Recent Stories in Visual Arts

Courtesy of Mr. Troy J. Morris, rapscallion. From our Flickr pool.

Don't worry--we won't get too CuteOverload today. (Photo by Great Beyond in ye olde SunBreak Flicker pool).

More street art documentation from the archivists at LeftCoastLetters.

I have no idea where Simple Insomnia shot this set, but it's rad so I'm using another from the Pool. It's like a Steampunk fashion shoot.

From :MPG: in our Flickr pool.

From Simple Insomnia, in the ol' TSB Flickr pool.

Our Flickr pool's Great Beyond has a whole series of photos of snowstorms of the '70s that bring back Seattle's workingman past in a Kodachrome rush. Here we are at the corner of 15th Avenue East and Republican Street on Capitol Hill, in November 1979. There's a Spic 'n' Span Cleaners where Caffe Ladro is today, and you can almost feel the snow crunch underfoot. We are not supposed to get that much snow this weekend, if any at all, and Kodachrome's power to color saturate your life has come to an end.

From :MPG: in our Flickr pool.

I am loving the implied violence of sunlight in this photo of the last day of the Implied Violence exhibit at the Frye Art Museum. (That's right, it's over. You procrastinated and procrastinated, and now it's gone. Forever. Go curl up in a ball and weep.) Thanks to Flickr's Jennyrh8 for putting the sun in new light.

Wow. I am clearly not the only one carrying my camera around and snapping sunrise shots. Look at this phenomenal catch by Ryan from our Flickr pool. I think this may compress just about everything photogenic about Seattle into one shot: mountain, hills, lake, boats, crescent moon (it's permissible to leave out the Space Needle if you can substitute a Mount Rainier). 

Typically at the stroke of New Year I'm either asleep or inspecting the liquor cabinet, but this time, I happened to be stationed with a good view of the Space Needle's fireworks show. I thought that was something until the next morning, when Nature showed us that we are poor imitators. 

And now, let's reverse the frame to the preceding evening. In the moments before 12 o' clock, nothing much is on view.

But that will soon change:... (more)

Yep, hard to believe, but that photo (by SunBreak Flickr pool contributor Paul Swortz) is from a full 365 days ago. Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at The SunBreak!

"Pagoda at Night" is from our Flickr pool stalwart Great Beyond, who writes: "Chinatown is an...interesting place in the middle of a Saturday night. I met all kinds of...colorful characters while setting up for this shot." You can see two architectural echoes of the pagoda roof in this shot, and it's remarkable how natural it looks with the skyline back of it.

Seattle has so far escaped the clutches of the Puget Sound Convergence Zone this morning; UW meteorologist Cliff Mass has a post up on the hit-and-miss nature of the snowfall, which is whitening Lynnwood to Everett. That being the case, here's some snow anyway, courtesy of shawnmebo and our Flickr pool. It's a gorgeous shot, thanks to the play of light and shadow, and soft and hard outlines.

Paul Swortz dropped this festive photo into our Flickr pool, for which we thank him very much. If you're not familiar with Santarchy's roving bands of drunken Santas, you're probably better off. (Note that "fucking" here is simply used as an FCC-approved intensifier, not to deride a day sacred to many of you. We don't need those emails.) We wish you a Merry Christmas Eve as well, and let's meet back here again on Monday. 

From smohundro in our Flickr pool.

There's lots of great photographers who contribute to our Flickr pool, as evidenced by some of the profiles I've been doing this month. But personally, the one who always surprises and entertains me the most is Lucas Westcoat. His photos range from elegant cityscapes that capture a warmth in Seattle that I, for one, often fail to note, to the occasional documentation of trips to far-flung places, to--and yes, this is probably what gets me the most--surprisingly intimate portraits of the women, whether wandering the park, chilling at Golden Gardens, or getting ready on the wedding day. Some of these we've already used, but I'm happy to put them up again--"Alexis the Bride" is my favorite photo of the year. Thanks to Lucas for contributing, and here's to 2011!... (more)

"From a Seattle Flickr photostroll in Saint Mark's Cathedral." --Lotus21 in our Flickr pool.

