Valencia in black and white

I know it's been forever since I've posted. I took the month of August, as the French do, to relax. I needed time away from my little corner of the internet, and I think it was well worth it.

I've been organizing and archiving my negatives and prints lately, which is suuuuuuch a good feeling. These are some shots from Valencia back in April. I've been getting lots of medium format photos printed (see my flickr on the right) and I hope to be shooting a lot more like them. I'll put some new ones up here soon. 

p.s. have you all seen Rachel Getting Married? if you haven't, you really must. brilliant.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Her name is Sugar, and she writes an advice column for The Rumpus. 

She was asked a version of that age old question: if you could talk to your 20-year-old self, what would you say?

This is her response.

It struck such a chord with me that I've been thinking about it for days. Especially this part:

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Thank you, Sugar, for saying what I couldn't put into words.

And a photo, taken on a long, meandering walk through Madrid.

Barcelona: Mercat de la Boqueria

 

 

 

 There's a reason the majority of these people look so happy – look at all this food! That candy! Those fruits! This market contained the most color I have ever seen in one place, period. Such a high concentration of life. We visited twice and I'll never forget it.

HI.

So, wow. I'm home.

I'm amazed at every moment that these passed four months took place at all and even more amazed that it's over. My life doesn't feel ordinary anymore, and I think that's what counts. 

Yesterday, I celebrated my 21st birthday with family and friends. Today, I washed my car with my dad in my driveway. I ate a hamburger with pickles and potato salad for lunch. Tomorrow, I'm probably going to the beach. I love America and New York and Long Island.

In the meantime, I've been scanning tons of photos that I finally got developed at my local drugstore (as is evident from the inundation on my flickr to the right! -->)

I'll write a little about each place and feature my favorite photos as these days pass on. To start, here are two of my most frequented places, Boulangerie de Vavin on rue de Vavin and le Jardin de Luxembourg. This boulangerie had a line this long outside it every day from the hours of 11:30AM until probably 2 in the afternoon. The sandwiches, the quiche, the pastries... it was all cheap and delicious. My personal favorites were the chocolate beignets and the pavé framboise, two dense, buttery biscuits with raspberry jam in the middle. I lost count of the amount of times I got lunch at this place and walked down the street to the garden to eat. Even in the bitter cold of winter it was the most pleasant option, and in springtime it quickly became the only obvious choice.

 

Come and find me

So I keep you in a flower vase
   with your fatalism, your crooked face

with the daisies and the violet brocades

and I keep me in a vacant lot

in the ivies and forget-me-nots

hoping you'll come and untangle me one of these days

I will never hear this song and not think of riding buses all around Spain.
Weaving tales in my head and daydreaming for hours on end.
Passing by wind energy turbines and huge silhouette cutouts of bulls
perched on the tops of hills.
Rest stops. Fields and mountains.

Just a tester...

 

more to come!