Abbeville Gallery: Florida

Recently Arbiter of Style Lauren traveled to southwest Florida to do community service work with Harvest For Humanity, taking her camera and her slightly melancholy photographer’s eye along for the trip. She has brought us back the following images:

When winter comes to south Florida, blueberries perish. (From the Harvest For Humanity farm.)

An ivy-covered gazebo, with chairs on the roof, at a hostel near the Everglades.

Birds at a fruit stand.

A view of the Everglades. The astute viewer will spot an alligator lolling in the foreground.

Thanks again to our trusty lenssmith Lauren, and stay tuned in the coming weeks for our next Abbeville Gallery exhibit, in which we will present images from Arbiter of Style Michaelann’s travels in the Old World.

Abbeville Gallery: NYC

It’s been a while since our last Abbeville Gallery post, but we thought we’d grace this mellow Friday with a few mellow photographs of New York in November, courtesy of Arbiter of Style Lauren. The chess figures in the second image, formerly so jolly, look feebly huddled against the darkening weather, while the third image will resonate with anyone who has ever jammed their hands into their anorak pockets and stared broodingly down into a Central Park pond. But what will happen when the water freezes over? Where will all the ducks go?

We can’t speak for the ducks, but we’ll be back next week with some Abbeville-style holiday gift recommendations, another skirmish with the Chicago Manual, and a review of “Stacks” and “Bracko,” the poetry/dance/”immersive sculpture” performance art piece that one of our Arbiters caught at NYU last night. (With a description like that, you can be sure it was either appalling or amazing.) Have a great weekend and happy Repeal Day!

We’re Back! With Wombats

The Arbiters of Style apologize for being MIA yesterday; we were all a little peakèd after the New York Is Book Country show on Sunday. (One of us may even have taken the day off.) We hope that, in our absence, your Monday didn’t suffer from a catastrophic deficiency of style. Just in case, we’ll do our best between now and Friday to boost your reserves with a double infusion.

Though tiring, the NYIBC show was a happy success. Books were sold, catalogs were distributed, mini-art kits and dinosaur finger puppets were tossed to the masses (and a few hoarded for ourselves). Christmas in September! We also reveled in the sultry late-summer sunshine, the graceful Central Park greenery, the crisp smell of new books heralding the crisp autumn weather soon to come…sorry, Book Country brings out the nostalgic patriot in us.

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and to make up for our absence, we’d like to share with you one last Australia photo that Arbiter of Style Lauren has been keeping up her sleeve. Its subject dovetails nicely with that of our Dante Gabriel Rossetti post from a couple of weeks ago (which, to answer our commenter Sara, we swear we were not making up). Yes, folks, it’s a wombat. Eat your heart out—he certainly is.

Abbeville Gallery: Israel

Today’s Abbeville Gallery image wasn’t technically taken by an Abbevillian, but it features an Abbevillian, and we figure that’s close enough. Besides, it features a huge camel, too, and who could quarrel with that? The location is Israel and the Abbevillian is our production manager, Louise. That’s her riding on the rear saddle and looking either thrilled or terrified, or possibly both. The camel looks unfazed.

(Click to enlarge)

(We’re not sure through whose lens this Israel photo was taken, but until we find out, credit and thanks to whomever it was.)

Abbeville Gallery: Cayman Islands 2

Another round of photo highlights from Arbiter of Style Briana’s recent Cayman Islands jaunt. We’re getting tan just looking at ‘em:

(Click to enlarge)

We have no idea how she managed to get such a good aerial shot, unless…Briana, you didn’t steal the Abbecopter again, did you? You know that’s only for top secret Abbemergencies.

Abbeville Gallery: Cayman Islands

Here at Abbeville, summer is travel season—and that means stylish photography season. Following on the heels of Lauren’s recent photo-odyssey in Australia, Arbiter of Style Briana has just come back from a getaway in the Cayman Islands looking enviably tanned and bearing spectacular images of her journey. Click to enlarge:

More photos to come next week! P.S.: Followers of the Abbeville Manual may have wondered why Arbiter of Style Austin never posted photos of the Italy trip he rambled on about so much back in the spring. The answer is that those photos are neither stylish nor reputable.

Abbeville Gallery: Australia 3

The Land Down Under is proving a fertile source of inspiration for Lauren, our contributor/photographer/Arbiter Abroad, who has sent us still more original photography from the antipodes:

Birds at the Healesville Sanctuary

Horse sculpture outside the Museum of Racing in Federation Square, Melbourne 

Federation Square, Central Business District, Melbourne

By the way, if you checked the comments for the last Abbeville Gallery post, you might have seen that Lauren cleared up the mystery as to what that animal in her other photograph was. It wasn’t a wombat or bandicoot, but it was in the marsupial family. So you could argue that we weren’t that completely wrong.

Abbeville Gallery: Australia 2

Our Arbiter Abroad, Lauren, brings us two more choice photographs from Australia today. One is of a small creek in the Healesville Sanctuary; the second is a poignant visual essay on the imprisonment of the spirit in contemporary—OK, fine, we’re not sure what it is, exactly. Some kind of wombat, perhaps? A bandicoot—does that sound right? All we know is that it’s got clawed hands, eyes as blue as Sinatra’s, and an expression of tragic dignity. Maybe it’s the same species as the thing that washed up on Montauk recently. We’ll ask Lauren when she returns; until then, feast your eyes!

Abbeville Gallery: Australia

One might expect Australian graffiti to consist largely of cheeky, offbeat swear words and cartoon drawings of wallabies, but apparently, the country’s urban artists have a taste for abstraction. Such has been the discovery of Arbiter of Style Lauren, who is visiting Melbourne (that’s “Melbin”) this month and who has provided us two new photographs for our Abbeville Gallery series:

We like how, especially in the second photo, Lauren’s turned the decorated buildings into abstract compositions of her own. But we’re really bowled over by the graffiti itself, which is better than anything we’ve seen here in the city lately. (Yes, even in Williamsburg.) Who knew that Australia, along with being a bestiary of crazy creatures, was such a haven of style?

Abbeville Gallery: Original Photography

Here at the Abbeville Manual, we spend a lot of time arbitrating other people’s style, but sometimes if you want something done right you’ve got to do it yourself. That’s why today marks the launch of “Abbeville Gallery,” our new feature in which we display original photography by us, the Arbiters of Style. Like “Marginalia,” this feature will be updated several times a month, and we’re hoping it lends our site a little more visual interest as well as that extra touch of class Abbeville strives for. But as we’ve said previously, we are in no way becoming a “photoblog” (which sounds like a term from particle physics, like “antiquark”); we are simply providing a periodic and ongoing image exposition.

Our first images come courtesy of Arbiter of Style Lauren; they portray two mysterious figures inhabiting their own bizarre, wicker-looking plane of reality. Enjoy.