Cold and warm

Red, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Jari Sillanpää in concert, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Well, the weather got warmer, but it is very windy and there is snow coming. Temperature is -5°C, so it is safely below the freezing point, promising a white Christmas.

Here are two photographs, one from today, the other from earlier this week. We went with the family to hear Jari Sillanpää sing Christmas songs. I had the flu then, but it was not so bad any more, and it was very nice to be there with the family. I took some photographs with the LX3, with manual focusing and no flash, so it didn't disturb anyone (for all practical purposes the camera is silent when shooting).

Update: I have been reading Joseph Mitchell's 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, one of the most intense books I have ever encountered. I don't mean action, I mean intense as "packed with details about real people and real life in New York". Although the book is classified under fiction, it is reportage of the highest order. For some reason, the writing reminds of photography, perhaps because of the huge amount of visual detail, or perhaps because of the subject matter. I think you could call this "street writing" (cf. street photography). In fact, he was married to a photographer, Therese Mitchell.

Update 2: I found another connection with Mitchell and photography: "When Diane Arbus was scouting for freaks to pose for her in the late '60s, she called Mitchell, whom she considered an expert on the subject. The courtly Mitchell spoke to Arbus at length but didn't open his address book for her. Their tendencies as artists were almost diametrically opposed. Arbus could take even an innocent young girl and bring out something ghoulishly lonely about her; her work with more unusual subjects also highlighted their freakishness, even as it humanized them. Mitchell, however, possessed a natural empathy, approaching even his more unusual subjects without condescension. As a result, he could get very private people to open up to him. His idea of research seems to have been to hang around a scene for five or 10 years; when he wrote his pieces, one of the marvels was how effaced the reporter was, often to the point of invisibility."