Natural light falls on an altar in Sligo, turning everything to gold. One of my MANY GOALS (because I have no sense of proportion) is to someday go around and do a “holy sites” kind of photographic book, in part because if I did that I could probably get permission to photograph a bunch of places one isn’t normally allowed to, and with better lighting in the places one *is* allowed to. Although really, you can’t get much better than this light, which I caught out of sheer fortune.
Ban an appai, the name of this boat, means something like “witchy woman,” as far as I can tell. This was taken down somewhere in County Cork in the general area of where my friend Kate’s grandmother is buried (give or take ten square miles) She might remember more specifically where it is, but it’s a beautiful little town on an inlet, one of several we visited that day. I could very happily spend weeks, months, indeed, probably years, riding my bike around this country and finding places like this…
Bantry is, in road miles, not all that far from Cork city. Eighty miles, or something. They are, however, eighty miles on bitty wee twisty tiny roads intended for horses and paved over when cars became prevailant, so it’s a much longer drive than one might necessarily expect. It ought to be taken on a bicycle, which would not feel like it was going to fall off the side of the road at any given moment. On the other hand, it did afford views like these. And actually, the southwest…
This baby bongo was born last year at Dublin Zoo. I remember the first time I saw the male bongo, whose antlers (horns?) are quite magnificent. He was curled against one of the fences, his head lowered so his mouth was near the ground, and when I looked at him through my camera viewfinder, I saw a classic African carving. It was an absolutely visceral visual, completely startling to me, and quite wonderful, as I’d never experienced anything like that before. Sadly, that picture didn’t turn out nearly as successfully…
This statue of Annie Moore and her brothers Phillip and Anthony look west at Cobh Harbour, from whence so many Irish left for America. Annie was the first immigrant processed at the newly opened Ellis Island on January 1, 1892, the same facility my own grandfather passed through almost thirty-five years later. There’s a statue of Annie Moore at Ellis Island, too, looking eastward toward Ireland. I’d love to get a picture of that statue, too, but it wouldn’t be as spectacular as this one, by simple dint of being…