Welcome to the latest installation of my December Glimpses project: for most of the year, my day began sorting through our Flickr pool looking for the daily Glimpses shot. So rather than do a "best of" as the year comes to a close, I decided to turn the tables, and asked a group of my Flickr pool faves to give me their own best-of-year lists.

Over the summer I was looking into Seattle grafitti for some reason, and trolling through Flickr, I randomly came across the work of user gabemeier. The shots in the pool were incredible: a thorough and deeply interested documentation of Seattle street art. What I discovered pretty quick was that gabemeier is only half of a pair of brothers (Gabe and Sam) who, I think, might still both be in high school. They were blogging under the name "Bald Man Is Watching," where most of their work and their occasional writings went up, but now that their project is extending down the West Coast, they've switched up to a new site, Left Coast Letters. Whatever the case, these two are amazing and their work is fascinating--you can scroll their site for hours. Otherwise, I'll just let Gabe explain it himself:

Around a year and a half ago, my brother and I began to notice stickers stating "The Bald Man Is Watching You" throughout Seattle. With a little research we learned that the stickers were put up by an artist named Bald Man and that he is a part of a thriving community of street artists that work in a huge number of mediums. We began photographing the stickers we saw, mostly around Capitol Hill and decided to create an outlet to share the work of Bald Man and other artists with our friends and whoever else wanted to listen. Since then, the blog has gone through many changes and earlier this year, we decided to expand and attempt to cover the entire West Coast. We have successfully photographed incredible graffiti and street art in Los Angeles and San Francisco and continue to cover Seattle and the surrounding region. The below six photos are some of our favorites from the past year, but they only give a small idea of the talent and diverse skills that our region provides.

From smohundro in the Flickr pool.

By seadevi in our Flickr pool.

Many's the day, searching through the Flickr pool, that I've had to stop and tell myself, "That poor bastard Chris Blakeley...his life sucks!" As indeed it does for the poor bastard, what with being the unofficial court photographer of the Seattle burlesque scene. Ironically, though (for my navel gazing jokes), what gets him that distinction is the fact that when he photographs mostly naked women, Blakeley tends to find the shot that captures the eyes or movement, the drama of the moment. And that's why his photography--whether in the dark of a theatre or a candid shot snapped across a bar--always overwhelms me.

Today we continue our journey through the TSB Flickr pool with Beth Jusino--a.k.a., zenobia_joy. I asked her for an artistic statement, and she basically captures what I would have said of her work:

I moved to Seattle in August 2009, and started wandering the streets with my camera as a way to get my bearings. I'm a total amateur - a writer and editor by day who started taking pictures a few years ago to help me start looking more closely at the world around me. I am drawn to water, color, and detail, and like the occasional odd angle.

Since moving to New York in April, I've been handling the daily Glimpses posts here at TSB, which means that for eight months now I've been digging through the recesses of our award-nominated Flickr pool, looking for the engaging, provocative, sexy, and--in my case, now that I've moved so far away--nostalgia-inducing photos of and around Seattle. And as we move toward the end of the year, I decided to use the month of December to switch things up and showcase not just a daily photo, but a particular photographer whose work I've noticed, enjoyed, and or relied on more than others over the year, and have these chosen few provide me their own lists of their favorite photos.

First up, today we have Tony Case, a.k.a., Great Beyond. Tony's one of several photographers from our Flickr pool who's taken part in a "year in photos" project to put up at least one original photo a day, and he's stuck with it. His photos always jump out at me for a few reasons: one, he has a real knack for capturing minutiae (not so much in evidence here, but check out his photos and you'll see what I mean), and two, he's particularly good at provocative architectural shots.... (more)

From lwestcoat in our Flickr pool.