A Looming Laplander Guards a Lighthouse Labyrinth

Walking down the aisles of L, I pulled out the files for Labyrinth and found these:

I looked in vain for a picture of my favorite labyrinth, constructed at the Yuan Ming Yuan, or old summer palace outside Beijing. The place is a ruin of the palace and gardens designed by Guiseppe Castiglione and other Jesuits to please the Qianlong emperor. But the images above are evocative and mysterious enough. It's just a little tricky to figure out how to use a labyrinth without it taking over the frame.

I also knew I wanted to look for images of Lapps. I was struck by the grittiness of some of the images I found, as well as by the confrontational, proud stares with which these Lapps greeted the camera.

 

I was also interested to read about their magical drumming tradition, pictured here:

These drums spoke not only through sound, but also through the runes inscribed on their drumming surface.

I was amazed (as usual) at the breadth of the collection of images, including this SAS airline menu image from the early 1970s:

 

Did a librarian bring this home from her/his vacation? Or how did it wind up here in the picture collection?

I also loved the thousands of images of lunch boxes, of which I've selected just a handful here.

And, of course, there are beautiful images of libraries, both the fixed and the traveling variety:

This beautiful Prague library has reappeared in my dreams ever since I saw its image, but the traveling library images brought back to me the smell of the bookmobiles I visited a few times as a child in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was drawn to later images, but was impressed at the variety of mobile libraries, some drawn by horses like the ice trucks in a previous entry.

After looking through stacks of lighthouses, I suddenly saw how to combine some of these L images when I pulled out this lighthouse image from Nantucket:

The blue sky and the quality of windy isolation inspired me to pair it with one Lapp, one lunchbox, and a labyrinth:

I wonder if the aye-aye will get lost in the labyrinth, frighten the dog, or knock the pipe out of the giant Lapp's mouth?

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