Bad Wig and Ugly Tracksuit Walk - Happy New Year at Green Lake

Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion, 2012 "Annual Bad Wig and Ugly Tracksuit Walk at Green Lake (left) Cory Gooch (right) Jana Rekosh"

For more photos from this deliciously fun day,  follow me to flickr.

Just watched Portlandia for the first time last night. I would say Seattle can easily give Portland a run for it's money. Shout out to Marlow Harris and Jo David for keeping this new years event alive and well.

Fall afternoon at Green Lake

Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion, 2007

Any afternoon, depending on the season the time may change, but any afternoon there is this timeless moment at the edge of Green Lake. Such a remarkable place.

Visual abstraction

"Winter, 2010" @Ann-Marie Stillion, all rights reserved, 2011

Abstraction in visual art hovers somewhere in darkness these days. Often images are called abstraction when they are merely not well understood or don't seem to be a picture of something. I offer the idea of abstraction as being an image which brings the viewer to the same place as the artist. An abstract brings our busy minds to a pause and we breath in and out more slowly. --ams

Beautiful Sue

I met Sue Doupe over a year ago. Full of energy and a great photographer with an established photography business in family portraits and headshots for actors & business in Seattle, her beauty inspires great photography. Also a skilled actor who has taught and performed, her natural sense of drama comes out in front of the camera as well as behind it.

Of late, Sue and Lisa Ahlberg and I started getting go together for fun with our cameras for a few hours a week somewhere in the Seattle. Business, children and jobs mean we can not do it for long but actually good things don't have to last long to be meaningful.

I took this picture with the Mamiya 330s I got from another photographer, Neil Lukas. It feels both heavy and light, complex and simple. Somehow I am so comfortable and excited about it in ways that the digital doesn't always provide for me these days. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily use the flash for now so I am concentrating on natural light.

I am planning on using the medium format almost exclusively for an upcoming project, facelessness, which will talk about displaced American tech workers and their foreign counterparts caught up in the current global struggle for jobs. Not an easy subject but an important human one which impacts so many aspects of life now: can we live globally and locally? Can we leave these most personal decisions to the massive impersonal corporate decision makers who often choose profit over balanced living? Can the marketplace really work for individuals to help us mind the heart and soul we need to survive once the bills are paid?

outside/in--a photography installation

Click here for a slideshow of the installation from creation to exhibition

On March 5, with help of Valerie Thayer and the suggestion of Neil Lukas, I mounted a photography installation at The Press Gallery in Seattle's Pioneer Square district. The exhibit runs from March 5-31 and includes the wall mounted installation of two images (and two 16x20 digital archival prints for sale) which were photographed at Green Lake, a beautiful natural oasis surrounded by the urban world. In my neighborhood park, I have seen eagles hunting ducklings and every shape of humanity doing all kinds of things in my walks and photo expeditions. One of the images "Walking Green Lake" celebrates the main human activity and the other, "Duck Island" is of the mystical land mass in the center of lake. The island takes on different shapes and forms as you traverse the watery world. On this day, it spoke to me in mystic terms. (In the photo above is the Lockwood Jazz Trio seen from the street, peering into the gallery.) Thanks to everyone who made that night a blast. The music was amazing and the crowd a delight.