v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Sofia's Borisova Gradina

In 2009 I went to Sofia Bulgaria on business to discuss the typical things when you have a low cost outsourcing partner doing almost 30% of your work. I had just joined the company so there was lots to learn. I had managed a business in Romania the three prior years remotely so I knew a bit about the culture in that part of the world. The interesting thing about Sofia is that unlike Bucharest it still maintained its classic architecture and was not taken over with lots of Soviet like structures-well, that is until I went to Borisova Gradina and saw the monuments to the fighters during WWll that with the help of the Soviets defeated the Fascist forces of Hitler. These are some scenes of the monuments and the park.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Sofia's Park in 2009

Here is some history about the park from Sofia Guide:

Borisova gradina or Knyaz-Borisova gradina translated as Boris’ Garden or Knyaz Boris’ Garden is the oldest and best known park in Sofia. It is certainly well worth a wander, especially to escape from the ubiquitous infernal-combusting engined machines for a short while.

Boris’s Garden was constructed in the late 19th century and it is named after Bulgarian Tsar Boris III. Although Knyaz Boris became Tsar in 1918, there is no evidence of the park’s name ever having officially changed to reflect this fact. Instead the word Knyaz was gradually dropped to become simply Boris’s Garden. After the communist regime took power in 1944, the park was renamed “Freedom Park”, until its fall in 1989, when it reverted to its original name.

Miles of tree-lined avenues were built up along with interesting sculptures placed all over the park. There are many other features, including of course the obligatory Soviet Monument, the Summer Swimming Bath, the University Observatory, the Open-air School, the Ariana Lake, the Yunak and Levski football fields, the tennis club, the diplomatic tennis court, the cycling track and the Yunak Rectifying Station.

About the Leica

From Codex99: The original Leica was incrementally updated over the next 20 years – the Leica I was introduced in 1930, the Leica II in 1932 and the Leica III in 1933 – and a complete range of interchangeable screw-mount lenses were developed. By the 1930s “Barnack's Camera” had become a complete photographic system.After the war Leica was facing increasing competition from not only Ziess in Germany but Canon and Nikon in Japan as well. Their response, introduced at the 1954 Photokina, was the M3. This was no incremental update of their earlier cameras but a revolutionary new design with a new lens system. It would become Leitz’s most popular camera and has been described as the best 35mm camera ever produced – a classic in form and function.The M3 has been continuously updated over the last 50 years. Leica’s current rangefinder models, the film-based M7 (2002) and the digital M9 (2009) are both directly descended from the M3.Barnack originally conceived the Leica as a tool for his landscape photography but its influence and legacy would be much greater than that. Its compact size, unobtrusive operation and exceptional optics allowed an undreamed-of freedom in artistic photography and reportage resulting in some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. 

 

The American Photographer John Beasley Greene

From an article for the Art Institute of Chicago about John Beasley Greene's small out put of photographs:

Over the course of his exceptionally brief career—he died at the age of 24—Greene made an extraordinary body of pictures that advanced both archaeology and photography and continues to offer insight into the central concerns that shaped the two fields.

Born in Ingouville, France, to American parents, Greene grew up in a well-connected merchant-banking family. This financial and social standing enabled him to pursue his twin passions: photography and Egyptology. In the early 19th century, Europeans developed a voracious drive to acquire and systematize knowledge about ancient Egyptian culture—an intellectual enterprise tightly bound to Western economic and colonialist interests in the region. After studying in Paris, Greene twice traveled to Egypt, where he used the camera to record hieroglyphic inscriptions on ancient monuments and to make spare, unpeopled views of the unfamiliar landscape. In late 1855 he traveled to Algeria, where his evocative images were similarly divided between documentation of excavations and studies of built and natural environments.

