Archive for the ‘Portraits’ Category

Syrian Photographer Releases Book: Home Sweet Home Alabama

November 30th, 2006

While we’re on the subject of photography, this project just came to our attention and looks like a book worth checking out.

Karim Shamsi-Basha was born in Damascus, Syria, but moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1989 to work as a photographer for the now defunct Birmingham Post-Herald.

He has a new book out called Home Sweet Home Alabama and was featured on the local television news today.

He also has a couple of Web sites that I could find.

Karim Photography

Karimisms

The Birmingham News’s Bob Carlton featured him a few weeks back in this story: Pictures of Home.

If we are not mistaken, Karim was a friend of Spider Martin’s and we met him in the late 1980s when he was still working for the Post-Herald at the first newsstand-coffee bar in the American South, NewsBreak, at 30th Street and Highland Avenue.

He seemed like a nice guy with a lot of talent as a photographer. We’ll have to check out his book in the book stores during the holiday shopping season…

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Southside Portrait: Bob Taylor of Five Points Hardware

November 21st, 2005
bob4p.jpg
Photo by Glynn Wilson, © Nov. 21, 2005
If the valve in your shower faucet ever fails, forget paying hundreds of dollars to a plumber. Go see Bob Taylor first at Five Points (Ace) Hardware on 20th Street South. When you walk in the back door, this is the scene you normally see. It’s nice to know some small part of the world hasn’t changed much in the 30 years he’s worked there and the 25 since I first walked in on him. Not incidentally, he has the largest selection of plumbing valves in the entire state of Alabama. The boys at Home Depot and Lowe’s can’t recognize a 50-year-old Speakman shower stem on site, now can they? Bob says they are “Mickey Mouse.” Oh, and he’s an artist in his own right, of the industrial hand-crafted kind…

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