View allAll Photos Tagged Sentences
SEZ, alongside Y3LOW,JANFREE,HOT,RESH and NEUTS
2015,big ups!!!!!!!
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The video on here,just click www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-gMkJsmqfQ
Beaucoup de touristes sont aussi des pèlerins et quand ils visitent un temple de leur obédience ils font tamponner un carnet pour indiquer qu'ils sont bien venus dans ce temple, de plus dans celui-ci, moyennant finances, ils peuvent demander à un calligraphe de leur dessiner une sentence de leur choix.
Many tourists are also pilgrims and when they visit a temple of their obedience they have stamped a notebook to indicate that they have come to this temple, more in this one, for a fee, they can ask a calligrapher to draw a sentence of their choice.
To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
Words by Jiddu Krishnamurti
for Flickriver - Sophie Shapiro
.
THE SENTENCE
When it realized that that marriage Opus Dei was not for what she was waiting, it went out to the avenues and undressed the clothes, wrapped in shouts and blows of breasts, begging the love of this husband that it loved to another fort and virile.
Every morning, I cross the threshold of my home and step into a society I no longer recognize. A world numb to real suffering, blind to genuine problems, yet hypersensitive and reactive to meaningless trivialities. Each time, it feels like descending into a hell of indifference and distortion — worse than any prison. In that moment, my body bends under the weight of a sentence that renews itself, day after day.
BEHIND THE SCENES video on my blog
"The sentence" is part of my series "Parallels" and was shot in Sälen, Sweden. We were there on a skiing holiday with my family, but being me I just couldn't let this breathtaking landscape be out there without being photographed.
The cold got me thinking about for how little time you would actually survive out there without any cover or extra warmth. And this story came to me about an entity, light as snow but with a deadly darkness, executing a sentence leading to certain death... Read more...
She has been forced to live in this hell for almost 40 years and hasn't been allowed to see another whale in almost 30 years!
"HUH, I got him! Told you Marble! I told you!"
"You were right, Phillip!"
"You can now call me Big Bear Fish King."
"Fine, just reel him in."
"Excuse me, what's my name?"
"Big Bear Fish King."
"Say it in a sentence!"
"UGH, reel that darn thing in Big Bear Fish King."
"Good, next time with a little less attitude. WHOO HOO, he's mine!"
Before the war this building was a munition bunker. From 15 August 1940 to July 1943 the SS used it as crematorium. In the autumn of 1941, the largest room, which had been designed by the camp authorities as a morgue, was adopted for use as an improvised gas chamber, the first of its king in Auschwitz. Using the gas produced by pellets of Zyklon B, man thousands of Jews were murdered here by the SS within hours of their arrival at Auschwitz. Several groups of Soviet POWs were also murdered here in this way, as were sick prisoners whose return t work was considered unlikely. Poles from outside the camp who had been sentenced to death by the German summary court were shot here. After the establishment in Auschwitz II-Birkenau of two more improvised gas chambers in spring and summer of 1942 for the mass murder of the Jews, the gassings here were gradually stopped. Later, with the completion in Auschwitz II of four purpose-built gas chambers with crematoria, the burning of corpses here was also stopped (July 1943). (sign at the building).
Up to 700 people at a time could be gassed here. People undressed outside, or just inside the door. As you enter, bear right and find your way into the big "shower room". Look for the vents in the ceiling--this is where the SS men dropped the Zyklong-B. In the adjacent room is a replica of the furnace. This facility could burn 34 bodies a day -- so it took two days to burn all the bodies from one round of executions. The Nazies didn't like this inefficiency, so they build four more huge crematoria at Birkenau. (Rick Stevens Snapshot travelguide to Krakow, Warsaw & Gdansk)
[Colors are muted in many of the photographs taken in Auschwitz and although there are many historical photographs of individuals and personal possessions they will not be shown in respect to the somber nature of the holocaust.]
Auschwitz I, the main camp in the Auschwitz camp complex, is the first camp established near Oswiecim. Construction began in May 1940 in the Zasole suburb of Oswiecim, in artillery barracks formerly used by the Polish army. The camp is continuously expanded through the use of forced labor. Although Auschwitz I is primarily a concentration camp, serving a penal function, it also has a gas chamber and crematorium. An improvised gas chamber is located in the basement of the prison (Block 11). Later, a gas chamber is constructed in the crematorium.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust.
Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans. It was a complex of camps, including a concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camp. It was located at the town of Oswiecim near the prewar German-Polish border in Eastern Upper Silesia, an area annexed to Germany in 1939. Auschwitz I was the main camp and the first camp established at Oswiecim. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was the killing center at Auschwitz. Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau almost daily with transports of Jews from virtually every German-occupied country of Europe. Auschwitz III, also called Buna or Monowitz, was established in Monowice to provide forced laborers for nearby factories, including the I.G. Farben works. At least 1.1 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. Other victims included between 70,000 and 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, and about 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war
Sentence from Paris words
dont miss the other two pics belonging to this one.Nr 2
www.flickr.com/photos/rolfnoe/48315545221/in/dateposted-p...
and Nr 1
www.flickr.com/photos/rolfnoe/48315533896/in/dateposted-p...
otherwise you dont get the sentence.
Background information: photo-philosophy.net/triplets/ and photo-philosophy.net/satze-sentences/
The sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem "Sacred Emily", which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays.
In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a person. Stein later used variations on the sentence in other writings, and the shortened form "A rose is a rose is a rose" is among her most famous quotations, often interpreted as meaning "things are what they are", a statement of the law of identity, "A is A."
Stein once remarked, "Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a ... is a ... is a ...' Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years." (Four in America). (Source: Wikipedia).
Picture taken in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain.
UNA ROSA ES UNA ROSA ES UNA ROSA... (2024)
La frase "Rosa es una rosa es una rosa es una rosa" fue escrita por Gertrude Stein como parte del poema de 1913 "Sacred Emily", que apareció en el libro de 1922 Geography and Plays.
En ese poema, la primera "Rosa" es el nombre de una persona. Stein utilizó posteriormente variaciones de la frase en otros escritos, y la forma abreviada "Una rosa es una rosa es una rosa" es una de sus citas más famosas, a menudo interpretada como que significa "las cosas son lo que son", una declaración de la ley de identidad, "A es A".
Stein comentó una vez: "¡Escuche! No soy tonta. Sé que en la vida diaria no andamos por ahí diciendo 'es una... es una... es una...' Sí, no soy tonta; pero creo que en ese verso la rosa es roja por primera vez en la poesía inglesa en cien años". (Cuatro en América). (Fuente: Wikipedia).
Foto tomada en Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, España.
Sentence
I'll save you from yourself
From the demons of the night
They promise fame and fortune
All you eagerly desire
I'll save you from yourself
From those voices calling you
To sell your soul to evil
Then you'll be dancing forever
Music: eRa
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG4sAFnwXb0
Model: Nic (my husband)
3rd Place WINNER - Atque Artificia 17th People and Portrait pool contest!!!
Please don't use this image on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit written permission. © All rights reserved
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I've been walking in my sleep
And I've been waking in my dreams
I've been living in the past
My food don't pay this debt
#ProjectBuriedTreasure
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Mission Log from Lt. Markland: On a personal note, I never thought I would be working with the Hutts, when I signed up for the Imperial Academy on Carida. Luckily Cdr. Bannon has put me in charge of restocking our arms supply. I’d rather be the one dictating terms to the Hutts, rather than turning a blind eye and fleeing to a more polished part of the Imperial Triumvirate.
Some time before on Nanth’ri’s southern hemisphere…
Lt. Markland: One Zeta-class cargo shuttle is already loaded. The rest will be loaded onto the Lambda. This should be enough weapons to supply the remainder of the Lannik garrison...
Exalted Kabani, the manifest states that payment will be taken care of personally by Cdr. Bannon. What does that mean?
Kabani the Hutt: Nobata uta-sha tinka mah kikyuna. Eh eh eh...
Lt. Markland: Your lordship, it is my concern if I am to make sure the Imperial Triumvirate continues to use your connections for supplying weapons.
Kabani the Hutt: Chuba! Spee ek uta-sha Bannon.
Lt. Markland: Mmph… I will do that!
A pleasure doing business with you, Lord Kabani…
Kabani the Hutt: Jee huujah uba Spasteelya kyotopa Circumtore mah kikyuna… Eh eh eh…
Lt. Markland: Thank you my lord. Your hospitality is most gracious.
Excerpt from Lt. Markland’s Mission Log: Kabani the Hutt seem to have an extensive network of smugglers and mercenaries on his payroll. I have only managed to identify a few of them from the imperial database.
Cpt. Augost, a male twi’lek, and seemingly the less charming part of a gun running smuggler duo. Former entries going decades back suggests he has death sentences in several outer rim systems. The other part of the smuggler duo, Vakál, male humam. Vakál’s record lists him as a notorious con man. Wanted for participating in the Scipio Heist, whatever that is.
