To the left of the front door, across from the kindling pile, under the deck, there is a mud kitchen. Iris measures careful cups of water into saturated soil. She wears white with flowers. Joshua dumps gleefully. He wears dark colors. Both children remain remarkably clean, which is more than can be said about the walkway.
Iris has learned the art of pointing out her favorite ones. She picks out favorite pictures in different books, favorite flowers to smell, and favorite clothespins. She has four favorite clothespins which she picks from the basket: three blue and one yellow, the yellow being the favoritest of all. They are 1950s vintage plastic clothespins that look something like this:
Some people collect them and display them in glass jars with fancy lids. I use them to hang laundry.
Heather’s mother-in-law spent some time in front of my camera with her grandchildren. In this post, I have made a series of three of my favorite photos. I finished them in a manner reminiscent of Charles Dodgson’s photos. A hobbyest-photographer living in the mid 1800’s, he made up elaborate stories in order to help children stay still in front of his camera.
Future posts will feature further photos from this sitting.
Bread & Puppet Theater is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year. It’s produced by Peter Schumann, who, up until a couple of years ago, still danced around on his 10-foot-stilts. This summer he turned 80. Peter’s wife & partner-in-everything is Elka. She is the grandaughter of Scott Nearing, who stood at the forefront of the back-to-the-land movement.
I went to a Bread & Puppet production in September 2009 & have wanted to go back ever since. My favorite part is the museum: two levels of an old, old barn with thick wide planks and peek-holes on the floor. It is hung with masks and figurines and monsters from the Bread & Puppet Theater production collection of the past 50 years. The puppets range in size from large to giant to magnificently humungous. For me, the feeling of being surrounded by so many heavenly blank stares is otherworldly. I did not attempt to capture it on camera.
I did, however, capture a nice photo of disembodied heads rolling across the Gaza Strip.
(from Fire, Emergency Performance for Gaza)
Read more about Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet Theater here:
Bread And Puppet’s Peter Schumann: ‘What Will Happen When I’m Not Around?’
Bread and Puppet Theater Founder Peter Schumann on 50 Years of Art and Resistance
‘Peter Schumann: The Shatterer’ at the Queens Museum
Peter Schumann on 50 years of the Bread and Puppet Theater
