Take a trip to the street corners of the world

Ron at Street Rhythms show –Eugene library – Nov. 8, 2015. All photos for this post taken by Leola Jewett-Verzuh

KLCC radio interview – aired Nov. 25, 2015

Street Rhythms – Register-Guard – Dec. 3, 2015

My show “Street Rhythms ­– A Photographic Journey” opened on Nov. 8, 2016, for a two-month exhibition at the Eugene Public Library. The 27 photographs in the collection are images of people from around the world that were taken over 25 years from the mid-1980s to 2010. Here is the description that appears with the show.

Welcome aboard! You are about to take a journey to several street corners of the world and on each one you will meet different people from different walks of life with different stories to tell.

In Sonoma, Arizona, an elderly Hopi woman looks left and right. Is she searching for an answer from her past or offering one to the future? On a dirt road near Cape Town, South Africa, another old woman carries a ten-gallon bucket of water on her head. She’s playing a role African women have played for centuries.

On a hilltop in Medellin, Colombia, children play in the rusty red soil near their slum dwellings. What does life hold for them as their displaced mothers try to eke out a living in the city below? A couple get married in Red Square while a guard stands at the Kremlin wall. Women and men join a union strike rally near Johannesburg. A Turkish woman studies the produce in a Berlin market while a Spanish woman scowls at the camera in Barcelona. A blue bass thumps in a crowded market in Port Townsend, Washington. Potato peelers look up from the outdoor kitchen of an aboriginal settlement near Cali, Colombia.

Some are at play in markets. Others blow their horns or dance the tango. Still others shop or sell or otherwise go about their daily business. These are images of ordinary people captured as they rest or work or seem to ponder their futures. Is something about to happen to perhaps change their lives? Are their faces telling us about their pain, their joy, and their puzzlement?

As you come to the end of this journey consider how much these people are like people anywhere, finding a rhythm to live by and to guide them through lives that are not so unlike our own.

Leaving Street Rhythms we may think about each of these ordinary people living in different parts of the world – some poor, some wealthy, some exotic. The stories these images tell are full of commonplace settings but there is also mystery and wonder here.

Welcome to some of the Street Rhythms that keep time to the beat of the globe!

Watch for a short video of the show to be posted to this site.

Tags: exhibitions, photos, street rhythms

This entry was posted on November 9, 2015 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Featured, Journeys, Memoirs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.