Belly Button Exercise

Many City Daily Photo Bloggers this week are participating in a "festival of the belly button" exercise, reflecting on the way their photography and their blogs have changed since their blogs began.

Here is a photograph from August 2010 -- about six weeks after my blog began -- of Ken Kahn and Thomas Hooker:

Ken was the executive director of the Greater Hartford Arts Council and played a big role in adding more public art in the region, including this statue of a Hartford founder.

Here is a previously unpublished photograph of Heather and Suzi, taken in November 2012:

What are the odds that a woman in a green V-neck sweater and black pants would walk past me just as I was looking at this painting?  Heather is a curator at the New Britain Museum of American Art.  I asked her to stand with Norbert Brunner's 2010 three dimensional work, Suzi.  Suzi is painted with dots on four sides of a plexiglass cube, each side of which is composed of three plexi sheets.  It is influenced by pointillism.

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The similarities in the two images are strong . . . in each case I posed someone with a work of art.  The more recent composition is stronger.   The biggest growth is in process.  I know Ken very well, so when I encountered him, it was easy to ask a friend to pose.  (He might even have been the one to suggest standing next to the Hooker statue.)  But, now I have become very comfortable about walking up to complete strangers like Heather.  I tell them about my blog, ask if I can take their picture, and then tell them where to stand and where to look.  So, today I am able to show a wider variety of people in my portraits, not just my friends, and the compositions are often better.