black & white - Sounds like wish

15 February, 201511 September, 2017

Weekly photo challenge: Symmetry

I found this photo of the Grand Hotel in my father’s war album, from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the AIF. The hotel in central Cairo is part of the Gamalian complex built in 1939, designed by Kamal Ismail. At street level are the hotel foyer and shops, above them is a mezzanine level of offices, and then eight floors of apartments. The complex is an excellent example of stark modernist architecture with its streamlined, symmetrical arrangement of facade details, repetition of balconies, rounded corners, simple balustrades and lack of ornamentation.

On the right and left of the photo where it is out of focus there are small corner balconies on separate buildings, between which there are three pedestrian walkways leading to a central rotunda. The walkways these days are blocked with shops and stalls, but they were designed to allow natural ventilation and illumination between the three parts of the complex, as you can see in the layout plan below the photo.

I found the plan at archnet.org in a very interesting article, “Gamalian: a rediscovery”, about the design and innovations in the complex. The author laments the deterioration of the buildings since their construction in 1939.

Thanks to the Daily Post for this photo challenge.

*****

31 January, 20156 July, 2019

Depth

Derna Harbour, Libya. Also Darna, Darnah. A very small harbour, anchorage depth 15.5 – 16m.

In 1941, when Libya was controlled by the Italians, and the Italians were allied with Germany, the British bombarded the harbour. My father brought home this photo.

Thanks Daily Post photo challenge: Depth.

22 November, 20146 December, 2019

Weekly photo challenge: Angular

The word ‘angular’ makes me think ‘Art Deco’, the popular visual arts style of the 1920s and 30s that embraced the hard edges of industry, machines and man-made structures rather than the soft, curving, natural lines of the previously popular ‘Art Nouveau’ style. Art Deco buildings are recognisable by their geometric, often symmetrical, forms and decorations: repeated lines, zigzags, steps, and ziggurat shapes. Here’s a photo from Dad’s WWII collection from 1941/42, showing the covered market in Nairobi, built in 1932. It’s now called the City Market.

The City Market building in central Nairobi has the classic features of Art Deco architecture: symmetrically stepped walls and straight lines at every turn – even the clock is octagonal. Well, that was in the 1940s; the clock is no longer there, as you can see in the photo below, taken in 2011.

6202713873_247f1cd912_b — City Market, Nairobi, Kenya, 2011. Photo courtesy Richard Portsmouth, Flickr, www.kanyawegi-uk.org/index.aspx

How quiet it was in the 1940s, with a neatly hedged roundabout and only a few cars parallel-parked beside the building. Images online of the City Market now, including the one above, show a lot of people and traffic, and angle parking to fit more in. Photos online of the interior are full of colour and activity, showing local people buying fresh food, particularly meat and fish, fresh flowers, handcrafts and souvenirs for the tourists.

Inside, it’s an open space where the windowed walls step inwards, with unadorned concrete arches supporting the vaulted ceiling. Pivoting windows on both sides allow air movement and cross ventilation (see an enlarged view of them in the header above), and the vertical strips of louvres allow hot air to escape through the higher openings and cooler air to enter at the bottom. It was ‘green’ architecture long before sustainability became so important. There’s an interesting site here with more photos, as well as plans and information about the energy-efficient design that keeps the building cool. It’s very interesting reading.

I have to admit that while I have a few items of Art Deco style inherited from my parents, it’s not my first choice of decoration or architecture. Give me instead the organic forms of Art Nouveau, the stylised vines whipping asymmetrically around doors and windows and up and down balustrades. Give me environmentally sustainable curves any day.

Thanks Daily Post photo challenge for the angular prompt.

*****

16 November, 2014

Weekly photo challenge: Achievement

I visited a neighbour one day in October to wish him a Happy 97th Birthday. That’s a pretty good achievement, surviving life’s vacillations for 97 years. He’s Dutch, born in Amsterdam he says, during the war (the first one). His greatest achievement, he says, was becoming a submarine navigator during the war (the second one). But what about his long long long life? He says everyone wants to grow old, no one wants to be old.