Much of Greene’s story remains a mystery. The albums and photographs he left behind attest to a curious mind, an inventive eye, and a keen sensitivity to the needs and possibilities of archaeology and photography in his time. Although he exhibited his photographs while he was alive, Greene’s work escaped serious notice until the 1970s and 1980s, when an expanding art market for photographs encouraged renewed interest in 19th-century photographers. To 20th-century viewers trained in modernist art, it was impossible to ignore the striking spareness of Greene’s landscapes, his adept manipulation of negative and positive space, and the near abstraction of his close-up views.

The Lockdown and Berlin

We are now in the 8th week of the stay-at-home lock-down order here in Maryland as a result of the CODVID19 pandemic. It sounds worse than it is and that is partly because I retired 3 years ago and have had control of my day to day life during this time. Being at my house is not a bad thing. Most of these days we have spent walking in different parks and testing my cameras. Reading has been a good activity. Then there is the editing photographs, and of course watching films. Also cooking. All activities I enjoy and have learned to love during this time. In terms of editing and reviewing old photos, recently I went through over 2,000 photographs from Cambodia and Thailand-I edited the ones that looked promising in Lightroom - most are Jpegs so the type of control that I have over today's images was not possible, but they yielded many excellent images. Lately I've started going through the photos I took during my visit to Berlin in 2014 when I had to speak at a Mobile Research conference. Here are some of the better shots from the first couple of days in that great city.

All images are Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Berlin 2014

Andy Denzler's Paintings

Jorinde Voigt

Work by Jorinde Voigt

 

Minimalism

From Hazlit, an interview with cultural critic Kyle Chayka on his book about minimalism:

Isabel Slone: Throughout the book, there are snippets of your own interest in minimalism: a wardrobe filled with grey clothing and a relatively empty Brooklyn apartment save for your roommate’s stuff. How would you describe your own personal relationship with minimalism?

Kyle Chayka: I started paying attention in 2015-2016, when I kept seeing the word minimalism pop up all over the place, used to describe the interior of a bar or a restaurant or a hotel. People were also talking about how they were living a lifestyle that didn’t put much stock into material possessions. And I had been looking a lot at this magazine, called Kinfolk, which ushered in this hipster-minimalist aesthetic of Spartan living. Around that time, minimalism was everywhere, but then I remembered that Agnes Martin and Donald Judd were part of an art movement in the 1960s called minimalism, and the work they made seemed to have little connection to what people were talking about as minimalism today. So I got interested in that disconnect between how people were using the word and the origins of the word.

You clearly appreciate the aesthetics of minimalism, but you stop short of calling yourself a minimalist. Why is that?

The aesthetic of minimalism has always really appealed to me; bare empty rooms, the art gallery vibe. But the label of minimalism that emerged over the past 5-10 years actually doesn’t have that much to do with the ideas behind minimalism and minimalist art that attracted me. The thing that makes me hesitant is that minimalism as a concept has been super commodified, as we’ve seen with Marie Kondo selling crystals and tuning forks on her website. Minimalism has become a brand that I don’t think has much in common with the original meaning of the term. I wrote the book in some ways to follow that trail and see what it could mean in the future.

I’m curious about how minimalism came to be associated with affluence. It used to be that owning a lot of material objects telegraphed wealth, but now it seems to be the other way around. How did we get to that point?

Right now, minimalism is this commandment to consume fewer, better things. But aesthetics are always evolving and each era and generation has a different idea of what luxury means. In the 1940s and ’50s, post-WWII, the aesthetic of success and luxury in America was material accumulation. It was a house in the suburbs, a fancy car. But at the same time, artists and writers were rebelling against that, especially in New York. Artists started colonizing the factory neighbourhood of SoHo and moving into these giant lofts. Then over the following decades, that kind of industrial austerity became a luxury aesthetic on its own. From the 1980s to the 2000s, fashion brands adopted the lifestyle of the SoHo loft artist as a marker of cool, which they branded and marketed to us as a quote-unquote authentic way of living. Now every new condo building is a loft.

More

 

More in San Juan-Jpegs directly from Camera

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Scenes from San Juan directly from Camera

Paris 2007

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Business Trip to Paris

In North Carolina

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - In the middle of the park