Six Degrees of Separation?
Six degrees of separation has become a cliché, or at the very least a metaphor for the idea that chance and science are linked in connecting us. We are surrounded by a variety of circumstantial evidence attesting to the fact that we touch one another in ways we may find surprising. The oft-mentioned “global village,” and other versions of “togetherness” as desirable states pop up at unexpected times and in the least likely places.
Yet despite the apparent shrinkage of modern day life, we have never been more separate…
Friday Voyage: Grand Canyon
Margaret Randall explores a palette of ever-changing light in the West's most endearing chasm.
Conscious Naming
In Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning: Her Lifetime in Photography by Elizabeth Partridge (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2013), I find the following paragraph: “Like many of the other San Francisco bohemians, Maynard [Dixon] and Dorothea found the label ‘artist’ highly suspect. In a kind of reverse snobbery, those who called themselves artists were thought to be more interested in being an artist than in making serious art ( . . . ) ‘I was a tradesman,’ Dorothea said. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’” (p. 13)
This passage brought to mind the very different weights, different meanings even, that certain words hold for us, depending upon our cultural contexts and the time in which we live…
Friday Voyage: The Women’s Plaza of Honor
Remembering the lives, contributions and collective history of women in a beautiful plaza at the University of Arizona.
The New Deal, New Mexico and Dorothea Lange
WPA art at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and remembering the trailblazing photographer who captured the soul of a vulnerable nation.
Friday Voyage: Chloride
Nearly frozen in time, a ghost town with 13 inhabitants preserves its past while fostering a budding community.
Friday Voyage: El Salvador
In a country battered by decades of violence and instability, a New Mexican organization is supporting community resilience through economic and environmental sustainability.
Filmmaking New Mexico: The Non-Hollywood Projects
Margaret Randall on New Mexico film history, state incentives and a new independent production.
Friday Voyage: Ojo Caliente
Margaret Randall explores the realities and facades of ancient, healing hot springs in Northern New Mexico.