Sunday, February 10, 2008

Contemplating Success

Contemplating Success

Photo & Text Copyright 2008 Seattle Daily Photo. All rights reserved, including reproduction or republishing.

The bus rolled past on E. Pike and I saw this handsome guy with such a thoughtful expression, I just had to take the shot. Afterward I noticed the billboard on the side of the bus underneath him, and it seemed he could have been a model for the ad.

This coming Thursday, February 14, Seattle Daily Photo will be featured in Metroblogging Seattle's 2nd Tournament of Blogs. Last year many visitors were kind enough to vote for SDP, and it placed in the top four semifinalists, so is being featured again. If you would care to support Seattle Daily Photo with your votes again this year, the voting booth will be open for a week, and if SDP remains in the running, will go into another round after that: please click here for all the information and how to access the voting booth starting February 14.

8 comments:

 gmirage said...

I very seldom chance upon photo ops like this. Good thing you caught the scene before the bus moved! I like the concept you presented here...it's like an ad in an ad! So nice!

Have a lovely week ahead!

Lucas Mobley Photography said...

Looks Good!

Chuck Pefley said...

the hidden or not seen meanings and interpretations after the fact are amazing sometime, aren't they? A fine example of this!!

Kim said...

G_Mirage, Sometimes these things WILL happen! Thanks so much for your kind comment. Were having a sun spot right now, and I hope your having a bright day, too.

Lucas, Thanks for checking out SDP, and thanks a bunch!

Chuck, Thank you. I do love when this happens. Our city has an amazing way of bringing elements together that make one think. Did you see that Denton's wife is presenting an academic forum on visual metaphors and is looking for (free of license) images to use? If not, info is on the forum right now. I'm sure you'd have a dozen or two apt shots! ;^) Thanks for stopping by SDP!
-Kim

Lynette said...

Wonderful, simply wonderful. Browsing your recent posts while in the background I listen to Morris Day and the Time and Rhianna on the Grammy show--what a great way to spend a few moments. Thanks for sharing your Chevy truck knowledge.

Anonymous said...

It's almost as if he were place there to enhance the ad.

RaleighKat said...

Please see this piece of reporting from New Jersey My Way.

One Race, Many Faces

February 15, 2008

There’s one exhibit at the Liberty Science Center (www.lsc.org) that will make grown up visitors take notice.

The first thing you see when you walk into the "Race: Are We So Different?" (www.understandingrace.org) exhibit there is a video montage that seems say, Yes, we are.

In the display, by artist-producer Teja Arboleda (www.entertainingdiversity.com), faces of different races and ethnicities morph into one another. Of course, you can tell when you are looking at a black man from sub-Saharan Africa, or at a woman from East Asia, or a blond from northern Europe. People do look different, yes.

But we knew that. What Arboleda — who describes his ancestry as "African-American/Native-American, Filipino-Chinese and German-Danish" — succeeds in showing visitors is that races blend almost imperceptibly. One second you are sure you are looking at somebody who might be Chinese, and a half a minute later the person certainly looks black, but in between there are subtle gradations, countless ways of being both.

And that is what the exhibit wants to do: challenge the conventional thinking about race.

In the center of the room, children play with multi-racial dolls; everywhere, videos and voices surround you. In one display, we learn Brazilians have 134 terms for people of different skin colors.

This is a complicated issue, and so it is divided into three: The Everyday Experience of Race, The Science of Human Variation and History of the Idea of Race. This last exhibit explores some of the crackpot racial theories of decades past. It quotes one book: "The population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of [immigrants], will rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, and more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder and sexual immorality."

We learn this was written by one Charles Benedict Davenport, in 1911, to warn against the wave of people coming to America from southern and eastern Europe, whose children and grandchildren form some of the largest ethnic groups in New Jersey today: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews.

Liberty Science Center, known for interesting insects, rock walls, skyscrapers, and entertaining giant bubble displays, takes a serious look at how science can be used for all the wrong reasons.

And this is worth your attention.

Petrea Burchard said...

A beautiful shot (and perhaps well-cropped, as Monoblog would have it).