The last individual I’ve been able to ID, is Djina, female zeltron bouty hunter, working as muscle and bodyguard for Kabani. Nothing in the records, but I’ve heard that she is among the most expensive bounty hunters on this side of the Hydian way.
///
This one came out very well I think. My first attempt at some Hutt architecture - inspired by Nal Hutta from SWTOR. Also toying with the idea of a Shell Hutt - or a Hutt with a cybernetic body...
Let me know what you think... :)
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” Ernest Hemingway
An old chinese sentence states: "Every blade of grass deserves its own drop of morning dew." But what happens when the winter temperature and humidity cover every thing with a thin layer of rime, lit by the morning sun like a smarm of tiny crystal needles? The morning dew becomes ice and ice becomes expression of the art of Nature. A magic atmosphere, full of awe.
This phenomenon is quite unusual and difficult to spot. So... this picture is dedicated to those who never walk the same road with the very same eyes. Whoever loves photography knows what I am talking about.
Un antico proverbio cinese dice: "Ogni stelo d'erba merita la sua goccia di rugiada del mattino". Ma cosa succede quando la temperatura rigida e l'umidità coprono ogni cosa di un sottile strato di ghiaccio, acceso dal sole del mattino come uno sciame di sottili aghi di cristallo? La rugiada del mattina diventa brina e la brina diventa espressione dell'arte della Natura. Una magica atmosfera, piena di meraviglia.
Il fenomeno è abbastanza raro e difficile da notare.
Perciò dedico questa immagine a chi non passa mai due volte per la stessa strada con gli stessi occhi. Chi ama la fotografia, sa di cosa parlo.
It is not that I am not a morning person. I never need coffee to get myself going, and I have trouble sleeping beyond 9 in the morning. Nonetheless, I rarely seem to make it out for sunrise, and that is something I intend to change about my photography over this next year. Call it a photographic resolution.
Anyway, this is a sunrise I did make it up for, made all the more remarkable because we had to drive over an hour just to get here in time for sunrise as we were not staying in the park and this is taken at Reflection Lake which is almost all the way to Paradise (yes I like how that sentence reads too ;-) ). Really not much else to say about this other than I forgot my tripod in Portland so I had to shoot the entire weekend hand held or using whatever logs and rocks I could find as makeshift tripods. I think in this case it was a downed tree at a 1/30th of a second.
Taken with a Noblex 6x12 swing lens panoramic camera and Fuji Reala film.
291 of 365 - Mars Attacks by Mezco. Title from Cannibal Corpse song that makes me thing of these guys burning down cities.
If you dig this, go like the Facebook page.
And then Jesus said, "Take it. This is my flesh." or whatever.
~~~~~
-Oberon's Look-
Pants, Jacket, and Tie by ArchiveFaction
Under by NOCHE
Shoes by Phunk
Book by ContraptioN
Skins and Hairs by HYPE
-Mateo's Look-
Thorns, Mask, Harnesses, Chain, and Locks by ArchiveFaction
Jock by THIRST
Knee Pads by NOCHE
Shoes by Flite
Rings by Ysoral
Skins and Hair by HYPE
-The Scene-
Stocks - Adjustable Pillory by eL
Backdrop - Cubic Backdrop by STUD INC
Cross - Mesh Crucifix by Urban Grunge
Some have commented in here about the stories being told in this image and, indeed, there are many. The first photo on the left, an official booking photo, is of Modesta Avila, the first woman felon in Orange County, convicted in 1889. According to local historian Jim Sleeper, the story goes like this: "She was very upset with the railroad, as she felt they had never paid for a right of way through her mother's land. The trains were dirty, noisy, and kept her chickens from laying eggs. She decided to do something about it. Locals said it was only a clothesline across the tracks with her laundry; Santa Fe said it was a railroad tie. A railroad agent removed it before a train came. Four months later she was arrested and charged with "attempted obstruction of a train."
She was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 3 years in San Quentin where she died 2 years later at age 22.
© All rights reserved.
Website: www.ajkpix.com
it's a story about tiny nano-ships and lasers, in one grammatically incorrect run-on sentence! kaboom!
por Warhol -
Keith Haring (Reading, 4 de maio de 1958 – Nova Iorque, 16 de fevereiro de 1990) foi um artista gráfico e activista estadunidense. Seu trabalho reflecte a cultura nova-iorquina dos anos 1980.
Nascido no estado de Pensilvânia, cedo mostrou interesse pelas artes plásticas. De 1976 até 1978 estudou design gráfico numa escola de arte em Pittsburgh. Antes de acabar o curso, transfere-se para Nova Iorque, onde seria grandemente influenciado pelos graffitis, inscrevendo-se na School of Visual Arts. Homossexual assumido, o seu trabalho reflecte também um conjunto de temas homo-eróticos.
