Davy's Adult Madhouse: 07/13/11

WHERE CHILDREN SLEEP

On a more serious note over the next few days i will be posting a series of pictures and notes about where children around the world sleep.
Photographer James Mollison travelled around the world and took these pictures that are now a part of his book called "Where Children Sleep

Indira (7) from Nepal. She shares her mattress, which is the only one in the house, with her siblings. Since she was 3 years old she worked at the local granite quarry. She works there six hours a day when she is done with her classes at school, but she dreams about being a dancer.

Kaya (4) from Tokyo, Japan. Living with her parents in a small apartment where she has many dresses, coats, dolls and wigs. She dreams about being a cartoonist when she grows up.

Simple Life Manhattan: A 90-Square-Foot Microstudio

Cool apartment in Manhattan
By choosing a studio that measures just 12 feet by 7 feet, Felice Cohen can afford to live in Manhattan's Upper West Side where apartments rent for an average of $3,600 per month. She pays just over $700 for her 90-square-foot microstudio. After a bit of adjustment she now loves living smaller, simpler and cozier.

VIRGIN OCEANIC

Sir Richard Branson, submarine designer Graham Hawkes, and sailor and aviator Chris Welsh launched Virgin Oceanic. Virgin Oceanic is taking the next step in human exploration. This time, the voyage is to the last frontiers of our own Blue Planet: the very bottom of our seas.

Over the course of 2011 and 2012, Virgin Oceanic's one-person sub will journey to the deepest part of each of Earth's five oceans. The first dive will be to the deepest place on the planet: the bottom of the Mariana Trench - 11 kilometers (7 miles) straight down. For the first time, the deepest trenches in each of the five oceans will be available for surveying, mapping and sampling from an occupied submersible.

http://www.virginoceanic.com/

ELGIN PARK – Remarkable American Town Frozen in Time

Imagine a town as time capsule, where nothing has changed since the 1960s. Certainly, there are examples the world over but for the most part these towns have been abandoned, left to their own devices due to the ravages of war, nuclear pollution or simply changing demographics. However, there is one town in America that still looks just as it would have in the decade that gave birth to rock and roll. Welcome to Elgin Park.

The minutia of everyday American life is there to be seen. The Top Toys store is there on the corner, pristine and just how it was all those decades ago.

The Chevy Dealership is open, waiting for customers.

The OK used car lot is a marketplace of glistening, washed and waxed chrome-ladened splendor, tempting buyers to part with their hard earned dollars.

…and that 55 Ford Crown Victoria is in remarkable condition for its age.

A passenger train hurtles through the town of Elgin Park on a hot and dry summer’s night, heading for the bright lights of the big city. Yet wait a second, hold on. How can a place have been preserved so well for so long? Plus, where are all the people? Let’s pan out a little.

Surprised? A modern day Gulliver has suddenly arrived and his name is Michael Paul Smith.

Perhaps you may already have guessed but the picture postcard town of Elgin Towers, seen on a snowy winter's day above, owes its condition to something a little more than an impenetrable dome come time capsule around its borders.

In fact the town is a creation, a mental combination of memory and fiction brought to life by Michael Paul Smith (pictured above) of Winchester, Massachusetts.

Smith has been making models of small town American life for over a quarter of a century. Elgin Park is, in fact, a 1/24 scale model. It is not based on any of the towns with similar names you will find in the US. It is, however, wholly his own creation and exists only through the eye of a lens.

Yet these pictures look so real – almost perfect captures of moments in time that, in reality never happened, at least as our eyes perceive them. One reason perhaps is the very clever use of real backgrounds to enhance the verisimilitude of the pictures. Smith takes his pictures outdoors against the backdrop of the environs of his real home town of Winchester. In this case you can say with no irony that the camera always lies.

Once he finds the right backdrop for one of his ‘sets’ then Smith pursues a system of trial and error until the right shot is captured. A shadow out of place, a tree in the background which is too tall for the set and the whole illusion would be lost. The same is true of 'night shots' where the lighting is all important.

What truly impresses me about the whole process is that the pictures end up looking like scenes or shots from movies. You could just imagine James Dean walking down Main Street, hand in hand with Natalie Wood, railing about how unfair his parents are to him. You can picture the cast of the original Ocean’s 11 pacing up and down the sidewalk in anticipation of their next masterplan. Or perhaps you might spot Elvis, on his way to cutting his first record.

Perhaps that is one reason that Smith deliberately leaves his sets free of people – so that we can populate them from our own imagination and so in a way contribute to the creative process ourselves. These wonderful pictures of Smith’s amazing sets show that the past retains a power to pull us back, even to times before we were born.

As you can imagine, Smith’s pictures of Elgin Park have caused quite a stir and to celebrate his project a book has been launched. Although it will not be available in bookstores till May 1 you can purchase in on Amazon.

Kuriositas would like to thank Michael Paul Smith for his very kind permission to reproduce the above pictures, including two which are only in the book, available on Amazon. Please visit his Flickr Photostream but be prepared for quite a long stay in Elgin Park. Stock up on coffee and snacks before you transport yourself back in town because you can’t buy them when you get there!