Mmmm...flickr

I finally got a flickr account. I must say, I'm much happier about it than I thought I would be. When I signed up, I just saw it as just another marketing and networking tool that people said I should have, but once I got in there and started poking around in the groups, it turned into an absolute revelation.

Ok, so, I'm not a photographer really (though I do have an eye for composition, if I may say so myself), but my dad was, and it ended up in me somehow to love photos for their own sake. I inherited his old photos: his work since he was a teenager in the 1930s, his early studio work, his work as head of the photography unit at the NIH, and later his photos of nature and sailing and so on that he took when he and my mother were cruising around in the Caribbean. I have kept ALL of them, even though many of them are not very good (he kept everything, too) and I don't know who, what, or where it is.

Here's one from his NIH days. Poor bunny!

I also have always had a certain fascination with things that others consider 'ugly' in the environment. I like water towers. Trainyards. Old barns and cracker houses that are leaning with time, half the roof rotted off. Downtowns in disrepair. Bleak, cold landscapes. Old books with the covers falling off. I always had a nascent plan to go on photographing sprees, documenting the watertowers of small towns across the country. I thought it was just a personal idiosyncracy, and never really pursued it because what the heck, I'm not a real photographer and what am I going to do with all those pictures anyway, since no one likes to look at that kind of stuff but me? But now I arrive at flickr and discover that there are hundreds of groups on such subjects: water towers, rural decay, old Florida, wabi sabi.

So, yeah. I feel...at home. It's not just me-- I'm participating in a zeitgeist of sorts. Huh. Who knew?