Keith Haring começou a ganhar notoriedade ao desenhar a giz nas estações de metro de Nova Iorque. As suas primeiras exposições formam,michelleis acontele era gayecem a partir de 1980 no Club 57, que se torna um ponto de encontro da elite vanguardista.
Na mesma década, participou em diversas bienais e pintou diversos murais pelo mundo - de Sydney a Amsterdão e mesmo no Muro de Berlim. Amigo pessoal de Grace Jones, foi ele quem lhe pintou o corpo para o videoclip "I'm Not Perfect".
Em 1988, abre um Pop Shop em Tóquio. Na ocasião, afirma:
"Em minha vida fiz muitas coisa, ganhei muito dinheiro e me diverti muito. Mas também vivi em Nova Iorque nos anos do ápice da promiscuidade sexual. Se eu não pegar AIDS, ninguém mais pegará."
Meses depois declara em entrevista à revista Rolling Stone que tem o vírus HIV. Em seguida, cria a Keith Haring Foundation, em favor das crianças vítimas da AIDS.
Em 1989, perto da igreja de Sant'Antonio Abate, em Pisa, Itália, executa a sua última obra pública - o grande mural intitulado Tuttomondo[1], dedicado à paz universal.
Haring morreu aos 31 anos de idade, vítima de complicações de saúde relacionadas a AIDS, tendo sido um forte activista contra a doença, que abordou mais que uma vez em suas pinturas.
...
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
David Galloway
As curator of the Keith Haring retrospective mounted by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, Elisabeth Sussman composed a thoughtful catalogue text in which she tidily divided the artist's career into three "chapters." In the first of these, Sussmann suggested, Haring synthesized a street and club style into a bold form of overall decoration that often employed elements of kitsch. In the middle phase, lasting from approximately 1984 to 1988, when he developed the first symptoms of AIDS, Haring produced paintings that were essentially Pop versions of Neo-Expressionism. In these years he also used his cartoon-like graphic line to execute murals, many of them for (and even together with) children. "Finally," Sussman observed, "in the last years of his life, major works not only summed up his painting ambitions but were socially active and angry responses to his imminent death."1
There can be no doubt that the artist's battle with AIDS had a profound effect on his artistic vision. "To live with a fatal disease," he confided to his biographer John Gruen shortly before his death, "gives you a whole new perspective on life."2 The resulting pain and anguish are eloquently expressed in Haring's two collaborations with William Burroughs: Apocalypse (1988) and The Valley (1989). Sussmann's categories are nonetheless too neat and too emphatic, concealing both the humor that frequently enlivens the late works and the dark side that shadows even the earliest, cartoon-like compositions. And the artist was a social activist from the beginning of his career. At a demonstration in Central Park in 1982, he distributed 20,000 antinuclear posters. His "Anti-Litterpig" campaign was launched in 1984, the famous Crack is Wack mural painted in 1986. The true "horror of AIDS had come to light"3 for Haring in 1985, and he had for some time regarded himself as a prime AIDS "candidate" - even before discovering the first Karposi sarcoma on his leg during a trip to Japan in 1988. Not only numerous intimate acquaintances, including his ex-lover Juan Dubose, had already succumbed to the disease. Rumors of Haring's own infection were rife long before he himself learned that he was HIV-positive. More than a year before the diagnosis, Newsweek had tracked the artist down in Europe to ask if his protracted stay there was a cover-up for his affliction with AIDS.
Yet for all the traumatic implications of the onset of the disease itself, it is a mistake to overemphasize the event as a kind of watershed, as a moment in which the oeuvre itself underwent some seismic change. Such an oversimplification is tempting but ultimately misleading. And it is not unlike that simplistic approach to the work of Andy Warhol which suggests a fundamental shift in theme and point of view following the assassination attempt by Valerie Solanis. In fact, Warhol's own fascination with "Death and Disaster" was well established before the deranged feminist entered the Factory in 1969 with revolver blazing. 129 Die in Jet, the first of the works associated with violent death, dates to 1962. And it was soon followed by garishly tinted studies of suicides, car crashes, race riots and electric chairs.
