trains and how that experience led him to a more focused pursuit of photography. Kevin writes, "West Virginia has become a foundation and an inspiration for my photography since that first visit. And I'm happy for the sudden realization that occurred those 37 years ago, looking into the sunrise at Hawks Nest, that I needed to narrow my viewpoint in order to see more." Read the whole thing here.
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Readers often arrive at Photography In Place by way of Google or other search services and it is interesting and sometimes amusing to see the search terms that brought them here.  Earlier this week, a visitor found us while searching for "do you see more alligators laying on banks in the morning or afternoon?"  I hope this person found the answer, but I am afraid that Photography In Place was no help at all.
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The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs department performs a valuable service cataloging and preserving historic photographs. Among the library's extensive holdings are the archives of the Farm Security Administration, which employed photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee and many others to record the life of America during the depression era.

The photo of the train depot at Edwards, Mississippi by Walker Evans in this earlier post was from a scan of the original negative available on the Library of Congress website. A large portion of the 171,000 black and white negatives in the FSA collection have been digitized and are available online. There are many excellent high-resolution scans, but this particular Evans photograph was available only as a low-resolution scan, and it does not do Evans justice. There is an excellent reproduction of this photograph on pages 98 and 99 of the book Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary (Steidl, 2006).

Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress LC-USF34- 057041-D [P&P]

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