Signs of spring

Ran with Frederick Douglass this morning - or at least, with his biographer, David Blight. 

Fred has two kids now, and his labouring days are over. It's 1840 and he's been discovered by white abolitionists. In particular, they've discovered his oratorical skills, partly self-taught, partly learned from preachers at the small black church he attends in New Bedford, where he had begun to preach occasionally himself. 

The American Anti-Slavery Society has just hired him and sent him out on his first speaking tour. The early notices indicate he's a star in the making. So begins his real life.

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I had two photographic projects today. One was to try my hand at 'found abstract' photography. I'm not sure if that's my own coinage or if others call it that too. I think it's a good way to describe what I was trying to do.

On my run in the morning, I had noticed the layers and layers of cracking paint on the piles holding up the Queen's Ave. bridge. The cracking and chipping exposes earlier colours, including colours of graffiti and tagging the city has tried to cover over. Sometimes the random patterns look like maps, sometimes like abstract paintings.

Some photo artists make very interesting shots of patterns in rust and lichen. This was supposed to be the same idea. Not sure how well it worked, but I like a few.

There's a word I've always liked that describes what these images represent: palimpsest. It originally meant a document page that had been erased or covered over so it could be written on again, but where the original writing shows underneath. The definition I just found online is more general: "something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form." I've always liked the way buildings and billboards and other public surfaces can be palimpsests.

I did also snap a little bit of spring down in Harris Park before I reached the bridge. Karen says they're called scilla or squill. These were growing wild just below Eldon House.

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The other photographic project was continuing my rediscovery of 2016 winter-away pictures. We spent that winter partly in Valencia, partly travelling with friends Ralph and Pat Lutes across Spain, and partly in Lisbon. In mid-February, we were still in Valencia on our own. One late afternoon, I took this stitched-together panoramic shot of Plaza de la Virgen, with the Basilica (the salmon-coloured building on the left), the back of the cathedral and the bronze statue of Neptune in the foreground.