Keith Haring, too, had explored a darker side of experience long before the dread diagnosis. The earliest works produced in his characteristic graphic style include serpents and monsters, nuclear radiation and falling angels, cannibals, omnivorous worms, bloody daggers and skeletons. The devil himself makes occasional appearances, as does the multi-headed beast of the Apocalypse. One can make out a sinister form that may well represent a virus, and an androgynous figure which wheels a sword-like crucifix over the heads of children, while scissors and chains are employed in sadomasochistic practices which often end in castration. In a Saint Sebastian, produced in 1984 and one of the few titled works by Haring, the martyr's body is pierced not by arrows but by airplanes - one of the numerous examples of the artist's critical view of technology, but also testimony to his deeply felt pacifism.
The figure of a hanged man, perhaps influenced by William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, makes it debut in 1981. So, too, do human figures writhing in the clutch of a nest of serpents. In 1982 a serpent pierces (and thereby joins like so many beads on a string) a row of human figures with holes in their abdomens. Indeed, human figures with holes gouged in their middles are a recurrent pictogram - one inspired, according to the artist himself, by the assassination of John Lennon in December of 1980. Yet even before that event, Haring was sounding the themes of violence and death in the cut-up headlines he posted around New York City, inspired both by his friend Jenny Holzer and by William Burroughs. In typical tabloid fashion, the headlines trumpeted such sensationalist assertions as "POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE." "RONALD REAGAN ACCUSED OF TV STAR SEX DEATH; KillED AND ATE lOVER." and "REAGAN'S DEATH COPS HUNT POPE."
When Keith Haring undertook his first cross-country trip in 1977 with his girlfriend Susan, he financed the journey by silkscreening T-shirts and selling them along the way. One model showed Richard Nixon sniffing a kilo of marijuana; the other featured the logo of the Grateful Dead: a skull - the penultimate memento mori that also fascinated Warhol - split by a lightning bolt. One of Haring's early subway drawings includes a skeleton wearing wire-rimmed glasses as an encoded self-portrait. In a diary entry for March 18, 1982, the artist reflected on the significance of "Being born in1958, the first generation of the Space Age, born into a world of television technology and instant gratification, a child of the atomic age. Raised in American during the sixties and learning about war from Life magazines on Viet Nam. Watching riots on television..."4 Like the Beat poets he admired, the young artist was intensely aware of the dangers of nuclear war and the precedent his country had set in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was equally aware of the dangers inherent in "peacetime" uses of nuclear energy. The notorious near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 occurred a short distance from the Haring home in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Spaceships projecting rays onto earthlings often hover over his works, and his famous "radiant" baby may suggest radioactive contamination as well as spiritual glow.
In short, the first "chapter" in Haring's career was neither so innocent nor so giddily affirmative as it is sometimes made out to be. His media-savvy generation, exposed at an early age to "sex, drugs and rock-'n'-roll," was quickly disabused of childhood's illusions. At the age of 19, he confided to his diary, "Through all the shit shines the small ray of hope that lives in the common sense of the few. The music, dance, theater, and the visual arts: the forms of expression, the arts of hope. This is where I think I fit in."5 Even amid the "shit," there was an element of hope, and the coexistence of these two entities defines the Haring universe. What one witnesses is literally The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to cite the title of a Roland Petit choreography for the Ballet National de Marseilles, for which Haring created a huge front curtain in 1985. Whether Haring was familiar with William Blake's ironic poem of the same title is uncertain, though the English poet was a favorite of the psychedelic set to which Haring belonged for a time. Furthermore, there are occasional parallels between Haring's graphic style and the illustrations Blake prepared for his own works. The implications of a linked pair of Blake titles - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - have clear relevance for Haring's oeuvre, as well.
The key to Haring's work is not to be found in "chapters" or in oppositions, but precisely in the mingling, the marriage of innocence and experience, good and evil, heaven and hell. This inherent but essential ambiguity is reinforced by an image he created in June of 1989, less than a year before his death. (He was in Paris at the time, executing a monumental painting intended to decorate a dirigible to be flown over the city in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.) The starting point was a photograph of the artist sitting on a chair from the Vitra Collection, part of a series of celebrity portraits made for the German furniture company. With a felt pen, Haring fitted himself out with wings, floated a halo over his head, bound his feet with shackles and coiled a rope-like or snakelike form around his torso. (In fact, in other works the rope which binds a victim often turns into a snake in the hands of his tormentor). Haring remarked on his own creation: "Whoever understands this photograph understands what my work is all about."6 The essential theme sounded here - man bound into a "mortal coil," anchored to the earth, while his spirit strives to soar into the heavens - is as old as religion itself)
In his journal Haring described the events of June 16th as follows: Friday I had a "press lunch" with the airship people (boring and trivial). Then went to Futura's exhibit and bought a nice new painting. Met David Galloway there. He came to Paris to interview me for the book Hans Mayer is doing on my sculptures. Went with David to see the airship painting again and do photos. We talked a lot and by the same time we got to the hotel the conversation got deeper and continually off the "subject."
