Here's a few shots I've taken that I feel aren't total crap:
This was taken while eating with my grandpa at a restaurant in Aurora, Indiana called Applewood. Aurora is sort of like Mayberry or something. An southern-esque small town in middle America full of nice white people who are nevertheless apprehensive about colored folk. Apparently the restaurant was awarded "best ribs" by the food network. Actually the whole Cincinnati/N. Kentucky/S.E. Indiana area is famous for its ribs. We were eating in a little courtyard overlooking the Ohio river. Pretty chill. One of thos little birds actually hopped up on our table at one point, not two feet from us! My gandpa threw a piece of bread at it and it was satisfied enough to leave.
Along the way back from the restaurant was this place that was just covered with super-old signs and junk from the 1950s. I got out to take some pictures of it. Inside they had some really really nice antique cars. The guy working there was pretty cool, too.
These are some old school gas pumps. Notice on the one to the left, the price display under "This sale" only has one digit in the dollar space. The guy inside, Bill, recalled the "good old days" when gasoline was 15 cents a gallon.
This was a painted metal policeman from inside the garage of the place. He was holding a big yellow saign that said "SLOW - school crossing".
Hopefully I'll be a halfway decent photographer by the time I get there. I have about two days left... I'm trying to figure out how to take lots of pictures there without coming off as some jackass tourist obsessed with getting photographs of "real live natives" to impress people back home. Travel photography is such an interesting phenomenon. Photographs wield an unspoken power over their subjects, and what we choose to photograph is largely determined by our own preconceived notions about what is interesting, what is "cultural", what is "authentic", and what is beautiful. Editorial decisions on the part of photographers to a large extent determine how the rest of the world will view and understand the people in the images. It's such a subjective exerise. A lot of travel photography is unsettling to me. I keep seeing the subjects of travel photography being portrayed as such vibrant, colorful, spiritual, musical, festive, innocent, and mysterious people. Talk about cultural romanticism. It kind of pisses me off, even though I'm sure we all are influenced by it to some degree. People see a photo of a woman in a colorful garment and think it's so amazingly cultural or ethnic or something. Do they really know anything about that person's culture? Is there some sort of cultural symbolism in the garment, or is it just something to wear? I wonder if in some parallel bizarro world, Mayan Indians, Kenyan tribesmen, and Thai villagers flock by the thousands to places like New York, London, and Berlin to get precious photographic documentation of people using fax machines. Extra points would be awarded for capturing someone garbed in their traditional, authentic, cultural attire - a suit and tie. Galleries worldwide would be filled with striking images of women in blouses and pant suits, and celebrities would keep trying to one-up each other by adopting children from the United States, France, and the Netherlands. What a world it would be.
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