Mando Alvarez's pictures
This guy's photos blow me away. He is from South Texas and shoots with medium-format film. He selects the photos he posts very wisely, and the cumulative effect of looking at each shot is an unmistakable sense of his visual style, and, better yet, his point of view. I especially admire that, how each photo seems to be coming from the same place in the same person. It's something I feel like I've been trying and failing to cultivate the entire time I've been taking photos (and lately I seem to have given up; what's up with that?). Is point of view something you can even work on, or does it have to come naturally?
Enough about me. I hope you like the pictures because I sure do.
Eric Fischer's maps
"Race and ethnicity" flickr set
When we were in Louisville, Eric and Amy both told me that one of the things that they really don't like about the city is how segregated it is. When I had a moment, I looked up the stats--Louisville proper is more than a third black. That startled me because just based on the parts of the city we'd been hanging out in, you could be forgiven for assuming the city is about 95 percent white.
Eric Fischer uses open-source maps and the 2000 census to illustrate racial concentrations in the nation's largest cities, and the results are stark and sometimes surprising. I hope he does another set from the 2010 data when that's available because a lot has changed in this country in the past decade.
Here is Austin; Louisville; Detroit (whoa, look at 8 Mile Road); New Orleans; and my hometown, Plano.
Any graphic novel by Rick Geary
I was pleased when Gary blogged about Rick Geary because it reminded me to go check out some more of his books. Eric gave me a copy of The Borden Tragedy from the Treasury of Victorian Murder series back when we were first going out, and I was impressed by the attention to detail, both in the art and the research, and the dry, restrained touches of morbid humor. I read the Jack the Ripper book not too long ago as well, and my neighborhood branch of the Austin Public Library just happened to have The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor and Housebound the last time I stopped by.
I especially liked Housebound, a compilation of early one-offs and a bunch of stuff he did for National Lampoon, for being so fun to read, if only to watch a very fine and specific style evolve. I will be done with those very soon if you want to put them on hold, and if you are liking something a lot right now yourself, I wish you would tell me about it.