CARNIVAL
Plastic molded figures possessing exaggerated anatomical
features of envy beckon to the neon pasty faced crowd standing in the
summer evening's wet heat. BE A MAN, RING MY BELL! AMAZING SCIENTIFIC
CURIOSITIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD (aka the international ghoulish
deformities collection). For those who might be squeamish about three
headed cows, there is the wonderful wiggling house. Go ahead, try to
climb its stairs and walk its halls while you repeatably get tossed on
your butt. Look at the mirror and see how fat you can appear! Jump
into a bumper car and do what you've always wanted to do during rush
hour! Slowing down? Get more cotton candy in your system!
So why do people go to a carnival? For me it's the
rides (and camera). Where else can you find and artificial environment
filled with rumbling, humming, hissing machines tossing bodies of
varying corpulence through seemingly random arcs in space.
I found that timed exposures clearly
defined the motion of the rides while also lending a feeling of a time
machine about to fade from the present. In a sense the photos are time
machines, compressing a minute span into a single, static instant. A
time compactor of sorts.
The
people who run the rides were like, ahh, really nice to us and probably
viewed our
cameras as possible publicity vehicles. In any event, they gave us an
excellent free ride on the ferris
wheel, stopping it whenever our gondola arrived at the top so we could
shoot pictures. I thought it was a heck of a nice gesture so I promised
I'd put their name up
on the web page. One must do one's part to encourage random acts of
niceness. (Now where is that pic of their name for the link . . . it's
gotta be somewhere in this mess . . .)