Did some photos for a German spaghetti book. (Portrait of me with a drawing made out of spaghetti we ordered from room service.) I talked with David till it was time for dinner at Marcel Fleiss's house with Yoko and Sam. Nice quiet dinner and then returned to hotel with David to talk till 1 :30.7
The "deeper" talk that quickly veered from the topic of sculpture and continued into the early hours of the morning ultimately found its focus in the fat roll of galley proofs resting on the mantelpiece of Haring's suite at the Ritz Hotel. This was the interview by David Scheff that would appear in Rolling Stone on August 10th, and in which Haring talked with painful frankness about his own illness. As a politically engaged artist who helped to organize the first" Art Against AIDS" exhibition and produced several AIDS-related posters, including more than one with the motto "Silence = Death," he felt morally obliged to speak out about his illness. (Later in the year, he would march in protest against New York City's "racist" policy with respect to the disease, which allegedly only afflicted perverts, junkies and Afro-Americans.) Nonetheless, when the time came to approve Sheff's uncompromising interview, the activist experienced a moment of hesitation. Quite simply, he feared he might not be permitted to work with children again, and this was one of his most cherished activities. Despite such misgivings, on June 17 he sent his approval of the text to the editors of Rolling Stone, and when it appeared the artist experienced an immense, deeply gratifying wave of sympathy. The sole sour note was a protest against his having been commissioned (by Princess Caroline) to execute a mural for the maternity ward of the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco - allegedly a potential danger for future generations.
In transforming a photographic portrait into a self-portrait with a few brisk strokes, Haring made an emphatic statement about his artistic intentions. At the same time, he revealed the depth of his own religious sentiment. Though not a practicing Christian in the last years of his life, the artist had a profound sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, and he devoted a considerable part of his energy to social causes. Attending Sunday School and church had been a regular part of the Harings' family life, and in summer Keith attended the camp run by the United Church of Christ. As a teenager he joined the Jesus Saves movement, read the Bible voraciously and developed "an obsession with the concept of the Second Coming..."8 Above all, Haring was influenced by "Revelation," which later offered him a veritable storehouse of trenchant visual imagery. Even at the age of 12, according to Haring's mother, "he began making drawings in which there were Jesus symbols and other types of symbols, like a loop with two dots."9 Haring's phase as a "Jesus Freak" was short-lived, and the impact of religion (above all, of organized religion) on his work can be overestimated. Indeed, the artist once complained to his journal that "Most religions are so hopelessly outdated, and suited to fit the particular problems of earlier times, that they have no power to provide liberation and freedom, and no power to give 'meaning' beyond an empty metaphor or moral code."10
When he finally decided, while dancing at New York's Paradise Garage, to depict the Ten Commandments within the arches of Bordeaux's Musee d'Art Contemporain for his show there in 1985, Haring was at a loss to remember all the commandments: "So the minute I get to Bordeaux, I ask for a bible!"11 Yet for all the vagueness surrounding Haring's grasp of biblical fundamentals and his distrust of the church as a moral authority, Christian mythology clearly had a profound impact on his use of angels and devils and madonnas, bleeding hearts and crucifixions and transubstantiations. (Painting an angel along with a mother and child on the coffin of his friend Yves Arman, who died in a car crash, transcended mere decoration to become a ritual act of healing.) Haring's fundamental religiosity, on the other hand, was also influenced by his interest in so-called "primitive" cultures, their myths and rituals and totemic objects - interests that inform the artist's pseudo-African masks, for example. And the Michael Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art at New York's Metropolitan Museum was one of his favorite haunts.
Haring's use of traditional Christian imagery is particularly explicit in Apocalypse (1988), his first collaboration with William Burroughs. Each composition is a reprise on a collaged image taken from advertising, art history or Catholic theology. In addition to a Christ with a bleeding heart, the series includes an advertisement from the 1950s (significantly, the period of Haring's own infancy) in which a mother tenderly - and, by implication, Madonna-like - leans over her baby to offer him a milk-bottle. The explicitly Catholic allusions continue in Haring's next collaboration with Burroughs - the suite of etchings entitled The Valley. Here the imagery includes the torso of a male figure inserting a knife beneath his ribs to duplicate one of Christ's stigmata. This belated "embrace" of Catholic symbology aligns Haring even more closely with other prominent creative rebels: with Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and Haring's street-wise friend and sometime-collaborator Madonna. For those three taboo-breaking artists the Catholic religion offered an especially fertile field for rebellion.
