August "Monthly Special": Photo within a photo

Dog shopping for a photogravure at a Paris flea market.

Intro
Stories within stories alter our perspective. When a new level of fiction appears, it can change our outlook, emotions, and ideas. Think about Shakespeare's use of the play-within-a-play. Or if you have a three-year-old obsessed with "Monsters, Inc." as I do, you might remember how the opening scene of that movie shifts from horror (the classic childhood bedtime fear of the monster in the closet) to comedy as the sudden wider perspective reveals the video monitors and the sets surrounding Mr. Bile's failed scare simulation. Incidentally, the revelation of Mr. Waternoose's corruption gets its dramatic impact from the same video-within-a-film set-up (I have seen that movie WAY too many times.) In any case, if you take a minute, I bet you can come up with other examples of art-within-art, both high- and low-brow, each with its own effect and function.

My last post hinted at this new theme with a photo of a man painting at the Oregon Coast. The photo showed what he was seeing/painting as well as what I was seeing/photographing. His painting and my photo offer two different perspectives. But as I said, my photo only touches on the theme (in the general sense of art within art), but does not quite fit this month's project.

The challenge
This month I propose the theme of "photo within a photo" as a way of exploring how we interact with photos and how photography affects our perspective. If you blog, please share the story behind your photo and link back to this page (remember to link to the URL of that specific post, not just your general blog address).

Countless variations or How two images can be better than one
The opportunities for storytelling increase with multiple photos. For example, your photo within a photo might use juxtaposition and/or repetition to do any of the following:

• create humor or satire
• look at change (now vs. then)
• transcend time or place (e.g. make the absent become present)
• reveal how your family uses photos (or doesn't)
• make a political or social statement
• change scale
• play with trompe l'oeil illusions

...so many possibilities for just one month. Are you getting ideas? I am. In fact, as usual, I can't even wait until the first day of the month to post the new challenge. Plan on a lot of posts from me this month. I hope to see a lot links from you as well.

Let the creativity begin!

A hint about the next Monthly Special?

One last photo from the Oregon coast. It's not architectural, but it hints at what is to come.

The August Monthly Special will soon be here. Meanwhile, I would still love to see more results from the July Special. If you haven't checked it out recently, there are some new links to enjoy.

A disclaimer for the coming August Special: Although I had planned on doing a Photoshop-based challenge for next month, I changed my mind. So, the good news is that you won't need any special software to participate. And there's no bad news. If you're dying to learn some Photoshop tricks (as you did in June's grid project), I promise to post a Photoshop trick or two within the context of the August Special.

And now for the hint: The photo above would NOT work for the August special, but it touches on the theme.

Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport, Oregon

As inspiration for this month's architectural detail project, here are a few photos of the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport, Oregon.

I pulled over to the side of the road in a precarious spot only to learn upon leaving that there was a safer (and official) place to pull over about 50 feet away. Oops. The stepped sides of the pillars screamed Art Deco to me, probably because I had just spent two weeks in Paris studying archives related to the origins of Art Deco for part of a chapter in my book project.

The view from underneath the bridge makes me think of what historian David E. Nye calls the "technological sublime." The arches and the beam of light coming from the upper right of the photo mimic the view from inside a cathedral, except that in place of stained glass we can look out to admire the complex geometry of steel.

This final photo is a detail of the staircase leading to the main road and the top side of the bridge. I was tempted to use Photoshop to clean up the signs of graffiti tags at the bottom, but decided against it.

Be sure to check out what other people have been posting this month, and add your own if you can.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon

I'm now on the Oregon coast--a far cry from Paris, but not without its own architectural beauty. Today we visited the Yaquina Head Lighthouse and I snapped a few pics and put them together in a grid (click on the photo to enlarge it):

The iron staircase (top middle) is as beautiful as it is hard on the knees, but I also noticed the appeal of the lighting mechanism. Even the floor in the top of the tower caught my eye for its signs of age. And the simplicity of the windows compliments the serenity of the coast.

It's not too late to participate in the Monthly Special. Think about a building in your area that you can better appreciate through photography and share it by linking back here.