I recommend the Squid (braised in white wine sauce?)
I have some chops as a photojournalist. I used to make a living at news videography. I liked to put together the sort of unnarrated essays you see on CBS Sunday Morning... piping plovers returning to their breeding grounds, the last day for a 100 year old variety store walmarted out of business, Mennonite barn raisings, outlaw bikers dropping Tickle Me Elmo dolls into the collection bin at the end of Toys for Tots runs. Those things win critical acclaim, Emmy nominations and NPPA awards, but they find very few open slots on mainstream newscasts.

My assignment editors preferred to send me out to loiter around crime scenes and wait for the bodies to be wheeled out of the building. If the scenes of human tragedy that make air or print sicken you as a viewer/reader, think about what doesn't. After ten years of seeing, hearing, smelling and breathing what doesn't, I couldn't take it anymore. While I don't miss being on the street one bit, I still work in an allied field where I try to be a mentor for those who are.

I don't know if Paul at Jimmy Squid's Weapons does this for a living, but he has the sort of camera eye that it takes veteran pho-jo's time to acquire. He'll have an occasional low-angle or foreshortened shot in there, but only if the subject lends itself to that. Most of his subjects are allowed to do the "talking" on their own merits. Nothing is staged. Most everything is well-composed. Few of the shots that make his pages have cutlines beyond location, nor do they need them.

Paul seems drawn to the bleak postindustrial moonscapes that dot the Pioneer Valley, today's echoes and remnants of that gilded age when things people needed and wanted to buy were manufactured here. But he'll also stop the car and find the irony in plants growing through the rubble of a long-abandoned nursery, the hypocrisy of a patriotic exhortation coupled with Scripture on a business sign, or the Levitt-like symmetry of a new housing development built and inhabited by people who never heard of Malvina Reynolds.

I love the verdant goodness of western Massachusetts and revel in it every chance I get, but my imagination is more successfully ensnared by this sort of stuff, and it's a part of living here that can't (or at least shouldn't) be ignored. The name of Paul's photoblog, "Jimmy Squid's Weapons," has a Tarantino ring to it that becomes apropos when you learn the name is taken from an actual business in downtown Chicopee. It all fits. 10:57:34 AM    comment []trackback []