12.24-25.2011 toys, playgrounds, graffiti streets, C/O Berlin: Ron Galella, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, and a little bit of Christmas

haha! got your face!

Although back home this day is just Christmas Eve, more people celebrate this day rather than the next. My flat-mate left to visit family for the weekend, so the apartment and the cats were ours. I wondered what I would be doing if I did not have company over the holidays and then shook my head at the idea of it, it was a dispiriting thought.

We headed out early on Christmas eve since all the shops closed around noon, so we had to scramble to grab whatever groceries we could and check out whatever stores were still open. On this day, the lady at the grocery store wished me a merry Christmas while handing over a mini chocolate bar as I was being pushed out of the check out line by other last minute grocery shoppers.

And on Christmas day, nothing turned out the way it was planned. We went to a restaurant we found online but it was fully booked for the evening when we got there, and found a deserted lot bombed with graffiti instead. Then we went to get coffee at this cafe I've heard about, but got disoriented and found a great photography exhibition instead. When we got to the cafe, they were out of coffee, but as it turns out, they had a great selection of cakes and pies to eat!

All in all, thanks for being here with me for the holiday season.

We walked by this store and paused. Walked back two steps and glanced at each other with a glint in our eyes. How could we step away from a place called "imaginarium" that comes with a door for both kids and adults?

She's so asian!

Came across this simple playground. Had this fun wobbly wooden bridge thing. 

wobble wobble wobble

stuck!

he sticks like glue.

And then I made dinner. Enough dinner to last us three days. 

dinner for two

played little children's board games

I won, of course.

opened presents...!

Christmas morning

Think you're hot ?

  

graffiti in an abandoned lot

Ron Galella is a famed paparazzo. He steals and reveals parts of peoples lives with his camera stalking skills and comes out of angry bashings and legal battles with many stories to tell. We stumbled across this building when we came out of the wrong station exit looking for the KW gallery cafe. The exhibition was good, the photos were categorized by type of people, and in each photo the person caught is unguarded and real as Galella leaves comments about how and when or where the photo was taken .

The building where C/O Berlin is at used to be the Royal Post Office. Now it is an "international forum for visual dialogue". It's a really nice space with many large spacious areas and many different rooms. Upstairs there was another exhibition with photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy. Titled: The early years, photographs from 1977-1990. Perhaps this was on purpose, that the two running exhibitions were portraying two entirely different worlds over the same time period, but it was well done. Although fame and fortune vs dirt and grime are easily and often juxtaposed, there was a thoughtful connection placed between the two running exhibitions. It's almost a coincidence (no coincidence really, but a smart curator I believe) that the pictures are captured in a similar manner --they tell a story, they invade and are very personal. Although the stories are very different, there is something there that brings the two photographers together. How do I describe Grundula Schulze Eldowy's series of works to you? They were grim yet honest and realistic about life and others I couldn't even stand to look at. 

"I was immune to any kind of tragedy at that time. What spurred me on was curiosity. It was a sense of beauty, too, which taught me dismay." - Grundula Schulze Eldowy

 My friend and I agree that we don't particularly enjoy photography because we don't understand it. But the images captured here told stories we could feel.