Daily Blague

Although I didn't expect to see them before Christmas, the two photographs by JR of L'homme qui marche that I'd bought prints of through Flickr were ready to be picked up on Tuesday. As you can see, I chose to frame them together, side by side; for I don't believe that I could ever choose just one of them without eternally regretting the loss of the other. Of all the snaps that I took, the one that I've chosen best captures the warmth of the corner of our bedroom. To see the images themselves properly, look for the thumbnails here and enlarge them. Despite being crazy-cheap, the prints are excellent, capturing all the detail that you can see on screen.

The framer beamed as she brought the frame out. "Everybody likes how it came out," she said. She has said this once or twice before in the course of framing two dozen pictures.

Now begins the scramble. JR's photos take the place of a larger but similarly shaped print that never belonged in the bedroom. It's an extremely austere, fastidiously black-and-white drawing of a railroad bridge somewhere, I should say, not far from Philadelphia. The angle between the humdrum intersection in the left foreground and the rail line, which is indicated by a parade of the pylons from which power lines are suspended. There is neither a vehicle nor a human figure in sight; the more I look at it, the more it seems to capture an industrial ideal that we have abandoned, even though we're still surrounded, here in the Northeast, by its remains. This picture will go into the blue room, where I spend my day, and displace, ultimately, a shadow-boxed platter. The platter, nineteenth-century English pseudo-export, broke cleanly in two one day when something so surprising happened that I no longer recall what it was. It is now one of three or four porcelain survivors of my maladroit manner that hang on our walls.