View allAll Photos Tagged Humiliation
Sissy put in a full head of rollers after having colour done. Next the hot dryer. All in public view for maximum embarrassment and humiliation.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkish: Sultanahmet Camii) is a mosque in Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey and the capital of the Ottoman Empire (from 1453 to 1923). The mosque is one of several mosques known as the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior. It was built between 1609 and 1616, during the rule of Ahmed I. Like many other mosques, it also comprises a tomb of the founder, a madrasah and a hospice. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque has become one of the greatest tourist attractions of Istanbul.
After the humiliating Peace of Zsitvatorok and the unfavourable result of the wars with Persia, Sultan Ahmed I decided to build a large mosque in Istanbul to placate Allah. This would be the first imperial mosque in more than forty years. Whereas his predecessors had paid for their mosques with their war booty, Sultan Ahmed I had to withdraw the funds from the treasury, because he had not won any notable victories. This provoked the anger of the ulema, the Muslim legal scholars.
The mosque was to be built on the site of the palace of the Byzantine emperors, facing the Hagia Sophia (at that time the most venerated mosque in Istanbul) and the hippodrome, a site of great symbolic significance. Large parts of the southern side of the mosque rest on the foundations, the vaults and the undercrofts of the Great Palace. Several palaces, already built on the same spot, had to be bought (at considerable price) and pulled down, especially the palace of Sokollu Mehmet Paşa, and large parts of the Sphendone (curved tribune with U-shaped structure of the hippodrome).
Construction of the mosque started in August 1609 when the sultan himself came to break the first sod. It was his intention that this would become the first mosque of his empire. He appointed his royal architect Sedefhar Mehmet Ağa, a pupil and senior assistant of the famous architect Sinan as the architect in charge of the construction. The organization of the work was described in meticulous detail in eight volumes, now in the library of the Topkapı Palace. The opening ceremonies were held in 1617 (although the gate of the mosque records 1616) and the sultan was able to pray in the royal box (hünkâr mahfil). But the building wasn't finished yet in this last year of his reign, as the last accounts were signed by his successor Mustafa I.
The design of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque is the culmination of two centuries of Ottoman mosque development. It is the last great mosque of the classical period. The architect has ably synthesized the ideas of his master Sinan, aiming for overwhelming size, majesty and splendour, but the interior lacks his creative thinking.
Mehmet Paşa used large quantities of materials for the construction, in particular stone and marble, draining away supplies for other important works. The layout of the mosque is irregular, as the architect had to take into account the existing constraints of the site. Its major façade, serving as the entrance, faces the hippodrome. The architect based his plan on the Ṣehzade Mosque (1543-1548) in Istanbul, the first major large-scale work of Sinan, with the same square-based symmetrical quatrefoil plan and a spacious forecourt. This prayer hall is topped by an ascending system of domes and semi-domes, each supported by three exedrae, culminating in the huge encompassing central dome, which is 23.5 meters in diameter and 43 meters high at its central point. The domes are supported by four massive piers that recall those of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, another masterpiece of Sinan. It is obvious that Mehmet Paşa was overcautious by taking this inflated margin of safety, damaging the elegant proportions of the dome by their oppressive size. These "elephant feet" consist of multiple convex marble grooves at their base, while the upper half is painted, separated from the base by an inscriptive band with gilded words. Seen from the court, the profile of the mosque becomes a smooth succession of domes and semi-domes. The overall effect of the exterior on the visitor is one of perfect visual harmony, leading the eye up to the peak of the central dome.
The façade of the spacious forecourt was built in the same manner as the façade of the Süleymaniye Mosque, except for the addition of the turrets on the corner domes. The court is about as large as the mosque itself and is surrounded by a continuous, rather monotonous, vaulted arcade (revak). It has ablution facilities on both sides. The central hexagonal fountain is rather small in contrast with the dimensions of the courtyard. The monumental but narrow gateway to the courtyard stands out architecturally from the arcade. Its semi-dome has a fine stalactite structure, crowned by a rather small ribbed dome on a tall drum.
A heavy iron chain hangs in the upper part of the court entrance on the western side. Only the sultan was allowed to enter the court of the mosque on horseback. The chain was put there, so that the sultan had to lower his head every time he entered the court in order not to get hit. This was done as a symbolic gesture, to ensure the humility of the ruler in the face of the divine.
The Sultan Ahmed Mosque is one of the two mosques in Turkey that has six minarets, the other is in Adana. When the number of minarets was revealed, the Sultan was criticized for presumption, since this was, at the time, the same number as at the mosque of the Ka'aba in Mecca. He overcame this problem by paying for a seventh minaret at the Mecca mosque.
