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Classical Gas Museum, Embudo, NM, fotoeins.com

Colours of the American Southwest

Above/featured: Classical Gas Museum: Embudo, NM – 11 Oct 2018 (X70).

I wrote previously about our time (in autumn 2018) driving through parts of the American Southwest where I also gave more “shutter workout” to my Fujifilm X70 compact mirrorless camera.

We’d seen an abundance and variety of colours throughout our journey, and upon return, I asked myself from what we had witnessed if there were sufficient examples to show. What follows below are sets of images from Arizona and New Mexico, with colours distributed throughout the “ROYGBIV spectrum”: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

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Bugs Bunny, Warner Bros. Cartoons, Bully for Bugs (1953)

That Left Turn in Albuquerque, 1938-2019

Above/featured: Image still from “Bully for Bugs” (originally, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1952).

Something is burrowing through the desert when a creature pops up through a hole in the dirt. A grey rabbit stands, brushing himself off and looking at his surroundings. Realizing he’s not where he should be, he checks his map and says aloud with mild irritation:

I knew I should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

That Bugs Bunny statement is a frequently used gag in a number of Warner Brothers cartoons. But in all seriousness, it is a very specific geographical reference. What does Bugs mean by “that left turn?” Is it a real thing?

Let’s go to New Mexico in the American Southwest, to Albuquerque, whose modern development has been shaped by the car and high-speed roads. The city’s history is tied with the creation of the American highway and one of the most well-known: US route 66.

After the 1937 realignment of highway US route-66, Albuquerque’s Central Avenue became the east-west “Mother Road” through the city. Driving west on Central Avenue towards the city’s Old Town district, the road bends slightly right and northwest to run parallel with the Rio Grande river. The road eventually comes up to a junction, and drivers are faced with choices at the intersection of what are now Central Avenue and Rio Grande Boulevard.

• Turn right, and drivers are headed away from US-66, northbound towards Santa Fe.
• Jig slightly left, and drivers continue westbound on US-66 towards Arizona and beyond to the highway’s western terminus in Los Angeles, California.

John Deeth also wrote about the “left turn” in August 2011.

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Fuji X70, Fujifilm X70, Fujifilm, X70, Peak Design

My Fuji X70: from Austria to the US Southwest

Instead of merely complaining about a desire to carry something lighter for day-to-day photography situations, I decided to do something about it a couple of weeks before my month-long visit to Austria in May 2018.

I looked online for a mirrorless compact camera, but I didn’t need the latest or a top-line model. I preferred an older model with a lot of online reviews and user comments, and I decided on a compromise among three criteria: cost, weight and size, and image quality.

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I-25, El Camino Real, US-66, Rosario, Budaghers, New Mexico, USA, fotoeins.com

US Southwest drive: road trip numbers & memories (2018)

Above/featured: NM I-25 southbound, between Rosario and Budaghers – 5 Oct 2018 (X70).

In October 2018, we embarked on a modest 2-week driving trip through parts of New Mexico and Arizona. We began in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, drove west towards Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, south to Tucson, and finally, northeast on the return to Santa Fe. With our first-time attendance at the Balloon Fiesta and first-time visit to the Grand Canyon accomplished, we’d like to examine further the Grand Staircase geographical formation beyond the Utah-Arizona border region and the historical remnants from old highway US route 66.

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Vienna: Disrupting Historicism with Modernism (1918-2018)

Above/featured: Modernism at Steinhof Church: building by Otto Wagner, angels by Othmar Schimkowitz, stained glass by Koloman Moser (HL).

Vienna is as much a present-day cultural capital city as she was for decades and centuries. Many will get a peek and taste of long-established aspects of the city by walking the streets of the Old Town for the atmosphere, chatting in cozy cafés with coffee and cake for the ambience, and swaying to the rhythms of the waltz under the spell ofOlbr the (blue) Danube.

The early years of the 20th-century were troubled by greater calls for more autonomy from multiple ethnic groups within the patchwork of the Austro-Hungarian empire, by destruction and loss of life from The Great War (World War I), and by subsequent dissolution of the Empire. The capital city became an open theatre for socioeconomic and political changes across all class divisions within an environment where rebellion and revolution were the big talking points against the dogma of long-held traditions. Deep longing for the stability of the old and familiar mingled with equally enthusiastic desire for the radical of the new and mysterious.

Many in the arts, design, and cultural scene were questioning the excessive persistence of past styles, and were seeking something new to better represent changes happening all around them in Vienna. In 1897, a group of artists and architects resigned from the established Künstlerhaus to form the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs (Union of Austrian Artists), known also as the Vienna Secession. Architecture moved towards a sharper focus to geometry and abstraction, and art flowed to the decorative with organic floral-like designs in the Jugendstil, Art Nouveau’s chapter in German-speaking lands. To promote their new ideas, the Secession group produced an official magazine called Ver Sacrum (“sacred spring” in Latin, 1898) and constructed the Secession building (1897) as an exhibition hall to display their work. The Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) was created in 1903 as an association of artists whose thinking and applied arts creations were a precursor to the Bauhaus movement. Members of the Werkstätte worked with Vienna’s architects to broaden and unite the various concepts for a complete artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, as applied to a living space: the house, its rooms and furnishings, the interplay of light and space, and the tools and utensils for every day aspects of living.

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