Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ghosts of Cars Past: Totally Cool Photos and Post

Granny J (Walking Prescott) was a journalist for 30 years. She hails from Jacksonville FL, and Chicago, and the desert in Arizona. Such a juxtaposition of another person's stomping grounds with my own always attracts my attention.

She knows, really knows, how to write. How to think. She sees the connectednesses of humanity and their buildings and their history, their families. Humanness.

But it's not just her writing that's so great. Her photography is absolutely exquisite.

Now add this: She's also the lucky owner of an exquisite new digital camera. One so fine, I'm hard put to subdue my covetousness.

And add this: She's an artist. Her art isn't only in her writing and her pictures. It's the eye she has for the beauty all around her, often in the so-called *ordinary* objects so many of us pass by.

She doesn't drive any more. So she walks. When you walk instead of driving, you see things.

She puts all this together in her art - her blog.

Me, I'm not a car person. I sometimes say, --I have a Missing Part in my brain, the one where other people put Car Information and Interest.

But I do love the looks of many old cars and pickup trucks.

This post of hers puts all o' that in one place.

Check it out:

http://walkingprescott.blogspot.com/2007/04/ghosts-of-cars-past_19.html

LORD that's gorgeous!

6 comments:

Granny J said...

k, I'm not just over-whelmed by your endorsement, I'm triple-riveted- whelmed. I really did start out with lemons for that lemonade -- kept going back to those show windows & kept getting pix of ghosts along with the real ghosts. So I decided that this was it, I'd best go ahead & post. The next time, I may have a polaroid filter as suggested by one reader; if so, the ordinary will no doubt be rendered in a slightly more ordinary fashion. But then there's a lot that's special about the everyday if you take a careful look. Again, thanks, k, for your kind words.

By the way, I'm definitely not in the desert!!! I'm in the mountains among the pines (if we get a little more rain to keep them going.) Maybe I'm in tomorrow's desert.

k said...

The whole post seemed like one of those serendipitous events where no matter how hard you try to make it work *your* way, life keeps stepping in and doing things *its* way - and you suddenly realize you might as well give up, and that it came out better *its* way after all.

Those pix were just amazing. I'm drooling over your new camera. I take so many shots from moving vehicles. Even if it's just windy and I'm trying to get flower pix, it's hard to get them clear. It seems to me that just holding that camera steady makes the biggest difference in photo quality of all.

If I read it right, yours does it for you.

Boy oh boy!

It may be that the polaroid filter should, at times, be left at home...

I tried to upload the photos here, but so far, no go. Sometimes I can stumble around into it, you just need a URL. Right now Blogger seems to be acting bad again. I bet DC could do it in two seconds. Not me!

I may have misremembered something - you didn't live in the desert in the past, sometime? Or had family there?

Desert Cat said...

It's only a little ways downhill to desert from Prescott.

k said...

Oh, okay. So maybe I was just sort of juxtaposing them a bit more in my mind than they were in real life.

Granny J said...

I'm sure I've mentioned my Phx grandparents at one time or another. Actually, we did live there when I was a kid and when Phx was a much more splendid, un-LA sort of town; I did 2 years of junior college in Phoenix in the late 40s. Loved the desert then, still do -- but I absolutely hate what prosperity and growth at all costs has done to that huge valley. The city fathers are trying to do the same up here in the mountains -- but we don't have the water and we're way uphill from the Colorado River, source of too much of the west's H2O.

k said...

*Phew!* Okay. So I wasn't having a brain spasm after all.

How odd it must feel to be glad you're water-challenged.

I've watched much the same process in Florida, and it makes me so sad sometimes. We've lost so much real beauty here.