Gage Park Fun Facts :p

#1: Gage Park has a history of racism. People protested the entrance of African Americans into the neighborhood.

Poster promoting a speech by Neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

#2: During the 60's many white kids left Gage Park high school for a school year (or semester) because of integration.

#3: Gage Park was mainly settled by Roman Catholics from western Europe and many active parishes can still be found in the area.

At St. Simon the Apostle mass is still given in Slovak as well as Spanish and English.

#4:The neighborhood is predominately Hispanic.

#5 Gage Park is home to The Colony, a theater built in the 1920's.
Although no longer active as a theater The Colony is a wonderful piece of early 20th century Chicago architecture.

Theme/ideas for book, woo!

I'm not going to stick to one theme.My themes are going to be death, loss of innocence, and failure to gain an identity. I personally feel that my community and the pressures of it cause many people to loose their innocence at a very young age. This can be innocence of the mind or innocence of the body. I always feel the dense presence of death among me and others. It is exactly that...a presence. Identity is hard to find when many people get stressed into being that something that everyone else is. Sometimes people loose their innocence to those who pressure them into that identity and the identity eventually leads to death.

I've a plan for my book. My book will consist of 3 main characters. These being death, life, and innocence. Death will be represented by a girl (dressed in white or black, yet to be decided...), life will be represented by the same girl only in more lively colors, and innocence will be represented by a small red toddler car. The girl will be my sister and I have make up in mind to make her look dead. The toddler car is this little thing often left scattered about the neighborhood. My sister will be put in different situations and scenarios in which she loses her innocence and gets pressured into being someone who is everyone. In every single one of these scenarios the little red toddler car will be present...as well as her dead self. HOW? Well, in the beginning of the book she is already...dead. What killed her is still to be decided...could be a combination of things(religion, peer pressure, parental pressure, lack of motivation).I haven't decided whether to add text or not but I might make it children book style. The title I have decided on and it will be called The journey of Stiff Elaine.

When it comes to relating it to the art of others or other photography I want to do something like postcards from the past. Below is such a postcard, children smiling at what seems to be a school exhibition of a lynching. This was a postcard, it was what people sent to their friends in far away places...It was acceptable in the KKK community...It was right. In a way these kids didn't have a choice to think how they wanted to think. To their parents there was only one correct way to think, the way they did.

I would also like to play around with the out of porportion stuff like...Big shoes on little people...Huge parents and their teeny tiny children...Might help get my point across and might be fun to toy around with.

Community...Blah.

No need to ride the L down to a Borders, no sir not me. Come to think of it probably no one in my neighborhood (Gage Park) has to. The public libraries around my area sell out of print editions of wonderful classics for 10 cents in order to raise funds. Now to me these out of print copies seemed too precious to be sold at the price of a cheap lollypop, the novels weren't in bad condition but many of them were discarded...Meaning no one had bothered to check the book out in a long time...Either that or that the copy of it was too old...Why ever they were there I knew I couldn't leave poor little Capote in the box with big ol' Gore Vidal.

Walking down the streets I often overhear the different conversations people are having. These are sometimes pleasant, amusing, entertaining, emotional, igmorant, annoying, serious, priavate...Sometimes they aren't even what you'd call a conversation, they're more like examples your writing instructor might provide for proper and improper dialogue. I confess I feel guilty sometimes for overhearing certain conversations but this feeling of guilt does not last long. The conversations when cheery often have to do with people coming over for some sort of celebration, the successful delivery of a baby, the ceremony going on at church this upcoming weekend, the wedding, the cashing of a check. When not so cheery these conversations often have to do with the obligation of paying bills, the tardiness to work the other day, the displeasure of having to go to church, the pressure of school, the pressure of work, the cost of gas and food, not winning the lottery, the funeral.

Art: Sally Mann and the Romantic period

Romantic period landscapesThomas Gainsborough RA, Romantic Landscape, c. 1783. Oil on canvas

Asher B. Durand, Woodland Interior, oil on canvas, Private Collection


Sally Mann photography
Emmett and the White Boy, Sally Mann, 1990.

Untitled, Deep South collection, Sally Mann, 1998.

Untitled, Deep South collection, Sally Mann, 2001.

Another Deep South piece, I couldn't find the title.Piece from Motherland, couldn't find title.

Community in the art of Sally Mann

Most of Sally Mann's photographs are landscapes of Virginia , Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Her photography often reflects the historical past of the south and also a hint of romanticism.The environment she uses as her setting is what connects her art to a community: the southern community. The nature shots are the ones that reflect romanticism because many of her shots show similarity to landscape paintings of the romantic period. Romantic artists where highly interested in nature and stressed the expressions of emotions and imagination. Since the setting is mostly southern country side we can assume the subjects share knowledge of the unattractive historical background of the south. The little romantic touch also allows us to assume that her subjects all hold interest in nature and self expression. The sharing of the environment, past, and beliefs wraps her characters into a community since they have all three of these in common. All members of the same society in the same environment.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/index.html

*Civil War locations, family farm/home

*Broken/damaged lenses