I had two specific avatars for this last "photoshoot" in Providence - two of the dearest people in the world to me, as it happens, and two incredibly talented  and compassionate human beings.  The incredible velvetwhip, of course, who has encouraged me to show off my photos and so I wondered "what would Gabrielle like to see?" every time I raised my camera.  "How can I convey my love for this city in images, rather than words?"  In the process of trying to describe what I love, I fell in love with Providence all over again.

My other avatar was my dear friend Kendra L. Saunders, also incredible as a person and a writer (full disclosure: I was a beta for her novel Inanimate Objects and her current work in progress is the most sophisticated thing she's ever written. Gabrielle and Kendra have very different styles as authors but both are skilled at blending humor and darkness, capturing eroticism and undercurrents of danger with surprising warmth and compassion for their motley array of characters. I have excellent taste in literature - and in friends, don't you agree?)

Kendra asked me to stop at the Biltmore Hotel when I went to Providence because she had happy memories of her stay there on her first trip to the city last year, abd she thought I'd appreciate it's art deco lobby, originally built in 1922 and renovated in 1979. I went one better and took a few snaps for her enjoyment, and yours.

 

There are cases in the lobby filled with historic postcards of the hotel, but I couldn't resist making one of my own from the photo below.  I lightened and cropped the original in ipiccy, then applied Photobucket's desaturated filters and the postcard frame.

  

The glass elevator was locked, durn it.  And I couldn't figure out how to get to that upper courtyard "balcony" to see the painting at upper left, or get a closer view of the ceiling.

Very art deco - or rather, American deco eclectic; a combination of real F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Baz Luhrmann pastiche version; but in person it's very elegant nonetheless, but also surprisingly comfortable and I dare say private in feel. And no one tried to stop the crazy lady me running around the lobby with a camera.



Detail of ceiling taken from a distance, the best I could get with my Nikkon. I had to lighten the image considerably; as dimly lit as the lobby was I'm pleased I got anything at all. And I brightened and warmed the color a bit to emphasize detail.