Four minarets stand at the corners of the mosque. Each of these fluted, pencil-shaped minarets has three balconies (ṣerefe) with stalactite corbels, while the two others at the end of the forecourt only have two balconies.
Until recently the muezzin or prayer-caller had to climb a narrow spiral staircase five times a day to announce the call to prayer. Today a public address system is used, and the call can be heard across the old part of the city, echoed by other mosques in the vicinity. Large crowds of both Turks and tourists gather at sunset in the park facing the mosque to hear the call to evening prayers, as the sun sets and the mosque is brilliantly illuminated by coloured floodlights.
As I was pursuing the Cinnamon Teal, out of the corner of my eye I caught a Red-tailed Hawk over Mbrook Marsh. Without time to adjust my manual set up, I swung the camera up and hoped for the best. Only when I got home did I discover that it was our old friend Ready Eddie (Re'ddy) being harassed as he has been so many times over the years by Red-winged Blackbirds. I first photographed this phenomenon in this area back on March 24, 2016! That series begins here:
www.flickr.com/photos/8666250@N02/26027521585/in/photostream
What might look like an act of public humiliation to a bystander, was in fact honorary initiation - after going through the whole ugly sweater thing, Michael was officially part of the family, fully accepted by every1, including Naomi's dad.. though Ashley and Jamal still found it to be very amusing.
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
A few corridors away, an 80-year-old woman, Halyna, and her two-year-old granddaughter, Eva, are sitting on the side of the corridor. Grandma can't explain where they have the rest of the family. "Far, far away," he says. The granddaughter, like in a trance, keeps yelling, "They banged and shot at houses. They banged, then glass, glass, glass spilled on me. Glass fell on me. Glass." Grandma nods, "Glass spilled on her." And he specifies that rockets and mortar fire hit all the windows in their house.
Original report : zpravy.aktualne.cz/zahranici/reporteri-navstivili-nouzovy...
This drawing was originally inspired by a discussion between Lawrence Weschler, Errol Morris, Dr. Kanan Makiya, and W.J.T. Mitchell as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The subject was the iconography of war and how people live with and process the myriad tragic and frightening images that have become a part of our everyday experience. It occurred to me that these iconic images fail us, or more that we fail them, in that we continually allow new atrocities to bloom, that we author many or most of these great calamities ourselves, and that we allow history to repeat itself over and over, only with more technological savvy as each new conflict arises so that we are further removed from the killing than we were the last time. When i see photos of depravity, of war, of suffering, of humiliation and dehumanization, such as the photos from Abu Ghraib that so many of us have seen, i want to believe that the images are powerful and profound enough to shock us into action, into some kind of patient and benevolent revolution to actually make the world better, to accept and respect all the differences in cultures and histories and ideologies and live amicably if not peacefully. Clearly i’m either too optimistic or too naive, because we fight, maim, lie and kill in the name of empire, religion, oil, just as we always have and likely always will. And many of us believe what we are told about the righteousness of our crimes and the trueness of our aim with little or no question because it is simply what we are told by those we expect to be in the know.
So the drawing at its inception was a collage of iconic images of war and struggle, a superimposed collection of calamity. It was my hope that the volume of sadness and destruction in this drawing would serve as a reminder for myself, an alarm to help me wake from my own apathy and disillusionment in the face of the grinding and monstrous engine of modern government and the political machine that can apparently function on nothing but the blackest crude, a reminder that i need to let history inform every decision and choice that i make so i’m not simply stumbling and blind as i move through the world, that if i am going to be a part of any change, it should be positive change.
The drawing has changed, however, and is no longer based solely in the literal, in the photo realism of our recent past, but for me it has also begun to acquire a symbolism and metaphorical nature that feels relative to our future. This piece has taken on its own life, separate from me, and i don’t feel like i control it anymore, neither the direction of the imagery used nor the execution of each individual piece of imagery, but rather that i’m slowly opening and receiving what comes in. It feels akin to the process of pollination. Foreign bodies have entered and have had a profound effect, life-changing even, and in realizing that effect, those foreign bodies become familiar and essential.
i’ve rewritten these lines a dozen times and i’m never satisfied with what appears on the page. It could be that for me there is no satisfaction in talking about my own failures as a person living today, or maybe i don’t want to sermonize what i see as the collective failures of everyone. It’s also possible that instead of all this writing and talking, all i can really do is draw a picture and let you do with it what you will.
