DALTON ROONEY

I’ve been considering a regular feature for this blog, now that I am writing again: posting a small selection of favorite photographs from Flickr every week or so. In addition to sharing new work that I find interesting, it also gives me practice in talking about photographs that aren’t my own in a concrete way. This week, I’ve chosen a few color landscapes to discuss:

Photograph by Lisa Sheer on Flickr

This photograph reminds me a lot of my childhood in southern California. The warm light, the long shadows; if I think back hard enough I can actually taste the dust on the roof of my mouth. I love the way Lisa has used the shadows as compositional elements, inking out the bottom and slicing through the middle like a knife, creating four horizontal stripes: blue, black, brown, black. The houses poking over the top of the wall leave a lot to the imagination. I wonder, what’s on the other side of that wall? For that matter, where the hell are we, anyway? The missing front-half of the truck is interesting, too.

Lisa also has a photoblog that I highly recommend visiting.

Photograph by Vanityforgotten on Flickr

It would be pretty much impossible to talk about this next photograph and not mention Stephen Shore. The telephone lines, the wet pavement, the deserted feeling—I know Stephen Shore didn’t actually invent any of these things, but he pulled them together in such a way that it has become forever impossible for me to walk down the street without feeling like I could be in one of his photographs at any moment.

The color palette in this photo is wonderful: the muted blues, greys and greens, and the—POW—the red truck right in the center. I would love to see a great big print of this, I’m sure it would be wonderful.

Photograph by Omsi28 on Flickr

I find this photograph interesting for a lot of reasons. I absolutely love the spaces that appear between buildings in urban and semi-urban environments. They become dumping grounds for some of the most fun and bizarre objects. This photo has a wonderfully airy feel about it (largely because of the color palette, and I think the fact that it’s shot on film has something to do with it, too), the shadows on the wall from the tree are brilliant, and then you’ve got this weird PVC thing in the middle of it all, just flipping out. It’s great.

Do you have anything to add about the photographs above? How do you like the idea of this new feature? Leave a comment below and let me know.