There is a kind of poetic logic in the fact that Haring's collaborations with Burroughs mark the end of his career, since it began with the mock New York Post headlines inspired by the cut-up technique Burroughs employed in Naked Lunch. The artist, furthermore, seems to have felt an intuitive sympathy for a surrealistic juxtaposition of images - partly inspired by his own use of hallucinogenic drugs, but also by his acquaintance with the works of Burroughs and the Beat-generation poets. A sentence from Burroughs' Soft Machine, published in 1962, might almost describe a composition by Haring: "Carl walked a long row of living penis urns whose penis has absorbed the body with vestigial arms and legs breathing through purple fungoid gills..."12 Haring had known Burroughs' work long before the two first met in 1983. In 1986, the artist told an interviewer that the author was "very into a lot of the world I've depicted, especially in the recent things - sex, mutations, weird science fiction situations."13 Erotic grotesquerie mixed with Christian symbolism characterized the works of both men. Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed guru of the acid age, remarked of the first Haring-Burroughs collaboration, Apocalypse, that it was "like Dante and Titian getting together."14 Dante and Hieronymous Bosch, whom Haring greatly admired, might seem the more appropriate parallel for works redolent with a sense of doom.
On March 20, 1987, Haring made the following remark in his journal: "I always knew, since I was young, that I would die young. But I thought it would be fast (an accident, not a disease). In fact, a man-made disease like AIDS. Time will tell that I am not scared. I live everyday as if it were the last. I love life."15 That affirmative note is sounded throughout the artist's work, the numerous interviews he gave, the social activities he sponsored, the texts he composed. Yet in the same journal entry which included the vigorous assertion of his love for life, Haring composed the following reaction to the news that the policemen accused of killing Michael Stewart had all been acquitted:
I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can never escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pink lady who can't see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits. An eye for an eye... 16
Like a Bosch-Burroughs vision, the passage indicates the rage Haring could experience when confronted with social and political injustice. For an understanding of the artist's oeuvre as a whole, however, it is important to observe that in the journal entry for a single day, remarks of a tender, Christian-like nature - "I'm sure when I die, I won't really die, because I live in many people,"17 - are followed by fulminations of Old Testament rage. Yet this dichotomy in no sense represents a contradiction; far more, it is symptomatic of the complexity of the artist's vision. It is an underlying duality which make the early works more than naive cartoons, the late ones more than angry odes to man's mortality. Fitted out with the wings necessary to ascend into heaven and the shackles drawing him down into the fire and brimstone of hell, Keith Haring demonstrated an astonishingly precocious grasp of the inherent ambiguities of his generation, of his age. He was the loving, lusting, break-dancing, quintessential American boy, but also an untiring, uncompromising social critic, and he was doomed to die young of a disease that decimated his generation. "Nothing lasts forever," as he noted in one of his final journal entries. "And nobody can escape death."18
In Russia defendants are placed in a cage in the court room. As long as they are not sentenced they don't have to wear a jail uniform.
At first glance, I thought this man was munching on a slice of pizza ... after all, he looks vaguely Italian, and the orange/red color of the food makes it look like a slice of pizza. But if that were true, you would have to ask yourself (as I did): why would anyone be eating a slice of pizza at 7:45 in the morning?
I eventually concluded that the food was either a huge piece of cornbread, or perhaps some kind of fried/baked food from some other part of the world. And then I noticed the man's unusual belt buckle, and what seems to be some unusual embroidery on his shirt. Indeed, even his shoes look a little unusual.
So I finally concluded that I have no idea at all who this man is, where he comes from, or what he's eating for breakfast. All I can tell you is that he was also not a pattern that repeated itself during my days at the Earth Cafe.
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As I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent Tumblr blog postings, I’m working on an exercise for a new class that I’ve started taking at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in the fall of 2015.( You can see the earlier Tumblr postings here and here.)
In addition to taking a bunch of photos (see the other Tumblr postings for details and descriptions of what the photos are supposed to illustrate), we also have the task of editing our images down to a maximum of 10 “presentation images” that we will share with the ICP class next week. When our instructor, Joanne Dugan, asked me last week if I anticipated having any problems with this aspect of the assignment, I shrugged and said, “No, I do this all the time …”
Well, yes and no: I do do a lot of editing/winnowing of my photos before deciding which ones should be shared with anyone else. But I had forgotten that I also do a lot of cropping, color-adjustment, tweaking, and general post-processing before I upload my photos to Flickr, Facebook, or even Instagram. For this particular ICP exercise, we were also told not to crop the photos, and not to do any post-processing. That makes things a lot more difficult …
On the other hand, part of the exercise is to assemble and share a maximum of ten photos that collectively tell a “story” of some kind – and to “tell” that story with anywhere from a word, to a sentence, to a paragraph for each of the photos. That makes things a lot easier … after all, if a photo has to be presented in isolation, then it truly stands alone. And it is intended to be viewed without any accompanying text, then it really stands alone. There’s nothing wrong with that; indeed, one might argue that that’s the whole point of photography: a picture should “tell” a story all by itself, without any extraneous verbiage to “explain” what might not be obvious to the viewer.
