Left: Whistler's stairwell from the lower bookstore to the upper level with the reading room (right)
Ellen Walterscheid, writer
Whistler's Books was one of the best-known independent bookstores in Kansas City.
It was located in the middle of the Westport area and seemed to be permanent.Whistler's is now long gone.
These are a few pictures of a reading from 21 July 1996.
This reading featured writer Ellen Walterscheid and Friends.
Left: Whistler's stairwell from the lower bookstore to the upper level with the reading room (right)
Ellen Walterscheid, writer
Applying an indexed color table (color temperature) to another photo from the same postion as the top left photo.
View is from the top of the stairwell, peeking over the stairwell wall.
Writer Meg Huber - during this reading at Whistler's ('96)
Meg, at home (April 1997)
Web-Monkey / Photographer Note I recently returned to this page and to a set of companion pages (July 2009). I was reminded of how one or two small pictures on a page seemed, in the mid 90's, like a photo gallery. Shooting with digital cameras changed both the way I shoot pictures and my ideas about the number of pictures on a page. After looking at these I think I may need to return to a smaller number of shots and a few more visual experiments. I like the way the pages looked and their more intimate, smaller presentation, more deliberate about what goes on the page. I also like the look, a little more homespun. It seems much friendlier. In the mid 90's I did a lot of duo-tones and arbitrary color table changes. Looking at the pages again, I had to laugh at myself for originally labeling the above picture as "hot." Clearly the "hot" label can have several meanings but I was a bit single-minded, immersed within Photoshop. It had not occured to me that anyone might think I meant a hot photo of someone, with implied search-engine conotations. Calling it "hot" is based on a black-body color table. If you don't know what a "black body" is (and I suspect most people don't) I should to explain (or click the link). A "black body" is a term used in physics to describe a theoretical body (a gob of inanimate matter, not a human) which is totally and absolutely black at zero-degrees Kelvin temperature (i.e. no light can reflect from it) and which changes color as it is heated. Think of iron heated in a forge until it glows in "hot" colors. As it becomes hotter it glows red, then orange then yellow, eventually becomes white hot and then blue and so forth. This closely compares to the colors from a tungsten light bulb at various temperatures. That brings up a time in 1967 when I was new to photography and just as oblivious to alternate understandings. Brown developer stains on your fingers were supposedly the mark of a true darkroom worker. |
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