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I took this a few days back and have forced myself to edit it slowly. There are times my excitement to show a new image gets the best of me and I'll rush to post it and find myself viewing it a week later filled with ideas for how I could have made it better. That isn't to say I won't be doing that with this image… I tend to be someone who is constantly trying to improve upon work both future and past, but I wanted to take my time.
It was so quiet at this spot. Come to think of it, I made a really concerted effort to take my time in capturing this photo as well. There are benefits, at least for me, in taking my time. I think I enjoy the process more… and my images become more intentional. Maybe I truly am the only one who benefits from the intentionality I am trying to create with my work, but I enjoy it. And it's worth it.
I love the opposites in this image. Everything is liquid and flowing (including the sky) except for the dock which is solid. I decided to produce this in a way that mirrors those opposites with a dark image overall contrasted against the dock.
One of my favorite things about photography is it's ability to capture what the human eye cannot… Time.
Unusual perspective but not so sure it's 'forced perspective.'
Anyway, a friend decided to check on her horses at the farm after our lunch out today. I didn't have my camera with me so this is an iPhone shot.
group: #FlickrFriday
theme: #ForcedPerspective
(a stone behaving strange in the garden of my parents-in-law)
camera: Minolta XG-2
lens: Minolta MD Rokkor 1:1,4 f=50mm
film: Kodak Ektar 100
in places? Not so crisp as I would like it in some spots. It's hard to choose just the right fabric to help create the sense of color and light play.
But I like it.
Shopping with my "Better Half". Comparing materials, endless opinions sought and woe betide me if my replies are inappropriate!
Ah, well, could be worse!
bought some Haitian antiquated folk art today for a quarter
check out the history
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti
The United States occupation of Haiti began on July 28, 1915, when 330 US Marines landed at Port-au-Prince on the authority of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to safeguard the interests of U.S. corporations.
It ended on August 1, 1934 after Franklin D. Roosevelt reaffirmed an August 1933 disengagement agreement. The last contingent of U.S. Marines departed on August 15, 1934 after a formal transfer of authority to the Garde.
Between 1911 and 1915, a series of political assassinations and forced exiles saw the presidency of Haiti change six times. Various revolutionary armies carried out this series of coups. Each was formed by cacos, or peasant brigands from the mountains of the north, along the porous Dominican border, who were enlisted by rival political factions under the promises of money, which would be paid after a successful revolution, and the opportunity to plunder.
The United States was particularly apprehensive about the role played by the small German community in Haiti, which numbered approximately 200 in 1910 and wielded a disproportionately high amount of economic power. German nationals controlled about 80 percent of the country's international commerce, owned and operated utilities in Cap Haitien and Port-au-Prince, the main wharf and a tramway in the capital, and owned a railroad serving the Plain of the Cul-de-Sac.
The German community proved more willing to integrate into Haitian society than any other group of white foreigners, including the more numerous French. Some Germans married into the nation's most prominent mulatto families, thus bypassing the constitutional prohibition against foreign land-ownership. They also served as the principal financiers of the nation's innumerable revolutions, floating loans at high interest rates to competing political factions.
In an effort to limit German influence, in 1910–11 the State Department backed a consortium of American investors, assembled by the National City Bank of New York, in acquiring control of the Banque Nationale d'Haïti, the nation's only commercial bank and the government treasury.
In February 1915, Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the son of a former president established a "dictatorship," but in July, facing a new anti-American revolt, he massacred 167 political prisoners. All of them were from elite families, particularly from the better educated and wealthier mulatto population with German affiliations. Sam was then enthusiastically lynched by a mob in Port-au-Prince immediately after word of the executions reached them.
It is alleged that this popular anti-American revolt against Sam threatened American business interests in the country (such as the Haitian American Sugar Company HASCO). Because of these competing interests and the possibility of the caco-supported anti-American Rosalvo Bobo emerging as the next President of Haiti, the American government decided to act quickly to preserve their economic dominance over Haiti.
American President Woodrow Wilson sent 330 U.S. Marines to Port-au-Prince on July 28, 1915. The specific order from the Secretary of the Navy to the invasion commander, Admiral William Deville Bundy, was to “protect American and foreign” interests. An additional motivation was to replace the Haitian constitution which prohibited foreign ownership of land. However, to avoid public criticism the occupation was labeled as a mission to “re-establish peace and order… [and] has nothing to do with any diplomatic negotiations of the past or the future” as disclosed by Rear Admiral Caperton.
