crooked house

Vivi Models

We got this fancy dress at the Giant Baby and Children's Sale last Saturday for 4 bucks and it may very well have been the best 4 bucks we have ever spent. Vivi has worn it pretty much every day since then. This is the selection of jewelry she almost always wears with it. The pony bandaid is a deliberate choice.  She asked me to take pictures of her in this outfit today. The pursed lip thing is something I'm afraid she picked up from me when I look in the mirror.

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This is one of her more artistic shots. When she viewed this photo, she expressed displeasure about the slightly rolled sock so please keep that in mind when judging the styling here.

Anguish.

During the shoot, she inexplicably ran to get a comb, which she matter-of-factly inserted in the keyhole and proceeded to pose next to. During further discussion I gleaned it is supposed to be Alice's key.

Fiddling dramatically with the "key."

Pose with light switch.

Solitude.

A slightly Toulouse Lautrec effect.

One Day, My Child, You Will Be

A bishop, a boxer, a bullfighter. Eric Maloberti imagines what the future may hold for his three-month-old daughter June.

And of course, DON'T MISS Lotte Time Lapse: Birth to 12 years in 2 min 45, which makes me want to weep.

Snow Drawings

It's March 1st and we're expecting 20 cm of snow overnight. Might as well develop an appreciation for the stuff. Check out Sonja Hinrichsen's Snow Drawings, which were made a couple of weeks ago in Colorado, with the help of five volunteers. Via BB-Blog. (The kids are running to the window -- the storm has officially started.)

Polly Gaillard's Reframing: Motherhood, Memory and Loss

Photographs by Polly Gaillard that seem to capture those gorgeous or funny moments you think you'll remember about your children but probably will not. I love this kind of family photography -- not saccharine or posed.

Hidden Mothers

In the early days of portrait photography, small children were often photographed while sitting in the arms of their mothers, who were completely covered by a blanket. Later the ghostly lump of the mother would be cropped out of the photo by a mat. These Hidden Mother pictures are highly sought after by collectors today. It seems that even before the proliferation of unrealistic images of women in the media, moms didn't want their pictures taken.

Look here and here for more of these strange photographs. Via A Cup of Jo.

Remakes

"Automata" remake by Or Eitan.

Hopper's "Automata."

Art students remake famous paintings with photography. Via A Cup of Jo.

 

Whatever Happened to A Very Young Dancer?

I vividly remember the first time I saw this book, A Very Young Dancer. It was a rainy October afternoon and I must have been about ten years old. I pulled it off the shelf in the Bookmobile, which was parked in its customary spot in the far corner of the Save-Easy lot, and sat right down on the floor of the bus there and then and read it all the way through. I didn't take it out, though. While it did make me yearn for a life of serious purpose and beauty -- and of course the applause of an appreciative audience in a fancy theatre -- I knew that ballet wasn't for me. I was already too old to ever learn it properly. And  even at that age I had an inkling that I had the wrong body type. (It wasn't until I reached adulthood that I realized I'm a total klutz anyway.) But it was a captivating, mesmerizing book of photography and it cast a spell on a lot of little girls who started ballet lessons in the 70s and 80s. The book catapulted its subject, the young ballerina Stephanie, into instant fame. That fame made things difficult for her when, at the age of 13, she was asked to leave the School of American Ballet. She has only now, at the age of 46, come to terms with it. Via A Cup of Jo.

Incidentally, Jill Krementz, is Kurt Vonnegut's widow, and she published a whole series of these A Very Young Whatever books. What happened to the rest of them?

Stephanie's story reminds me -- just a little -- of Emma Ridley's. Ridley played Ozma in Return to Oz, a movie that has been in constant rotation in this house, as the kids are fascinated with all things Oz. I knew that Fairuza Balk, who played Dorothy in it, continues to work as an actor as an adult but I wondered about Emma, who is startlingly beautiful in the film. Apparently she was a fixture on the London nightclub scene for six months in her early teens in the 80s, stripping on tables while carrying a teddy bear. She married a much older man at the age of 15 and then disappeared. She now lives on a farm in California with her two children, is an evangelical Christian like Stephanie, and has a dance fitness business.

The Crooked House Paper Village

Here's a shot of the paper village we always put up around this time of year. Some of the houses -- the three-dimensional ones with pastel roofs -- I made a year or two ago using a Martha Stewart winter village kit. At some point, I used Country Home's plans to make the plain white buildings, which are flat. And this year's addition is the one in the middle  -- it's made from a photograph of our own crooked house, printed on vellum and taped to a square glass vase. I got the idea from Hutch Studio. They made similar ones of their shop. (Via the lovely new blog A History of Home.)

I've taken photographs of other houses in our neighbourhood, and ones of the houses of some relatives and friends -- you know, the people who don't actually live in our neighbourhood but we wish did. (Gramma, when you read this, please email us a photo of your house and Den's.) And, time permitting, I'm going to add those houses to our paper village, too. So that even if the real world isn't perfect, our paper one will be.

Or maybe not. If you look closely, you can see where the roof of our porch is starting to fall down, right above the steps. And unfortunately, there's another slight problem. I suggested to Luke that we might like to put little cut-out photographs/paper dolls of him and Vivi on the felt, next to that snowman say, and he thought that was a great idea. "We should look sad, though," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because the house is on fire," he said. And unfortunately, it does look a little like that. Luke thinks the glossiness of the map behind the roof of the house even looks like smoke.

We could just go with that, I suppose. Add a toy fire truck and all.

 

All you need to make your own is a photograph of your house printed on a sheet of vellum, a battery-operated tea light or two (whatever you do, don't use real ones), and some tape. The glass vase or candle-holder is optional. If you don't want to use one, just fold the photo of your house in a kind of tube around a tea-light and fasten it with the tape.

Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies

Arthur recreates 12 Angry Men.

Arthur recreates American Beauty.

Arthur recreates Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are more at Studio Arthur. Thanks @sue_oz!

Starry Sky

Photographer Thomas Zimmer (thats him up there) got some astonishingly beautiful shots of a starry sky over the North Sea. Via My Modern Met.