A few favorite scenes from Charm City. Almost every day, often several times a day, I see things from the absurd to the mundane that I feel the need to capture in photos. The strangeness and variety found all around Baltimore makes it hard to resist, and the fact that that scene might be gone the next time I'm there makes me want to catch it while I can.

More of my favorite scenes from Charm City. Almost every day, often several times a day, I see things from the absurd to the mundane that I feel the need to capture in photos. The strangeness and variety found all around Baltimore makes it hard to resist, and the fact that that scene might be gone the next time I'm there makes me want to catch it while I can.

For the past few years, I've participated in The Light Ekphrastic, a quarterly online journal dedicated to the creation of new written and visual artworks through collaboration between artists. [Ekphrasis: art from writing, writing from art] 
For each issue, writers and artists are paired, each creating a new poem, story, photograph, painting or other piece of artwork inspired by work previously submitted by their partner artist.  The Light Ekphrastic was founded by editor Jenny O’Grady as a way of inspiring friends who hadn’t written or made art in a while to get back into practice. It has since grown to attract contributors from all over the world, and to include occasional forays into public spaces beyond the web. (Description from https://thelightekphrastic.com/about/)

This has inspired me to experiment with new and extended techniques in both my photography and graphic art. Whereas most of my photographs are spontaneous and inspired by scenes I come upon on the streets, the ekphrastic art for this project is mulled over for weeks or months, with many different photos, superimpositions, collages and video animations tried out until  I find the right single artistic representation to go with my partner's poem. In many cases, I'm inspired by more than one of their writing submisisons and I create several different images in respose. Since one one image per project may be submitted in the end, it serves as a good deadline with an ultimate goal of new artistic creations, and achieves the founder's goal of pushing artists to create something new that they would not have done otherwise.

See them in context at The Light Ekphrastic website, under Duggan & ...

A vintage blue car and a vintage blue spaceship: home sweet home.

Most of my photos are found surprises that I notice while walking the streets of Baltimore, but this one was worth special trips for an intentional photo shoot. This spaceship lives in Delaware, but when I exhibited one of these photos in Baltimore it unearthed stories of a similar that used to be in Dundalk, and people I knew who had grown up with it in the neighborhood. To me that just adds to the magic of it, and I hope one day I'll turn down an alley in Baltimore to see something like it. You just never know.

I wonder if the fact that I don't drive a car makes me enjoy the passenger seat scenes more than most people. The views out the window when I'm along for the ride are changing too fast to take it all in, offering an experience that's unique to being in motion on the road. The window glass and car hood add another layer of interest, with possible reflections, distortions, framing or obfuscation. Some of my favorite moments are at night and when there's rain obscuring neon lights. It's fun to try to freeze and capture a view of the landscape as it can only been seen at that particular moment in time.

I usually photograph people when I can surreptitiously snap a secret moment from them. They tend to be fleeting and unposed, often leaving some major part of the story out of the frame. The ones I keep usually have something a little awkward or unfinished about them that makes them more interesting to me. I'm slowly starting to get over my shyness and approach people to ask for their photos, but I still prefer the fleeting ones.

Sometimes photos can have a quality that transcends the thing being photographed and stand on their own, just for the shapes, textures, and composition. These are a few that I could imagine being drawings, paintings, sculptures or installations if they weren't photographs.

Sometimes little details just require me to stop and snap a photo. Often in the middle of the street or other times and places where I really shouldn't be taking photos. But usually worth the weird looks I get from doing it. They make me curious, and they make me smile.

A selection of some of the natural world that's caught my eye (and stayed still long enough to photograph.)

The combined inside/outside views of various windows can create layers within each image. The view becomes more interesting because of the glass itself.