It was sometime in the summer, 2018, Mom and I took a road trip, from her house in NW Arkansas, up through Springfield, MO, to Kansas City, MO and KS, mostly stopping at used bookstores and whatnot. I don’t recall the impetus for it. We stayed the night in Springfield, I think, and so there must have been something she or I or we wanted to do, but I don’t really recall what…
As we were in KC, I just had to get to the sculpture garden at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art museum (the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park) to visit Claes Oldenberg & Coosje van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks.
If you can’t quite tell, the Shuttlecocks, like most of Oldenberg & van Bruggen’s more famous sculptures, are massive.
There are four, I think, in total: 1 all by itself on one side of the museum; three scattered down the length of the lawn on the other side, and they all look quite at home on the lawn outside the Nelson Atkins.
I finished a roll of Lomography Color 400 on arrival and loaded a roll of Lomography Color 100. Of course, me being me, I forgot to change the ISO setting on the FM3a, and, again, me being me, kept on shooting in Aperture Priority mode.
There might be a slight magenta cast, or maybe my color correction is off (probably the latter), but the Color 100 seems to have held up fine. I don’t have notes on whether or not I compensated for this in development, and given that the two rolls were scanned on the same day, I suspect I just underexposed by two stops. And, really, the Color 100 held up fine, more or less.
Down at the end of the sculpture garden, we stopped at the Robert Morris Glass Labyrinth. Mom wanted to walk it, but there was a big caution bollard blocking the door. We dithered for a moment, but then a ghostly voice came from the Labyrinth and told us to go on…
So if you find yourself wandering the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park at the Nelson Atkins museum, be aware that they’re watching, whoever “they” are, and even if the Museum itself is closed. Spooky.
It’s nice to have an archive of photographs sufficiently large enough to pull a fairly coherent, previously unshared/unseen set of photographs together with very little forethought. I stumbled across these while looking for something else and the two rolls they came from hadn’t been color corrected yet. If I recall, I stumbled into some ticks later on in the trip, and spent a miserable week or so alternating between itching and soaking in bleach baths, so maybe I just forgot.
Anyway, they’re here now, and I’m pleased enough with a few of the pictures. That last one would’ve looked much better in black & white, I think. Oh well.
