Arden Fair, Delaware

When the weather cooperates, the Arden Fair takes over my neighborhood with crowds, vendors, musicians, artists, food, books, crafts, and wizards.

This annual event benefits the Arden Club, the cultural umbrella for Arden, Delaware. It has many gilds including Ardensingers, Shakespeare, Swim, Garden, Writing, Folk, Georgist, Library, Scholars, Dinner, and Concert, all headquartered in Gild Hall.

“Gild” is the correct spelling and honors the efforts to simplify spelling popular in the first decade of the 1900s, the year our utopian village was founded. Such spellings are one of the many charming and not-so-charming-but-idiosyncratic features of The Ardens, three Single-Tax municipalities in northern-most Delaware, my home since the year 2000.

Living so near Gild Hall, it is nearly impossible for me not to photograph some of the thousands of people in attendance, many of them my neighbors.

Click on any image below to see it larger in a slide show. Once in the slide show, use your arrow keys to advance and retreat. Right-click on a slide-show image to download it to your computer and credit “Danny Schweers Photography” if you publish it in any form. If you use an image or would like to purchase a print or would like to make a comment, please contact me.

2024 Arden Fair

A few images. Unlike me, the featured artists of the 2024 Arden Fair, Casey Orr and Julia Gorton, actively pose their subjects and adjust the backgrounds. Me, I like finding photos, not arranging them. That is why you will see four images here of a speed bump; vivid yellow lines in a geometric pattern being walked over by a stream of people. I am imitating one of my favorite photographers — Henri Cartier-Bresson — who would find a scene and then wait for people to fill it.

Katrina Nelson wearing her administration face. People automatically believe she is in charge.

2019 Arden Fair

Lots of images here, many of friends and neighbors, five months before COVID. These photos were taken with a miniature camera manufactured, not in Japan, but in Paris, France. The DxO One digital camera is now obsolete, no longer in production but has a decent lens and produces 22MB RAW images. The camera was made to plug into an iPhone, but I use it unattached, by itself. It has the world’s worst viewfinder, a small black-and-white bitmapped viewing screen.