It was not my goal to make a drawing of ruin, but when i consider where we seem to be going and how desperately we seem to want to get there, i don’t know that i could avoid it. At least, not this time.
3-24-08
Since the 19th of March, when Chicago held its 5 year anniversary rally/march/protest for the invasion of Iraq, a great deal of information has come my way that is causing me a great deal of concern. And fear. And anger. And i don't know if anyone else out there who might intentionally or accidentally stumble upon these paragraphs knows more or less than i do, but my knowledge is only starting to expand regarding where we are as a country and as a society, and even in my peripheral knowledge of the kind of insidious and deep running corruption we're living with and in, i find myself in a state of shock because so few people are responding to this information...which is available, it's definitely out there...and i know so few people who have any sense of outrage at all, who feel that their rights are being taken from them and are not anything more than sarcastic about it. As if they simply expected it and are willing to accept it because, well, what can one person do?
Habeas Corpus is gone. None of the current politicians are talking about that. This scares me. This essential right, now taken away, is one of the major dividing lines between a free society and a police state. And there's so much to say that i can't do it here. There is so so much to talk about. Habeas Corpus is just the literal tip of a vast and murky iceberg that i fear is about to sink our titanic self-image and our possibly vague and misguided ideas about what America is. And i don't want to sink.
8-5-08
Since i last made an entry here, not much has changed. The telecoms have been granted retroactive immunity, which in short means that our channels of communication can be monitored, and done so with no repercussions to those doing the monitoring. Which means we should probably fear that anything critical we have to say about the society we live in could be used against us, but not in a court of law. A closed society, a police state, requires no court of law. Barack Obama supported this retroactive immunity, which elicited a long thin sigh of disappointment from myself and many others. The young people canvassing the streets to raise money for his campaign didn’t have much to say about that, at least not here in Chicago. Some of them didn’t seem to know what i was talking about, to be honest. He may have had his reasons. There may have been other items tacked on to this particular legislation that he wanted to see get “through the system.” But could those reasons really outweigh our civil liberties, our small comfort in thinking we can speak freely? i still think Obama is the only candidate running for president. But i also think he has only used his offices to get to bigger and better offices. He hasn’t done much for Illinois since he’s been Senator because he immediately started running for president. i hope that once he wins that office he’ll be able to get something done, anything, as long as it’s in the opposite direction our current administration has been taking us. Clearly it is the most unsuccessful administration in the history of our young country. The most insensitive, the most rash and unthinking, the most ignorant and arrogant. i’m happy i was around to see it. Witnessing this kind of colossal failure offers an infinitely important challenge to mankind: The chance to fix things. Our fuck-ups have been on a global scale, and we need to make global amends. Coming out of this fog of war and corruption, we have an opportunity. It isn’t the first time we’ve had this opportunity, and if it’s the last then we won’t be here to consider it.
Also:
How about we stop being so silly? The New Yorker cover? It’s satire. We of all people should know what satire is. And it’s ironic that so many of us, including the Obama’s, were so offended by this illustration. We call ourselves the land of the free, yet our country was founded on genocide. Is that not irony? Are we not a satire of what we claim to be? Liberators? Come on. i know it's hard to have a sense of humor in these dark ages, but if we fail to see the absurdity in such situations and responses to those situations it will only add to the already frightening pile of things we've failed at.
More very soon, if you care...
9-22-08
And now, a word from my paramour, Cassandra:
----------------
This is a bit long, but the financial cluster-f#@$ we're in is complicated and it seems the Bush administration would just like Congress to sign off on the bailout, no questions asked, no strings attached. So, if you can't slog through this whole text, could you, would you, please, skip to the end, call your elected officials and tell them you're not okay with signing off on a trillion dollar bailout without knowing the details or that only assists the companies that got us into this mess? And then, feel free to whittle it down, but could you pass it on? In email and/or phone calls to the folks you know that haven't yet crossed the digital divide? Yes, you know them; some of your parents, neighbors, etc. They don't really care for the world wide web, but they still believe in democracy and hopefully, the telephone. It's an awful lot of money that we're being asked to pony up. Wait! We're not being asked! That's why you have to call your Senator!
