James Lommasson

Sue leaves for another trip in the morning, so we took this afternoon off from all our projects and went to see the new photographs on exhibit at Blue Sky Gallery. One of the artists currently featured at Blue Sky is working on the erasure of black lives in the USA (Sue is preparing her blip about that one). The gallery also has drawers full of work by local photographers, including the work of James Lommasson. Sue and I were examining his photographs, admiring and commenting to each other on them, and while we were looking at his work, he just happened to visit the gallery himself--and introduced himself to us! 

He has been working for the past decade on a collection of photographs of objects--a plate, a prayer rug, an old photograph--that refugees from Iraq and Syria take with them when they flee their countries. He meets refugees, asks them to allow him to take a picture of something they brought from their old home, and then he takes a large print of the photograph back to them and invites them to write on it in Arabic or English about the meaning the object has for them. Then he makes a new photograph of the object, including the written text. 

These slippers, ironically depicting the US Flag, belong to a fifteen-year-old who bought them in Basrah. Many examples of Lommasson’s photography augmented by the interesting and artful ways people have written on his photos, appear in a spiral-bound book, What We Carried, and on this link there is a preview of the book so you can see them. I have always been drawn to the ways words complement and enhance photographs (which is why I was drawn to Blipfoto in the first place), and Lommasson’s work makes a new art-form of the combination of the two.

There are no words in my heart or my vocabulary to express my horror at the bomb dropped on Afghanistan by the US Government.