Before we sat down together on his birthday, he took a cooked sausage from the lunch delivered by Meals on Wheels, cut it up into small pieces, put them into a small decorative plate and stuck a toothpick into each one. He poured himself a glass of red wine and invited me to join him in his birthday celebration.

Aart 97 today

He is the eldest of 12 children and has no idea if the others are alive or dead. They all stayed in Holland while he moved to Australia, and now he only remembers the names of 5 of them. But he remembers his childhood, and often sings a Dutch song that his mother sang when he was small, a song of thankfulness for being saved from a shipwreck, ‘Als g’in nood gezeten’. He wrote it out in Dutch, and then translated it into English for me:

Aart writing Als g'in nood gezeten

He has sung the song for me many times. For a while, he forgot some of the verses, so we turned on his computer and found, to his surprise and mine, that he still has an Internet connection. We looked up the verses, then he sat and sang it from start to finish. At the end he was so pleased with himself that he turned to me with this delightful smile. I snapped him.

Aart singing

Aart was a seaman and says he has seen more of the sea than most people, spending much of his life on it and under it. He now lives up the street from me, that is, several hours’ drive inland, so I asked if he’d like to come for a drive to the coast to see the sea. But he has no desire to see it again, and prefers his memory of it. He rarely leaves his house, and likes it that way. He wants to die there. If he gets what he wants in the end, without doctors and carers insisting he goes into an aged care home, then that will also be a great achievement.

*****

Thanks WordPress for the photo prompt. It was good to reflect on achievement.

5 November, 2014

One trip EVERY month: November

This month I spent a weekend at Barlings Beach on the south coast of New South Wales, named after the Barling family who have been in the area since 1852. That’s a long time in Australia’s books.

On the way I saw an ex-church which has been here almost as long; the sign high above the door says 1855. The church now appears to be inhabited by free spirits. I was bold and brave and took photos of it, though I’m not sure I would have knocked on the door to ask for directions.

I don’t know if anyone was inside peering out, but as I wandered down the street and looked in the left hand window, something was looking back at me.

At Barlings Beach the air was dry and hot, and it felt good to be hotter than I’ve been since last summer. But this was no paradise, the sky overcast with dark blue clouds, the water green and waveless. Strange, but last time I was at this beach there was surf. And here and there, a few dead birds lay half-buried in the sand. I’ve read that they are short-tailed shearwaters, a type of muttonbird, that fly thousands of kilometres from the Arctic to arrive on the east coast of Australia at the start of summer. The long trek is too much for many of them.

Only one man was swimming. My husband. (No photo.) Another man was fishing, wetting his line really, while the women, who had been fishing from their esky seats, declared it a waste of time and settled down for a chat.

Another woman seemed to be wondering why the water was so flat. Was there something in the green murk that she couldn’t see? Only a few days before, a surfer had been bitten by a shark in waist-deep water at another beach up the coast. Knee-deep was a safe depth.

The rainless windstorm came and the temperature plummeted by 15 degrees. The wind blew itself out and the waves rolled in again. Later in the afternoon as I walked on the shore, I couldn’t believe it was the same beach as a few hours before.

Next morning, paradise had returned, and I walked to the rock platform that goes out to Barlings Island. When the tide’s low it’s possible to walk over to it on the rocks. The island is a significant Aboriginal heritage area associated with traditional laws and customs. It’s excellent for snorkelling, to see fish swimming through a giant underwater kelp forest.

On the way home, at a small beach called Mosquito Bay, I was standing on the boat ramp wondering how boats would survive a launching over the rocky bottom, when something moved around and over the ramp base. See the black part above the water?

It was a stingray, a Smooth Ray, according to the notice at the top of the ramp warning us not to harm them. I frequently walk in the edge-water, sometimes up to my knees, but this time I’d stayed on dry land. Wasn’t I happy about that! The blown-up photo in the header of this post shows the ray’s long sting, almost as scary as a flying celluloid doll in a church window.

It was another good trip away, another weekend of nature-watching. And, even better, people-watching.

Thanks again Marianne for the suggestion to take one trip EVERY month. Only one 2014 month to go, one 2014 trip to take.