We've been told that in order to avert a major financial catastrophe, the bailout is necessary and needs to happen immediately. And that may be true, but it seems like we're not being told enough. Will the executives that run these companies that are crashing and burning, still receive their multi-million dollar pay and bonus packages while employees lose jobs, health benefits and retirement funds? Will there be any relief (of course we won't bail out your average working stiff, I'm not THAT naive) for the person who's losing their house, their business, their pension? Where is the money coming from? Where exactly are we borrowing $700 billion to a trillion from? What is the plan after? What will prevent this from happening again in a couple of months? We're going to be on the hook for this money (on top of the crushing debt we're already under) for a long, long, long, long time. Or is this another preemptive strike with no exit strategy? This feels a bit familiar, no? A dangerous set of circumstances that requires swift and bold (shock and awe) tactics to keep us all safe? Calling for nearly unfettered powers, (this time to the Treasury secretary)? "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Intense pressure on Congress to pass a rescue measure quickly?
online.wsj.com/article/SB122200573768460503.html
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/20/...
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/no-deal/
Even this guy doesn't like the idea:
www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/trillion_dollar_bailou...
Does anyone remember the S&L crisis? Which cost American tax payers, some estimate, $1.4 trillion dollars? Sound familiar? Some highlights: During the senior George Bush administration, Jeb Bush defaulted on a $4.56 million dollar real estate loan, paid $500,000 back, the $4million balance was paid of by... um... you, the taxpayer. Neil Bush became director of Silverado Savings and Loan in 1985. Three years later the institution was belly up at a cost of $1.6 billion to... you again! The taxpayer bailed them out!
A more thorough account here:
www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/4386...
A 1989 Time Magazine article here:
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,957083,00.html
(Note that Bush Sr. asked Congress to act within 45 days to prevent financial meltdown. Bush Jr. wants this passed tomorrow, Monday Sept 22, 2008. So, please don't wait to phone your elected officials.)
Accountability? Not much. We paid their bad debt and they went on their merry way. No indictments, no jail time, not even garnishments or freezing of assets to re-coup the embezzled money. Jeb even got to keep the building he took out the loan to buy! Bush Sr. wasn't re-elected, but Jeb was later elected Governor of Florida! (Schwing Vote!) An office he held during the Florida Supreme Court ruling that stopped the recount of the 2000 election his brother, W, "won". (Holy Serendipity!) Hey! Here's another interesting side note: did you know that this time last year August 30, 2007 Lehman Bros hired Jeb as an advisor?! Me neither! It's funny how these things go mostly unreported. Wonder why Lehman didn't get in on the bailout deal? Sibling rivalry? If you think your head won't explode, you should go here for Jeb's breathtaking resume:
www.atlargely.com/2008/09/what-is-jeb-bus.html
So, this is just one (eerily familiar) example of how the Bush family and their friends have been fleecing us for generations and we, the voters, the taxpayers, the people that our government is supposed to be "of, by, and for" are letting them have their very greedy way with us. Over and over and over again. They do it, frankly, because they can. We keep letting them fleece us (or another word that begins with "F") and we shrug, or rant, sometimes we take to the streets, but not often. But we don't act. We feel overwhelmed and totally hopeless, so we turn on the television or fire up the internets or find some other, any other diversion not to think about how overwhelming and hopeless it feels. But I am imploring you to call your elected officials, the ones who you took the time to vote into office, the ones you elected to represent you, call them and ask that they do what you elected them to do: Represent you. It's redundant, I know, but I think we forget that they work for US. (Even the ones you didn't vote for, still work for you.) Make them work. Tell them what you think. It'll take minutes. Minutes out of your day to use your voice to not allow our government to spend our money without accountability. Again. And if nothing happens, if we don't manage to start a movement today, that's okay. Because we did move. We stood. We didn't just sit idly by while we got filched. Or another word that starts with "F"...
Find your State Representative: forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
Find your Senator: www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.c...
Patriotically yours,
Cassandra
----------------
9-28-08
A New Delhi-based journalist who has worked with The Guardian and BBC invited me to contribute this image to a brief story about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on a news-gathering website called NowPublic. Their motto is "Crowd Powered Media," which could be good or bad, depending on the crowd. To be honest, i think the crowd is ok, so i was happy to be invited. Here it is: www.nowpublic.com/world/un-investigate-bhutto-killing
It's small, but it's something. If one person wants to see it, i want them to see it. So thank you, Mr. Jha.
10-28-08
People! If you're still reading this far, please look at this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdNgMKPV9xQ&eurl=http://gobnf...
We can't ignore it. We can't sit back and watch. We need to be active. Informed. Right now. We need to use our power and we need to remake our government, our country, our world.
11-04-08
Let us hope that this is the beginning of a new American era.
Marker on watercolor paper.
Late 2007 – Early 2008
30 x 22