Posts By: Jessi

Free Renaissance Music

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I’ve adored renaissance music for many years and I’ve wished more of my friends would join me in appreciating its charms. photo credit: Fujoshi If you’re unfamiliar with Western music before the Baroque era, here is a pleasing, friendly introduction to some lovely tunes. Originally sung or plucked on lute strings, they translate well to… Read more »

Naval historical fiction: Patrick O

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Go thou and beg, borrow or steal Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander and enter into a world of entertaining adventure and moving friendships. O’Brian’s hero, gregarious Jack Aubrey, and his geeky sidekick Stephen Maturin are such well-developed characters, I half expect to turn a corner and run into them someday—despite knowing they led wholly fictional… Read more »

An American Self-Portrait

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This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.