Singapore

I visited Singapore recently for the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) conference. The photos I took there follow a pet "lion-dog" as it visits parts of Singapore. A lion-dog is the symbolic guardian of the homes of the "Peranakan" -- people who were the children of mixed ethnic background in southeast Asia. The lion-dog knows the city well. This photo comes from the Peranakan Museum.

The Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) makes commuting in Singapore easy, though the city it much too full of cars for my taste. And the stoplights are too long to make walking easy whenever it is necessary to cross a large street.

The roof gardens in Singapore are a calm refuge from the crowds in the shopping malls and on the streets. This roof garden was near the conference center.

Singapore has religious diversity and tolerance. There are Buddhist and Hindu temples, Islamic mosques, and Christian churches. The lion-dog visited this Hindu temple in a walking street near my hotel.

One of the Singapore's attractions is its Botanical Garden, especially the Orchid garden. The variety is enormous, but the lion-dog had favorites.

While much of Singapore is relentlessly modern, a few neighbors like Little India still exist and have an identity of their own.

As is typical near the equator, the sun goes down suddenly. It seems not to affect the night life, though.

I always try to visit art museums. Singapore has no collection of old masters European style, but it has excellent contemporary art exhibits.

Viewers may notice a few familiar works on the wall, which were there only for the lion-dog's visit.

Leipzig

We spent four days in Leizpig after our holiday in Dresden. These are Saxony's two major cities, but nonetheless quite different in history and temperament. Dresden was the court city and is still the capital city, while Leipzig was and remains commercial city with an historically strong publishing sector. Leipzig also has Germany's second oldest university.

Leipzig  has an impressive collection of old masters , though not quite enough to attract the hordes of tour buses that choke Dresden's Zwinger. Leipzig's Museum der Bildnenen Künsten does something very innovative, though: it integrates very contemporary art, often photographs, in the rooms of the old masters. Sometimes these are photos of the museum itself. The effect is itself artistic and gives the viewer a sense of the continuity of artistic thought. On principle I take no photos of copyright-protected works, as the photos certainly are, so I can show none here. But I can show an example based on what I saw.

Museum der Bildenen Künste

On the suggestion of a friend (I will use no names here, since this is public), I began taking photos of clocks with the idea of putting them together in a single work much like a painting of doors from Guatemala. This turned out to be much harder than I thought, since the individual photos had clocks of different sizes with different amounts of background and different angles.

Saxon Clocks

There were also choices to make with the background color. I tried white originally. Then dark blue, and finally settled on a gold that matched the gold in the clock faces. The leftmost clock comes from the Leipzig Rathaus tower and needed some editing to remove a flag mast that obscured the lower part of the image. One ordering principle is that time progresses from left to right.

The painting below struck me not so much for its merit as for the topic. This examination  reminds me strongly of a Habilitation defense defense.

Hasenclever-Hieronymous Jobs im Examen

Leipzig is rich, but not every building has been renovated. The following photo comes from an alleyway with a ghostly 16th century wooden head from the museum in the window.

Window - Leipzig

Dresden

We are on a holiday trip to Dresden and Leipzig. This blog entry includes only Dresden pictures. Leipzig will follow next week.

Reflections

Dresden was a beautiful city before WWII bombing, and much of its beauty has been restored since the wall came down and east and west Germany reunited. As will be obvious from the photographs, I am interested in the artistic effect of reflections. Only one of the photographs below contains no reflections, and two are only reflections. Reflection both distorts images and gives them context because of the surface on which the reflection takes place. The effect can be at once impressionist and ethnographically informative.

Dresden Sights

The Altmarkt (old market) reflected in the Kulturpalast, was the first photo I took in Dresden. The orange-glass Kulturpalast is architecturally reminiscent of the now vanished Palast der Republik, the parliament building of the old east German regime. In the right light, he building functions marvelously as a mirror.

Kulturpalast-Reflections

The Grosser Garten in Dresden is the city's equivalent of the Tiergarten in Berlin or Hyde Park in London or Central Park in New York City. It is large and diverse. The Palace below stands roughly at the center of the Garden and reflects in its own large pool.

Grosser Garten - Dresden - Palace

Dresden Neustadt is the area across the Elbe where my great grandfather (among others) lived before the bombing. It has a mix of architecturally boring state offices, decrepit buildings awaiting repair,  lively shopping, and a bohemian district that resembles the atmosphere of Prenzlauerberg in Berlin. This photo shows a reflection from a window in the shopping district.

Dresden Neustadt - Reflected

The river Elbe is a major feature of Dresden, and an annoying one when it floods, as happened recently. This tourist photo shows the bridge known as der Blaue Wunder (the blue wonder). The restaurants along the Elbe suffered badly during the flooding, but most are back in business.

Blaue Wunder - Elbe Bridge

Wildflowers

In the middle of a very well-to-do district on the Elbhang, I saw a garden filled with wildflowers and with bees feeding on them. Bees are not easy to capture on camera, but this one cooperated.

Wildflowers with Bee - Elbhang

Light on water

Berlin has experienced a week of heat, sun, and very still air, which creates interesting mirror effects in the river Spree. The first photo is of a notable building called "Lessinghaus", which appears to have survived the bombing of the second world war with relatively little damage.

 

 Lessinghaus

The second picture shows the Lessing Bridge, with a re-purposed old industrial park that now includes the Abion hotel and the Ministerium des Innens (just behind the hotel). 

 Lessingbrücke

The last picture has an abstract quality. It was taken further down the river in the direction of the Reichstag and shows trees shimmering in the water.

Reflections

None of these photos have been altered from the original.