The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

Lester Bangs is not a person whose life and career are hardly my bag -- but I certainly agree with this bit -- at least for my work. The majority of current photography is way too hard-edged, gritty, and in-your-face for my taste. Yes, that's my problem and I'm stuck with it. I'm also stuck with the humanist tradition and its light-hearted goal of seeing the beauty and life of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places.

August kind of got away from me.  I've been scrambling to get a sort of quick project under control.

I am designing a small display for the Highline Heritage Museum called “The History We Live With”.  It will be presented in two display cases in the city of SeaTac’s office/court building in late September.  The display is based on a continuing question I have about my own work “What am I not photographing?” The root of this nagging question began several years ago in Germany.  The cobblestone courtyard in this German village dates from the 16th century.  This schoolgirl stopped, perhaps waiting for a friend, and broke out her homework sitting on a wall that was there in the 1500s.  She lives with the long history of her village every day of her life.­ We do, too.  The history of our area as we see it today is very brief by comparison but that does not mean that we don’t have history.Moreover, history is not exclusively about the past.  It also is about creating a memory of what is important, significant, interesting, quirky – that we walk or drive by every day but will be gone in a year or another decade.  What we will remember being there once upon a time — or that our grandchildren should see as a reminder of what we now see every day?

Developing this display has been a lot of fun as well as a good deal of tracking down historical images and descriptions.  A few of the photographs will (big surprise) be mine.  Here’s one of them with the text that will accompany it. 

During the 20s and 30s there was a fad for buildings that looked like, well, something else.  Hollywood had the Brown Derby.   Des Moines had the Spanish Castle dance hall (1931, now gone -- I played in the band there a couple of times), Seattle the Twin Teepees café (1938, now gone).  The Hat and Boots gas station (late addition in1954)is now in Seattle’s Oxbow Park.)   The “Top Hat” neighborhood is the northeast corner of Highline on what was then the main route from the south county to Seattle.  Still standing proudly is the reason why it was so named. Built in 1936 as a gas station, likely Mobil since the current owner of 42 years remembers the “flying red horse” sign from his youth.  It hosted an auto glass shop between that and the current transmission repair shop.