On November 17, 1915, U.S. Marines captured Fort Riviere, a stronghold of the Cacos rebels.
The Haitian government had been receiving large loans from both American and French banks over the past few decades and was growing increasingly incapable in fulfilling their debt repayment. If an anti-American government prevailed under the leadership of Rosalvo Bobo, there would be no promise of any debt repayment, and the refusal of American investments would have been assured. Within six weeks of the occupation, representatives from the United States controlled Haitian customs houses and administrative institutions such as banks and the national treasury. Through American manipulation, 40% of the national income was used to alleviate the debt repayment to both American and French banks. Despite the large sums due to overseas banks, this economic decision ignored the interests of the majority of the Haitian population and froze the economic growth the country needed. For the next nineteen years, advisers of the United States governed the country, enforced by the United States Marine Corps.
i am ashamed to be an American when i look at our relationship with Haiti
it is as if we were threatened by the fact that slaves could revolt and take a country to claim as their own and that ideology as continued
Representatives from the United States wielded veto power over all governmental decisions in Haiti, and Marine Corps commanders served as administrators in the provinces. Local institutions, however, continued to be run by Haitians, as was required under policies put in place during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.[citation needed]
The US administration dismantled the constitutional system, reinstituted labor conscription for building roads, and established the National Guards that ran the country by violence after the Marines left.[10] It also made massive improvements to infrastructure: 1700 km of roads were made usable; 189 bridges were built; many irrigation canals were rehabilitated, hospitals, schools, and public buildings were constructed, and drinking water was brought to the main cities[citation needed].
Opposition to the Occupation began immediately after the Marines entered Haiti in 1915. The rebels (called "cacos" by the U.S. Marines) vehemently tried to resist American control of Haiti. In response, the Haitian and American governments began a vigorous campaign to disband the rebel armies. Perhaps the best-known account of this skirmishing came from Marine Major Smedley Butler, awarded a Medal of Honor for his exploits, who went on to serve as commanding officer of the Haitian Gendarmerie. (He later expressed his disapproval of the U.S. intervention in his book War Is a Racket.) Racial attitudes towards the Haitian people by the American occupation forces were blatant and arguably widespread. The NAACP secretary Herbert J. Seligman in the July 10th, 1920 NATION, wrote: “Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot on sight. Machine guns have been turned on crowds of unarmed natives, and United States marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded.” Franklin Delano Rooselvelt was not immune to such attitudes, as exampled during a visit to Haiti; he was amused by a traveling companion's remark about the Haitian minister of agriculture, “I couldn't help saying to myself that that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes.” Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, the mulatto president of the Senate, agreed to accept the presidency of Haiti after several other candidates had refused on principle. In 1917, President Dartiguenave dissolved the legislature after its members refused to approve a constitution written by Franklin D. Roosevelt (then Assistant Secretary of the Navy) However, a referendum subsequently approved the new constitution in 1918 (by a vote of 98 225 to 768). It was a generally a liberal document. The constitution allowed foreigners to purchase land. Jean-Jacques Dessalines had forbidden land ownership by foreigners, and since 1804, some Haitians had viewed foreign ownership as anathema.
The occupation of Haiti continued after World War I, despite the embarrassment that it caused Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the scrutiny of a congressional inquiry in 1922.
In 1922, Dartiguenave was replaced by Louis Borno, who ruled without a legislature until 1930. That same year, General John H. Russell, Jr. was appointed High Commissioner. The Borno-Russel dictatorship oversaw the expansion of the economy, building over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of road, establishing an automatic telephone exchange, modernizing the nation's port facilities, and establishing a public health service. Sisal was introduced to Haiti, and sugar and cotton became significant exports.
