Graffiti archaeology

Capp @ 17th St
Originally uploaded by suman_ganguli.

A whole month passed w/o an entry! I've mentally been composing a summary of the past month, but that will have to wait, since I'm at work (and trying to focus on actually getting some done).

I did do a couple posts over at dillytaunt, our new (but so far fairly quiet) group blog. (Don't ask me about the name--ask fatmango).

I'm always pleasantly surprised (amazed actually) that some folks are still dropping in here and reading. Both Arjun and Simeone told me they liked my 'walk to work' essay. I would still like to follow through on that idea of making it a photoessay. A positive development is that (as of Friday) I've started lugging the camera around--check my Flickr photostream for my latest uploads. Quite a few of those are yet more Ukraine photos that I uploaded over the weekend (we've got almost all of them up, so we should finally be mailing out the link soon. I have also been meaning to write up something about the trip to go out with the photos, but that hasn't happened yet either.)

More specific to the idea of taking some photos of the walk to work, however, is that I started taking some shots of graffiti in our neighborhood. It's another thing I'd been thinking about doing for a while, but I was motivated to finally start after Anj pointed out this NYTimes article about the Graffiti archaeology site, which in turn led me to the Flickr Graffiti Archaeology pool.

The SF photos in the Flickr pool inspired me to get started. Check my own baby SF Graffiti set. I added that handful of shots to the Graffiti Archaeology pool, which elicited a comment--a mini-dialogue, in fact--regarding the piece pictured above. It seems the hype about Flickr being a social forum is in fact true.

A footnote: Flickr got mentioned in a couple NYT articles about last week's London bombings. This Arts essay in particular is primarily about how the events got covered on Flickr. I happened to take a look at Flickr's Hot Tags list on Friday, and of course "londonbombings" was up there. But as that Times piece points out, most of the photos weren't of the events itself, but one or more steps removed from them.