Texas Swimming

Monday, October 29, 2007

Quote of the Day

Whenever the people are well-informed,

they can be trusted with their own government.

Thomas Jefferson

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Quote of the Day

What does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Quote of the Day

Man is a goal seeking animal. His life only has

meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

Aristotle

Monday, October 22, 2007

These may be the last of the season:

Quote of the Day

At this point I've got a bit of a track record.

So people realize that when 'Weird Al' wants

to go parody, it's not meant to make them look

bad...it's meant to be a tribute.

Al Yankovic

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Quote of the Day

If one morning I walked on top of the water

across the Potomac River, the headline

that afternoon would read:

"President Can't Swim."

Lyndon B. Johnson

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Nine or ten years ago, I cut down a dead tree out back. Leon must have been about eight and Bobby about six.

I'd buzzed it up and split it into smaller pieces and they were "helping" me haul it out front.

After about a half-hour of grunting and sweating, I overheard this conversation:

Leon: Bobby, are you goin' to college?
Bobby: I don't know.
Leon: If you don't go to college, you gotta stay here and work for dad.
Bobby: I'm goin' to college.

Quote of the Day

We can't solve problems by using the same

kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

Friday, October 19, 2007

Quote of the Day

I am more afraid of an army of a hundred

sheep led by a lion than an army of a

hundred lions led by a sheep.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Quote of the Day

It's better to explore life and make

mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes

are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

Sophia Loren

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

From this week's Chronicle of Higher Education

In a Liquid State

I have photographed a women's swimming group on Staten Island since 1984. They meet on Wednesday nights and swim in a dimly lit, extremely humid YMCA pool. The oldest members have been swimming together for more than 40 years, and every fall new acolytes arrive, some as young as 6 years old.

Photographing these swimmers has enabled me to be in a relaxed setting in which female bodies move in and out of water, each carrying her own lightness or weight of years. This is a society of girls and women who have created a gliding, floating world for themselves, apart from societal constraints.

Being a part of this landscape has been a gift. I have been a witness to a world of extraordinary beauty that few people notice. Photographing women in bathing suits is a loaded issue in our culture. Young women are rarely photographed on their own terms, and aging women are largely unseen. Sometimes I think that maybe we aren't looking at life well enough.

When I first began this project, I may have been as interested in the quirky, cultural aspects of the swimming group as in each swimmer's physical form. But as we all became more comfortable with each other and with the camera, I began to make portraits of individual swimmers. The water itself became a subject, as the girls and women moved from solid to liquid states.

The photographs and text are by Christine Osinski, a professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The photographs are from the exhibition "Pool Studies," at the Westover School's Schumacher Gallery, in Middlebury, Conn., through December 1.