Salish Park

I.M. Pei-designed building in Dorchester, Mass. The Ernest Hemingway Collection, containing 90% of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, is here. JFK’s sailboat on the right.

From an article that appeared last summer in the travel section at nytimes.com and also at boston.com/travel: “Boston, while still not quite the avatar of cool, is showing plenty of new signs, for better or worse, of hipness…”

“Sure, it’s not New York City, but grab a bagel stuffed with salmon and slathered with cream cheese, anyway, at the South End Buttery (314 Shawmut Avenue, 617-482-1015).”

My wife took this picture:

On Sunday while walking along where the Boston Massacre happened I snapped a photo of the State House and after doing that I happened to look behind me and there was a guy waiting for me to finish so he could ask me to take his picture. He didn’t really ask because he couldn’t speak English but I got the idea. He handed me his camera and when he pointed at a tall white building down the street I got the idea that he wanted the building in the picture too.

The problem was that we were standing in open shade and that building over there was in bright sunlight: when I took the picture the image on the LCD indicated that he was properly exposed but where the building should have been was just white sky. I gave him back his camera. He handed it back to me and seemed to be suggesting that for this next one I should make it vertical.

So I framed a vertical picture of him against a white sky and pressed the shutter button. There was a noise but then the LCD went completely blank. Dead battery? He took his camera back and walked away.

Or maybe it’s just Pinocchio, on Winthrop at JFK in Cambridge, where Harvard students go for a slice.

The Pilgrims stayed about a month before getting back on the Mayflower and crossing the bay, landing at Plymouth, where they reportedly stepped on that rock.

The first time I got yelled at for taking someone’s picture was at one of those markets in Seoul, Korea. I didn’t know the guy was there but it seems he saw that I was pointing the camera in his general direction and he didn’t like that, asked why I was taking pictures. My Korean is lousy; it was instantly obvious I was a tourist taking travel snaps and he grumbled some more as he went back to his business.

That’s him on the left looking.

There was another time in Seattle: while working on a class assignment I was photographing a chair I happened upon while walking along in Capitol Hill and some punk over there said if I took his picture he was going to wrap that camera around my neck—or something like that. I said I wasn’t taking his picture.

Evidently some people are real touchy about having their picture taken. W. Eugene Smith and Joe Rosenthal could’ve told you that; during the course of their careers they each spent time in the hospital after being pummeled by guys who didn’t want their picture taken. And in 1967 filmmaker Hugh O’Connor got shot dead in Kentucky by a landowner who resented the media’s presence on his property, as described in the film Stranger with a Camera by Elizabeth Barret.

There’s an ad on craigslist posted by someone looking for 3-6 MB pics of these signs you see around Massachusetts when crossing into a town. Compensation is $1 to $20 per.

From the Seafair Indian Days Pow Wow in Discovery Park, a few months after art school.

Earlier this week I was talking with a guy whose job is designing and developing a missile guidance system and it got me to thinking back to the days when I worked as a fashion photographer’s assistant. Once we were on a job on a beach somewhere, I can’t remember where, and one of the guys, I think it was the stylist, said, well, at least we’re not making bombs.

If that weren’t bad enough it seems that fashion photography isn’t even what it used to be, according to this argument in pictures on slate.com.