Calender Image Challenge
Rob Walker shares
Starting now and continuing through the months ahead, take occasional pictures around your neighborhood, with an eye toward compiling enough (12) for a calendar. [This can be a good summer project to involve kids in, I’d venture.]
This was at the height of Covid lockdowns, when we were all looking for ways to rediscover our immediate surroundings. (A practice that of course remains a noble one!) I encouraged unlikely or even weird subject matter, because that’s just what I’m like. In this case, I had decided to document all the bollards in my neighborhood. Anyway, I’m bringing the idea back not just because most of you haven’t heard it, but because I’ve been pondering how it can be expanded beyond the neighborhood. As I’ve continued the practice myself over the last few years, my approaches have varied. So here are some possible ideas and parameters:
Compile a series of personal landmarks — sites you would miss if you moved.
Collect multiple examples of a category: flowers, architectural details, birds, trees, even just a particular color, anything you want.
Document a single subject over and over, through different weather, different times of day, perhaps from different angles.
Pair up this exercise with the “single-object scavenger hunt” I describe in the book: document all the interesting mailboxes or fence ornaments or store banners or the backs-of-stop-signs or whatever — good, bad, interesting — that you have noticed recurs through your neighborhood, town, city, county.
If you’re on the road a lot, attend to something that pops up in multiple locales. Someone I knew took pictures of Irish bars wherever she went, for example, from Canada to Latin America.
Or tighten your focus: Pick a subject restricted to your living space. One meaningful object a month? A dozen window views? A 12-part time lapse of one ever-changing spot (like a plant, or your fridge)?
This exercise can be added to an existing ritual — a regular walk or ride — or it can become an ongoing mission of sorts, encouraging you to visit new neighborhoods or other places, or to focus on familiar territory in unfamiliar ways. The important thing is that the subject should relate to you, and what you notice. It’s a personal calendar.
Someone Tell me How I'm Missing Out-Anne-Marie Bonneau
By choosing to live more sustainably, I sacrifice:
- Unhealthy processed, food-like substances that don’t taste all that great
- Colds and other minor illnesses (I get sick WAY less often than I used to)
- Excess stuff I don’t need and which requires maintenance and dusting during its (usually short) life
- Spending lots of money on said stuff
- Working more to earn more money to buy said stuff
We environmentalists have not done a good job if the majority of people equate reducing their carbon footprint with a life of self-flagellation, self-denial and utter drudgery. By dropping out of consumer culture (even just a little bit), you actually gain much more than you lose.
Take food. Back when we went plastic-free, our diet changed more than anything else. No more eating store-bought cookies, or crackers, or cereal, or snacks or fizzy drinks. No chocolate bars, or tea bags or even sliced bread.
Hmmm, that does kind of sound like self-denial…. (folllowed by subheading "what we eat today")
Pete's Garage/ Desire Image
Today we began our road trip to the UP. We stopped in Green Bay for lunch at this excellent cafe called Kavarna where I had one of the best black bean burgers. Ever. Across the street is an outdoors store called Pete's Garage. We marveled at the highly priced bikes in the shop -- which looked like they came directly from this year's Tour de France. Who in Green Bay was purchasing this $8000-$1200 bikes?
One of their displays was this old SUV tricked out with a Thule rooftop tent. I thought that was pretty cool. It struck me with the this kind of desire image: I wanted to be in a pine forest (probably in the mountains, lake or stream nearby, sweet smell of pines), climbing up to the tent, ready to spend a dark night under the pines. I saw myself immediately in that idyllic spot.
On This Day (07/14):
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