Kari Giordano
The following topics are parked here for future reference.
Vacationland
(title stolen from John Hodgeman)
The exploration of holidays by a resident of a tourist town
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Interruption of the regular, vacating, escapism, distraction from the norm
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Socio-economic implications of tourist towns - wealth gap, housing crisis, etc.
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The people who make tourism possible
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One person’s vacation is another person’s drudgery.
Attention
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
distractions - human’s limited capacity for attention and how as we evolve that attention span is minimizing.
Attention as poetry. Anything, given the appropriate amount of consideration can be poetic.
"The trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry.." - Billy Collins
The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --
the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.
Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.
And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.
Distractions
Portrait of cat and kid through reflection of my phone
As we pass.
Before being sent home due to Covid, I was on fellowship in Edinburgh for the winter of 2020. It was the first time I had lived in a city in over 15 years. I remarked how different walking as opposed to driving felt in terms of inspirational awakening. I set out to photograph all of the points of interest on my daily walks.
Memory, nostalgia, connection to objects
Leaving a place
The emotional space of one leaving a home, especially the last home of a lost loved one. How do the objects we own exist separately in a specific environment?
Does the space give a unique life to objects?
Summer stew
They always say write what you know...
Spending so much time with teenagers I can think of many opportunities to collect imagery.
• What students leave behind - what do the things that students leave behind tell us about their educational experience, separate from whom they are as growing people?
• public/private school equity - the vast differences in services, facilities, etc.
Students entering my classroom.
In practicing methods, I have been trying to photograph my students as they enter my classroom.
I have a fondness for macro photography, but no real underlying concepts.
I began to photograph in-studio during the pandemic as a way to explore the subjects that already exist all around me.
Events
Photographing events is rarely boring, but it can become tedious. There are images that I collect throughout the wedding season that are far more interesting as art pieces than as part of what the couple is searching for in a wedding gallery.
I enjoy seeing the images side-by-side with their more traditional counterparts.