Aside from the caco rebels, Haitian writers and public figures also responded to the Occupation. For example, one public figure, a minister of public education, Dantès Bellegarde, continuously discussed his issues with the event. In his book, La Résistance Haïtienne (l’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti), Bellegarde outlines the contradictions of the Occupation with the realities. He states that President Wilson wrote the new Haitian Constitution to benefit the Americans. His main purpose was to remove the previous Haitian clause that stated foreigners could not own land in the country. The original clause was designed to protect Haiti’s independence from foreign powers. With the clause removed, Americans could now own land. Furthermore, Bellegarde discusses the powerlessness of Haitian officials in the eyes of the Occupation because nothing could be done without the consent of the Americans. However, the main issue that Bellegarde articulates is that the Americans tried to change the education system of Haiti from one that was French based to that of the Americans. Even though Bellegarde was resistant he had a plan to build a university in Haiti that was based on the American system. He wanted a university with various schools of science, business, art, medicine, law, agriculture, and languages all connected by a common area and library. However, that dream was never realized because of the new direction the Haitian government was forced to take.
Another figure that was highly regarded during the period was Jean Price-Mars. He associated the reasons behind the Occupation to the division between the Haitian elite and the poorer people of the country. One of the dividers between the two groups was Vodou. The elites did not recognize Vodou because they connected it to an evil practice. Thus, in a book titled Ainsi Parla l’Oncle,. Price-Mars elaborates on what voodoo really was so that the elite could have a better understanding. After all, Vodou was the base that connected the slaves when they were brought from various regions in Africa.
Along with Haitian figures, the NAACP sent James Weldon Johnson, an African American, to Haiti to discover the real situation because it was depicted as a mission to progress and pacify the country in the United States. Nevertheless, Johnson’s trip results in him exposing the harsh truths of the Occupation in several articles in the magazine The Nation. In one of his articles, “Self-Determining Haiti” he talks about how the marines demoralized the people through their racist views and the slave-like system they imposed in building the great road from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien. Johnson also dismantles the previous notions of Haiti being a poor unsanitary country by talking about its beauty and stating that there were programs to advance Haiti before the Marines arrived rather than it being a result American intervention.
However, efforts to develop commercial agriculture met with limited success, in part because much of Haiti's labor force was employed as seasonal workers in the more-established sugar industries of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. An estimated 30 000-40 000 Haitian laborers, known as braceros, went annually to the Oriente Province of Cuba between 1913 and 1931.Most Haitians continued to resent the loss of sovereignty. At the forefront of opposition among the educated elite was L'Union Patriotique, which established ties with opponents of the occupation in the U.S. itself, in particular the NAACP.
The Great Depression disastrously affected the prices of Haiti's exports, and destroyed the tenuous gains of the previous decade. In December 1929, Marines in Les Cayes killed ten Haitian peasants during a march to protest local economic conditions.This led Herbert Hoover to appoint two commissions, including one headed by a former U.S. governor of the Philippines William Cameron Forbes, which criticized the exclusion of Haitians from positions of authority in the government and constabulary, now known as the Garde d'Haïti.
In 1930, Sténio Vincent, a long-time critic of the occupation, was elected President.
By 1930, President Hoover had become concerned about the effects of the occupation, particularly after the December 1929 incident in Les Cayes. Hoover appointed two commissions to study the situation, with William Cameron Forbes heading the more prominent of the two.
The Forbes Commission praised the material improvements that the U.S. administration had wrought, but it criticized the exclusion of Haitians from positions of real authority in the government and the constabulary, which had come to be known as the Garde d'Haïti. In more general terms, the commission further asserted that "the social forces that created [instability] still remain — poverty, ignorance, and the lack of a tradition or desire for orderly free government."
The Hoover administration did not fully implement the recommendations of the Forbes Commission; but United States withdrawal was under way by 1932, when Hoover lost the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt, the presumed author of the most recent Haitian constitution and the proponent of the "Good Neighbor policy". On a visit to Cap-Haïtien in July 1934, Roosevelt reaffirmed an August 1933 disengagement agreement. The last contingent of U.S. Marines departed on August 15, 1934 after a formal transfer of authority to the Garde. The U.S. retained influence on Haiti's external finances until 1947
The occupation by the United States had several significant effects on Haiti. An early period of unrest culminated in a 1918 rebellion by up to 40,000 former cacos and other disgruntled people. The scale of the uprising overwhelmed the Gendarmerie, but Marine reinforcements helped put down the revolt at an estimated cost of 2,000 Haitian lives.