*****

3 November, 201411 September, 2017

Weekly photo challenge: Descent

Descent: a downwards movement, bad for a fragile object falling or a fragile person tripping. A good thing if you descend from an airless mountaintop or from worthy ancestors. It’s especially useful if you need an inexpensive system of water delivery, for even in the desert there’s the free pressure of gravity. The photo here is taken in a desert during World War Two, one of the many photos my father brought back from the Middle East. It’s captioned simply “Gravity Tank”, taken in North Africa, probably Egypt, in about 1941.

Prompted by the WordPress photo challenge.

27 April, 201428 August, 2018

Monochrome Madness Challenge

Leanne Cole and Laura Macky have a blogging challenge to find a sight that looks superb in black and white: Monochrome Madness.

I presently live in a city where there are no billboards and very little advertising visible anywhere, except occasionally in bus stop shelters. And there are no overhead wires for trams because there are no trams. So when I visited Melbourne last week these very things were constantly capturing my attention, the omnipresent messages and photos in street advertising, and the straight dark lines of overhead tram wires.

When I saw these images of a beautiful man and woman, labelled Man and Woman, disfigured, from anyone’s viewpoint down below in the street, by the tram wires, I made a judgement and learnt two things. 1. It’s good to live without advertising telling me how unbeautiful I am. 2. Trams are fun and functional and I’d be happy to live with wires criss-crossing above me.

Here’s my photo of Monochrome Melbourne.

Toorak Rd, South Yarra, Melbourne, late afternoon, Anzac Day 2014

29 March, 2014

Weekly photo challenge: Street life

I’m not old enough to have taken these photos. Lol. They’re from my father’s war album of photos taken in 1941-42. He was sent to the Middle East for several months and brought back photos of the places he passed through. He wasn’t always the one behind the camera; some of them came from friends in swaps, so I can’t know who captured these images.

The first one is a snatch of street life during the early years of the war in Alexandria, Egypt. Not much traffic!

In the mid-19th century, under the French, this was the Place des Consuls, where several Consulates were situated in what was then a cosmopolitan Alexandria. It was then renamed Mohammed Ali Square in 1873 after the statue of the Ottoman governor, Mohammed Ali, was placed in the square (on the right of the photo). British naval forces bombarded the area in 1882 and destroyed most of the original buildings. It’s now Midan al-Tahrir, Tahrir Square (same as the famous square in Cairo). In English, it’s Liberation Square.

Mohamed Ali Square, Alexandria, Egypt, c1941 — Mohammed Ali Square, Alexandria, Egypt, c1941

The photo below is from the same album, but is unidentified. It’s in the same era, and probably in Egypt, definitely in the Middle East, definitely during the war. I like the perspective, the way the street curves into the distance behind buildings, and the way the buildings are flush with the street. It’s not so much about street life since everyone seems to be inside except for a woman and two children quietly making their way home. The scalloped detail on the rooflines is particularly clear in monochrome, as is the mass of (what looks to be) a dovecote on the right.

I’m very thankful these days that my family kept these photos. They’re possibly more meaningful now that several decades of history have passed, and we can compare the scenes then and now (thanks to all the images online). Try looking for current photos of Tahrir Square in Alexandria. The statue of Mohammed Ali is still there, but the square looks very different otherwise. But perhaps black and white hides some of the grit of street life.

*****

19 January, 201428 August, 2018

Weekly photo challenge: Family

A few days ago a few of us from my family went to the south coast for the day. We tried four beaches, but this one was the best for skipping stones: Circuit Beach. I took these action shots as my husband and two of our sons sent those stones back into the ocean.

Skipping stones 2 — Skipping stones, Circuit Beach, NSW

3 January, 2014

Cee's black and white photo challenge: cars

I’ve just stumbled across Cee’s challenge to find black and white photos of cars. I have just the thing, though I didn’t take the photos. My father did, way back when these cars were his. They were taken long before I was born, in a spot near the beach, probably Noosa Heads (long before they solved the sandfly problem and turned it into an internationally appealing resort town). The first photo is of the family car; I have other photos of it with my sister and brother as toddlers sitting on the running board (that’s how wide it is!).

My father's car, c1943 — My father’s car, c1943

The next photo is of Dad’s ute (short for utility truck). My mother told me he made the tray on the back to put his tins of paint and work gear in.