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Brief Interruptions

Brynn Shepherd is a Product Designer at Facebook. This is a place for some of the interesting things she finds on the Internet.

Jan 23

“ There has always been a respectful suspicion between the East Coast and West Coast, perhaps because they offer competing visions of the same good life. In particular, New York and San Francisco are cities that seem to trade citizens freely, for why would you want to live anywhere else? On one side: genius, quirk, people showing up to work in sneakers, a Lexus and a Prius in the two-car garage. On the other: the hustler’s ambition, the valor of cruel seasons and cramped quarters, the smell of old money. Two different ways of saying the word ‘awesome.’

— Hua Hsu, “Going Back to Cali”

Jan 22

“ When you photograph you give up much of the quality of the immediate experience; but the payoff is that you have this record, these images that you can refer to and use for the rest of your life.

— Charles Eames

Jan 20

Same Hill, Different Day by Paul Octavious

Jan 03

“ Painters from Poussin to Seurat, Picasso to Mondrian, Pollock to Chuck Close have exploited the special power of grids to create order yet also highlight small differences. Manhattan’s grid is not perfectly regular. Some blocks are longer than others. Some avenues are wider. Broadway cuts diagonally across six north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces…We feel all these shifts in the grid, alert to changes thanks to the expectation of sameness.

— Michael Kimmelman, “The Grid at 200: Lines That Shaped Manhattan”

Jan 01

#40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011 by Doug Rickard:

Unlike the making of street photos in the traditional sense, with Street View there is an oblivious-ness to the camera as it goes about its job with no feeling or emotion. In spite of this anonymity of machine, his images are — perhaps surprisingly — layered with empathy.

Dec 12

“ A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off.

— Paul Graham, “Cities and Ambition”

Dec 03

“ We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but they will never taste like anything. An image represents and verifies a memory but the rest is left to imagination.

— Joanne McNeil, “The Never Forgotten House“ (via Frank Chimero)

Dec 01

“ My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (via Frank Chimero)

Nov 18

A History of the Sky for One Year by Ken Murphy:

I installed a custom camera rig on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in SF, which captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds, around the clock, for a year. From these images, I created an array of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day, arranged chronologically, and playing in sync. My intention was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

Nov 17

“ The world is deluged with objects and images intended to record and remind us of people and places and, once their immediate moment has passed and the emotional connection has been severed, most are ignored. My choices of postcard to write about here might seem whimsical or arbitrary. They are, but it could scarcely be otherwise. At least they are conscious choices. We make meaning by selecting and discarding — by editing. The more images we collectively over-produce, the more ruthless we need to be as individual viewers in bestowing our precious attention only on things that matter to us.

— Rick Poynor, ”The Infinite Warehouse of Images”