But not very many things exist in complete isolation of the rest of the universe, especially in today’s interconnected world. I suppose some people would debate that point quite vigorously; and some people might argue that a photograph of a person, place, or thing should be able to “stand alone” without anything else. I certainly have seen photos that fall into this category, and I suppose I’ve taken a few like that, too. Or, maybe if I never intended my photos to be considered in complete isolation from one another, perhaps that’s how some people prefer to look at them …
But for me, that’s a pretty rare phenomenon. Almost always, I find myself telling a story. The photographs obviously present one “dimension” of the story, in a visual form; and I’ve been trying to remind myself lately that videos can present can present one, and sometimes two, additional dimensions (motion and sound) that can add enormously to the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the underlying story.
But even if one uses only traditional photos, I find that it’s almost impossible for me to crate (or make, or take) one photo by itself; invariably, I take dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, which collectively tell a story. It may be a story about someplace I’ve been, or some event in which I’ve participated, or some individual (or group of individuals) that I want the viewer to know and appreciate in more detail than would be possible to communicate in a single photo.
And then there are the words … maybe it’s because I spend part of my time as a writer and teacher that I find it almost impossible not to augment my photos with words. Lots of words. Indeed, sometimes far too many words; and sometimes clumsy words, or the wrong words. And I do realize that there are times when the situation would be improved if I would just shut up, and let the photograph do all of the communication. But for better or worse, I guess I’m a photojournalist.
With that in mind, I began the process of editing the photos for my recent ICP assignment. Here’s what I found:
1. It’s not as easy as one might think, when you start with a large number. I began winnowing the original images when I had 2,700 (after 9 days of shooting), and I still had 5 days of shooting left).
2. It’s much more difficult than I had imagined, given the constraints of my ICP class: no cropping, no post-processing, and a maximum of only 10 images. I’ve worked within those constraints for the final images that I’m submitting to the ICP class; but for these Flickr uploads, I’ve ended up with 40-45 images – and they have been heavily cropped, tilted, color-corrected, noise-dusted, and tweaked in various other ways. C’est la vie…
3. Using the collection of photos to “tell a story” is both easier and harder than I thought it would be. I’m including these background notes in all of the photos that get uploaded to Flickr … because I’ve learned (form past experience) that some visitor will zoom in on just one particular photo, without necessarily looking at all of them, and/or without seeing the overall notes for the entire album. And I don’t think I’ll find it difficult to write a few sentences to provide the background details for each photo … but whether they “flow” and create one overall, coherent “story” remains to be seen.
4. Aside from a narrative “story,” there are some “themes” that I noticed throughout this entire two-week exercise. The most significant one was exactly what I had anticipated: patterns. If you are lucky enough to sit in the same spot at the same time, day after day, you see the same rhythms, the same people, the same repetitions of life’s little actions and emotions. Many people have the opportunity to see these patterns, because they do follow the same schedule, day after day, on their way to their job or their school. But some of us have irregular routines, and any, most of us don’t pay any attention. If you slow down, and pay attention, you’ll see the patterns.
But sometimes the pattern involves uniqueness – i.e. strange and unusual people or events that seem to happen only once. But I have to keep reminding myself that my visits have lasted only two weeks; if I was here for a month, or a full season, or perhaps an entire year – then perhaps I would see these strange incidents repeating themselves
5. Another theme – which I did not anticipate, but was delighted to see – was the pervasive sense of affection and caring between and among everyone on the street. Mostly it was apparent in the interactions between parents and children; but sometimes it was between dog-owners and the dogs they were walking; sometimes it was between friends who happened to be walking along together; and sometimes it was between complete strangers and me, as the strangers would smile and nod and say “hello” if they noticed I was watching them. It was a great experience.
The sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." was written
by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem Sacred Emily,
which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays.
In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a woman.
Stein later used variations on the phrase in other writings
and "A rose is a rose is a rose" is probably her most famous
quote, often interpreted as "things are what they are".