Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - a lifelong supporter of photography. (For context read last paragraph below.)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I truly appreciate the feedback as well as the opportunity to visit many of your blogs. And as you can see it was also a reminder to myself to leave more comments on other people’s blogs.
I’ve been a relatively early adopter of all things web (I started my first blog – so boring it put me to sleep - in 1999) but I’ve always felt that the blogosphere is one of the most genuine and creative forms of expression on the web. It's a community I'm happy to be part of and as I’ve mentioned before, what brought me back was a combination of getting to know The Sartorialist and the much lamented demise of the photographer Alec Soth’s terrific blog.
What I figured out between 1999 when I was doing a general cultural commentary and 2007 when I started to focus on photography was that nobody really cared what I thought about American Idol but they were interested in what I had to say about photography – my field of specialty. You have to speak from the core - at which point you can digress.
And so speaking of American Idol and digressing – this weekend I went to see “Every Little Step”, a documentary currently packing them in Manhattan, that follows the casting of the recent Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line” and interweaves the story of the creation of the original play with the actual winnowing down of the dancers hoping to be cast in the revival. It’s part American Idol goes to Broadway, part exploration of the emotional and physical toll of a dancer’s life, and part the backstory of what was clearly a seminal and transcendant work of American theater. Don’t miss it.
On another subject, if weekend shopping is anything to go by, the recession is roaring to a close. I went with my wife and daughter to buy one of her best friends a bat mitzvah present and wherever we went there were huge lines at the checkout desk. It’s also interesting to see how various stores use photography. Ralph Lauren was a pioneer in this. But the photograph above of Jackie Kennedy came from J. Crew. I only had my iPhone so I apologize for the poor quality snap. You just never know where a great picture is going to pop up!