The occupation greatly improved some of Haiti's infrastructure and centralized power in Port-au-Prince. Infrastructure improvements were particularly impressive: 1700 km of roads were made usable, 189 bridges were built, many irrigation canals were rehabilitated, hospitals, schools, and public buildings were constructed, and drinking water was brought to the main cities. Port-au-Prince became the first Latin American city to have an available phone service with automatic dialing. Agricultural education was organized with a central school of agriculture and 69 farms in the country.
When it came to living conditions, the Americans inhabited the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince in houses that the majority of Haitians would only dream of. Consequently, the neighborhood in which the Americans lived was called the “millionaire's row.” Hans Schmidt accounted an officer's opinion on the matter of segregation: “I can't see why they wouldn't have a better time with their crowd, just as I do with mine." American intolerance provoked indignation and resentment — and eventually a racial pride that was reflected in the work of a new generation of Haitian historians, ethnologists, writers, artists, and others, many of whom later became active in politics and government. The mulatto elite managed to dominate the country's bureaucracy and to strengthen its role in national affairs.
The education system was re-designed from the ground up; however, this involved the destruction of the existing system of "liberal arts" education inherited (and adapted) from the French. Due to its emphasis on vocational training, the American system that replaced the French was despised by the elite.
All three rulers during the occupation came from the country's small mulatto minority. At the same time, many in the growing black professional classes departed from the traditional veneration of Haiti's French cultural heritage and emphasized the nation's African roots. Among these were ethnologist Jean Price-Mars and the journal Les Griots, edited by Dr. François Duvalier.
Captain Eagle: I'm forced to watch you walk away, Savitar! But, I promise! By all that is just, the next time I see you, you won't even be able to crawl away!!
Savitar: The next time, Captain Eagle, I won't...
...pause...
audience restless
Captain Eagle: (whispers) You won't...
Savitar: You won't... hm...
audience grumbles
Captain Eagle: (whispers) See me coming.
Savitar: You WON'T SEE ME COMING! HAHAHA!
audience applauds
Savitar: (whispers) Thanks man.
Captain Eagle: Yep.
______________________
A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Just got back from a trip to Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway. Lots of photos to edit and share. this was a fun shot I tried with my husband during a sunset.
forced myself to take a 'pretty' 'spring-like' photo today.
ignoring the snow outside,
I got out my best vintage melmac dishes...lol
plucked a left-over daisy from my vase of anniversary flowers,
and *wallah*,
spring.
just add water.
wish it were that easy...
my cuppa spring is half-full
my winter one is half-empty.
:)
Picture was taken at Völklingen Ironworks in southwest Germany. This piece is a memorial to the forced labor that worked in this facility. The boxes on either side are archive boxes and evoke the identities that were stripped from forced laborers during World War II.
Unbeknownst to most, a third hand is at play in this sudden turn of events. Originally believed to have been a friendly fire incident, Agent Colter-Stevens has a hunch that he is correct in his assumption. The attack came not from without, but within. He also has a hunch that the chemicals they were transferring were something altogether different. If he was correct, time was already trickling through his fingers. He had to find out where the chemicals had got to - and the place to start was their intended destination, Hamadan.
Agent Colter-Stevens: "Update when in position, over."
Trooper Soreson: "Roger that. We have visuals on the ChemTech HQ and are in position."
Agent Colter-Stevens: "Hostiles?"
Trooper Soreson: "Negative - wait, I see two hostiles guarding the back entrance. It looks like they have some serious gear for civilians. Must be a private army of some sorts."
Agent Colter-Stevens: Proceed to eliminate them. Headshots only. No noise."
Trooper Soreson: "Copy. Headshots only."
*Agent Colter-Stevens sees the two figures crumple through his binoculars.*
Agent Colter-Stevens: Advance on the gate. I have the package."
Trooper Soreson Gate secure. Let's blow this thing!"
*Muffled explosion can be heard. The gate swings off it's hinges.*
Agent Colter-Stevens: "Okay. Radio silence from now on. Hand signals only."
_________________________
The story thickens! Catch the previous part here.
For Modern Conflict.
I do love me some forced perspective!
This was a camera trick I used on my latest brickfilm and it can be seen here in action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnj3pU1WtQ
Feels like a forced long break.... my D5000 is hospitalized for its SDS (sudden death syndrome). Pulling out this shot from the archives...shot en route Picton, south island, New Zealand. The super clear air is beautiful here..and fetches beautiful shots for any keen photographer..worth his camera..