In the Venn Diagrams of real life, I sometimes have overlapping assignments or projects that allow me some increased efficiency, or, in the vernacular, to kill two birds with one stone.

For several weeks I’ve been going through all my digital and film files (since the early 70’s) looking for photographs of the Savannah riverfront and changes to it over time, initially for material a friend could use in a presentation on the history of that area, and, consequently, a personal photographic exhibition, “The Persistence of Change.” The show will be hanging in the Rotunda of Savannah City Hall from August 28 until the end of the year.

My biggest takeaway from all that research is that I wish I had done a better job of recording times, dates, places, details to go with the images. I’ll be 77 in a couple of weeks and I’m beginning to wonder if relying on memory to provide that information was the best approach.

The second project was for my Rotary (Rotary Club of Savannah). I provide some photographs of club activity for our social media and I noticed recently that our Facebook cover photo was in poor shape, bad definition, like a JPEG file that has been opened and re-saved 8-10 times. To add a cover photo on my personal FB page, I’ve always just dropped in the file and then moved it around to get the best cropping within the context of the image. I imagine most people do it that way, but it is a very specific format, 8.51 x 3.15. (There are some variations on this because of mobile applications.)

Using the pool of photographs from the riverfront, and a previous, broader Savannah area assortment, I looked for compositions that exploited that strong horizontal shape, cropping them to the specific proportions in editing rather than shoehorning in something that might have been a strong photograph, but which actually lost some impact or important information because of the odd cropping. The final result–I now have a folder of assorted “Savannah landmark” photos for Rotary to use and some pretty pictures I can easily drop into my personal FB cover, so maybe I’ll change them more frequently than I have in the past.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

In Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory,” melting clocks suggest that no matter how hard and fixed something may seem in the moment, over time, everything changes. Live long enough, and you start to understand. I don’t mean that you understand the adage, “Change is the only constant.” I mean on a cellular level you recognize the steady, incessant, relentless drive of change, happening in every moment, everywhere. Seeing change is a little like Ernest Hemingway once described bankruptcy: it happens two ways; gradually, and then suddenly.

As I remember it, when I was in high school, in the early 60’s, Captain Sam had a boat named “The Waving Girl.” In addition to whatever other boating business he pursued, he offered picnic/swim-party day trips for groups to the beach over on Daufauski Island. That’s before there was “Conrack,” or a golf course. One’s biggest concern during those “lazy, hazy days of summer” (thank you Nat King Cole) was, depending on your motivation, to try to slip off into the bushes with a companion, or to try to prevent anyone from doing that.

A few weeks ago a friend asked if I had some photographs from the Savannah riverfront during some general time frames, for her to use in an upcoming presentation “A Walk Down River Street” (https://reg129.imperisoft.com/SeniorCitizens/ProgramDetail/3531393030/Registration.aspx). Pulling files for that has led to me doing an exhibition in the Rotunda of Savannah’s City Hall.

The exhibition “The Persistence of Change,” explores the continuing evolution of Savannah’s riverfront in a series of photographs spanning the past five decades, reminding us that we are on a change continuum that started long before each of us arrived and one that will continue long after each of us is gone. From August 28^th through December 2024, the exhibit will be on display in the rotunda gallery of Savannah’s historic City Hall (open to the public Monday-Friday, 8:30am-5:00pm).

Artist Talk Details:

• Program: Photographer Bill Durrence discusses his work on display in the exhibit “The Persistence of Change,” followed by an opportunity to view the exhibit with the artist
• Where: 2^nd Floor Media Room, Savannah City Hall, Bay Street at Bull Street
• When: Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 3:30pm
• Registration Required: This program is free and open to the public, but space is limited and registration required. Email [email protected] to reserve your space now.

To see more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

My newest web gallery, “Kolkata: Art, Spirit, 2012,” https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G00007QMbT_AMcUI, concludes my four part photo-essay on my brief visit to Kolkata.

My reason for being there was my Dad. Dad was a farm kid from deep in the country of southeast Georgia who never finished the 7th grade. In WW II he was in the US Army Air Corps, stationed in the Bengal area of Bangladesh and India (all of it India then), and it’s always seemed to me it would have been a huge culture shock for him. I regret he passed before I was curious enough to ask him about his feelings, details of his experience. One thing is, Dad was so low key, took everything with equanimity, at least on the surface, so no matter how much he might have been surprised, most people watching him would not register that. Mom used to say the only way she could tell if he was teasing her sometimes was a little twitch near the corner of his mouth.

I wanted, in some small way, to try to get a feel for what he might have seen, even all these years later.

During my visit, and now reviewing the images, it feels like a creative thread runs through every aspect of life there. Something being practical, utilitarian, doesn’t mean it can’t also be pretty or interesting visually, and the craftsmanship is sometimes spectacular. The gallery runs through a series from art found on the street to elaborate spiritual palaces. In September/October Kolkata celebrates the Durga Puja festival and for months beforehand extravagant straw and clay sculptures and altars are created to only be walked into a river and left to dissolve at the end.

In the countryside, ancient temples are covered with small tiles of bas-relief designs and characters, or groupings, each character uniquely individual.

All four of the Kolkata essay chapters are at https://www.billdurrence.com/index/all

If you want to know the feel of a place, you need to be on foot, on the street, off the beaten tourist path, and not part of a herd. It is not enough to see something of it through a window. You have to be where you can hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it. Step in it.

It was HOT! My intrepid travel companion, Randy Thompson, and I were in Bengal in early June, a few weeks before monsoon. It was the kind of hot that makes a cold beer taste so good, even to people who don’t usually like beer. Coming from Bangladesh where I could not get a beer (Muslim country), the first swig of a cold one the first day in Kolkata was ambrosia; I set the bottle down on a table and when I picked it up for the next taste, it was already too hot to drink. In temples and other spiritual sites you were expected to go barefoot out of respect, so we quickly danced across various hot paving stones until reaching the cool, soothing feel of marble.

It would have been so much easier to lie near-naked in a dark hotel room, lit only by the bright glowing around the window shutters, with a ceiling fan languidly pushing at the thick air. If you grew up in the American South pre-air conditioning, you know the drill. But much of the point of travel for me is to be surprised, and that’s unlikely to happen if cocooning.

I want to see what I might discover; discover in the sense of Christopher Columbus discovering North America. A lot of other people may already know, but it’s new to me. To capture detail and intimacy in narrative photographs of that journey, I like to use a wide angle lens and step into the scene. Here that let me see a fashion/style clash between the main subject-the women-that could be a metaphor for any number of social/political battles, and also include story-telling context like the bakery in the left background with goods in a modern deli case surrounded by a dirt storefront, the patchwork of architecture, and scary nightmare of wiring.

My new web gallery, Kolkata: On the Street, 2012, https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000gmGmlDXTr4Y, is a series of photographs from street level that tell some stories of the “feel” I got for Kolkata and countryside.