The recent "Garfield Park ... in Pictures" series here at Photo Potpourri, which ran for 41 consecutive days before ending yesterday, had its genesis a couple years ago. That's when I came up with the idea to present the images in blog posts for easy viewer consumption.
Along the way, other projects put "Garfield Park ... in Pictures" on a back burner until six months ago, when I finally began the serious task of poring through scores of archived images that, thankfully, I had organized in a reasonably accessible manner.
The chapter concept as a vehicle to present the images was convenient; I had used chapters last summer to publish On Hoosier Gridirons, a 30-months-long research and interview project that resulted in a non-fiction manuscript (including photographs) spotlighting small high school and small-college football in Indiana. My vehicle for that story was the parallel, early-life stories of two quarterbacks who grew up at the same time but on opposite ends of Indiana and had different experiences navigating their early lives in the sport in the first decade of the new millennium. (You can find that series here at Photo Potpourri by searching for and clicking on the tag "On Hoosier Gridirons" on any blog page or by clicking on this link, which takes you to Chapter 1.)
The "Garfield Park ... in Pictures" project conjured many, many memories, almost all of which are fond. But memories really rushed back to me in a vivid way in mid-March, when I spent a week in the Indianapolis area and visited the park to make my oldest granddaughter's high school senior portraits.
The daily posts for the “Garfield Park ... in Pictures” series were still going live throughout that whole week in Indy. I was back in Raleigh as the final 10 chapters went live, and I found myself appreciating those chapters as well as my dozens of park shoots even more so after having been in the park only a few days before that.
My biggest fear with "Garfield Park ... in Pictures" was that 40 chapters would be construed as excessive. But I was heartened by positive reactions to the blog series, both publicly on social media and in private notes. One always wonders if a project of this magnitude will be worth the time and effort ... or soundly ignored or disregarded.
So today, I decided — at the risk of being gratuitous — to compose on the fly one last post (I won't call it a chapter or even an epilogue) of images that didn't make any of the 40 chapters during the series. That doesn’t mean these photos weren't good enough. It just means I felt being judicious was more important. (And if you’re snickering, jeering or rolling your eyes after reading that, I get it. Sort of.)
The two categories of images not used in the series for which I have the largest volume are probably theater and flowers, so they probably will dominate this post. I apologize if those types of pictures interest you in the least. Or if you want, just move on. But to help make checking out this post more bearable for some of you who are theater-disinterested, I’ve included some full-cast portraits from three Garfield Shakespeare Company productions.
What’s so interesting about that, you ask? With two of these full-cast portraits that I made, I asked the actors and actresses to give me a straight/normal pose as well as one in which all of them are goofing it up (i.e., looking ridiculous). As stage performers, their roles quite often require them to do things out of their comfort zones, and that is the primary allure of performance, isn’t it? So for your entertainment pleasure, I provide the two goofy versions of cast portraits for Garfield Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest. You can find them below.
This post has a little bit of everything, but I'll start, finish and sprinkle the middle with florals. So without further adieu, here goes one final fling ... at “Garfield Park ... in Pictures,” in no particular order and with no captions or further text to bog down the viewing pleasure. And as always, click on any image to pull up a larger, sharper version of it.
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