Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires, also check out www.BuenosAiresPhotographer.com |
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| Inside the Biennial Pavillion at Parque Ibirapuera. The structure is one of several in the park designed by Oscar Niemeyer. It's the site of the famous contemporary art biennial and has always been closed on my previous visits. They were having a very interesting architecture show but I really just went to explore the building. |
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| Connecting several of the large building in the park is this concrete covering. In a colder climate it would be forbidding but here it's a welcome spot of shade, except that the place is completely colonized by skateboarders on weekends. |
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| Here's some evidence of the skateboarders and bikers careening off the walls creating a beautiful, abstract pattern |
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| Pirolito seller |
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| In front of some pichações near Avenida Paulista |
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| There was this random chair in front of an apartment building in Itaim so I sat down and had Vagner take a picture of me |
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| This small house in Itaim on Rua Tabapuã covered with pichações is not actually abandoned. The owner smiled at me from across the street. He's surrounded by high rises and probably holding out for the right price. |
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| Another small hold-out house in Vila Madalena with a VW Beetle, known as a fusca, parked in front. Like vochos in DF, fuscas in Brazil are getting scarcer. |
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| An abandoned construction near the Vila Madalena Metro Stop. I'm actually seeing fewer and fewer abandoned constructions as Sao Paulo seems to be enjoying a construction boom. Even the Eletropaulo building in Pinheiros is being completed: before / current. |
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| Tree roots busting up sidewalks in Sao Paulo
If humans ever disappear it's easy to see how the Mata Atlantica will just devour the city like another lost Mayan pyramid. |
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| Sao Paulo's fire hydrants are underneath the sidewalks, painted bright red and often outlined in yellow too. Each building is responsible for the surfacing of its own sidewalk which can make for some uneven but visually interesting shoe-gazing. |
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| I went to Sao Paulo last week for quick vacation. My one concession to American tradition was to eat the turkey and provolone sandwhich, pictured above, on Thanksgiving. My Brazilian friends had a sense from film & TV that this was an important holiday and seemed puzzled by my nonchalance. My Thanksgiving ambivalence goes back to college when a cross country trip for a long weekend seemed extravagant and tiring. Things didn't change much when I lived in New York. A flight to California was still too far but the arithmetic of scarce vacation days compelled me to travel on these weeks--10 continuous days for only 3 vacation days. Ironically I'd go much further than California; Paris, Buenos Aires, Portugal. This year I was already at home but in need of getting away. The work/vacation logic prevailed again Sao Paulo won. Apologies for the lack of posts the last ten days. Pictures of graffiti and alluring urban chaos to come. |
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| When I lived in New York at Mulberry & Houston I would often walk by Jen Bekman's gallery on Spring st. and peek in at the latest photography exhibit. Since I've been gone I've been following it vicariously on her blog. I recently purchased two prints from her 20x200 program where she sells 200 small prints for $20 each from various artists. The photo on the left is by Kate Bingman-Burt as part of her Obsessive Consumption series. It reminds me of standing outside a Jumbo in Santiago, Chile late on a fall afternoon, seeing a similar line of shopping carts and wanting to take a picture. The photo on the right, Bags, is by Beth Dow from her Fieldwork series. I got this print because it reminded me of an Adam Gopnik article from the New Yorker [not online, it seems] about a crazy guy who walks around the west village with a long pole removing plastic super-market bags from trees. Anyway, the prints are small but nice and don't take up a lot of space. $20 is not a hard amount to justify. Oh, and I just bought a 3rd picture by Joseph O Holmes of Joe's NYC.
I'll also try to stop taking photos of photos and put up some more interesting stuff here :) |
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| This book arrived in the mail yesterday from France. It's Globe-Painter by Julien Malland. You might recognize the photo on the cover. I took it. It's the skyline of Sao Paulo at dusk. Here's the original. This is my first book cover. I feel like a proud parent. |
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| The cover is embossed with pichações, a typical style of graffiti writing in Brazil.
The book is about the author's journey around the world, photographing different graffiti works and their artists. Here's Malland's Myspace profile. You can also buy the book on Amazon France. |
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| Julien wrote me a nice little note on the inside. He emailed me a year ago after having seen my Sao Paulo Skyline page and asked if he could use one of the images for the cover of his book. All my images are under Creative Commons license, so I said of course. |
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| And there's the credit :) |
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| A pole sculpture my mom did and installed in our backyard. I took a bunch of photos of it this morning so one of her friends can reassemble it in her yard. Here's the whole set. |
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 | Hi. I'm a 32 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |