View allAll Photos Tagged existential
The presence of extreme busyness in our lives may point to deeper problems – a pervasive people pleasing, a restless ambition, a malaise of meaninglessness. “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness,” writes Tim Kreider in his widely read article for The New York Times. “Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” The greatest danger with busyness is that there may be greater dangers you never have time to consider. - Kevin DeYoubng
Paris, 1961
Hard to believe these kids would be in their 60s now!
negative scan from my archives
More "Paris in the 60s" here: www.flickr.com/photos/amarcord108/sets/72157625555243112/...
“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
― Roland Barthes
"The End" by the Chinese artist Xiang Jing.
Xiang Jing is a profoundly introspective and innovative Chinese sculptor whose work explores the complexities of human nature, identity and existential truth.
Rather than aligning with a strictly feminist stance, she approaches her art from a
woman's perspective, using the female form as both subject and statement. Her sculptures, though realistic in appearance, carry a deep emotional and psychological weight, challenging conventions of beauty, self-awareness and gendered experience.
Her artistic process is meticulous and deeply personal. Working primarily with fiberglass, Xiang Jing layers hand-painted details onto each piece, ensuring every sculpture possesses an individual presence and emotional depth. Her practice is problem-oriented, engaging with themes such as the relationship between observer and observed, internal desire and the shifting boundaries between realism and abstraction. She is a fiercely independent thinker, constantly pushing the limits of contemporary sculpture while maintaining an introspective approach.
"The End" from Mirror Image series stands out for its ambiguity.
It features girls dressed in white, shielding their eyes with their hands yet tilting forward as if trying to peer through their fingers to catch a glimpse of something interesting. It's composition and treatment of the gaze introduce an open-ended, interpretive quality.
The insomnia derives from angst. Anxiety. Life. Direction. Well-being. The existential experience. Connectivity. Tangibility. Transience. Authenticity. Don't think about it. It doesn't exist. You're not there. I'm not here. I don't miss you. I choose not to miss you. Together. We are all alone. In the darkness and silence of the night, our minds are each our own. The electricity that fires each pulse and fueling each breath arises autonomously. You decide how to live and when to die. You decided.
Was it really important for me to take an afternoon to get to this location and take this picture? I know I had fun doing it, and maybe that’s all amateur photography is supposed to be, but I’ve taken the same looking shot a dozen times before. Does a person who takes nice (e.g.) cloud shots, like me, have to take and post 100 of them to Flickr? Ten years from now will I still be taking this shot? Why do I need to look at new photos from my contacts and others, wouldn’t looking at the pictures that I’ve faved already give me equal or even more pleasure? Why is amateur photography like food—no matter how good the previous meal, we’re always wanting to consume more the next day?
First, visual stimulation is enhanced by novelty of stimulus—in other words, people respond more strongly to seeing something new than old. Few of us spend five minutes looking at a photograph, even a famous one. Unlike a video, or a piece of music, or a conversation, the stimulus doesn't continue over time--it's there and that's it. We get our endorphin hit from the photo and move on to the next one. As artists we amateur photographers have to create a lot of photos because that’s how they’re consumed and because the medium and technology allows us to create a lot of photos quickly and cheaply.
Second, amateur photography is about recording history. I take a new photo today because I exist. Photography is the way we share our lives with others and remind ourselves of where we’ve been and what we’ve done. With Flickr I have seen the whole world and experienced many things vicariously, because people are recording and sharing their histories with me.
So here you go, another pretty cloud shot, because I was there.
I was looking at graffiti outside the chemistry building at the university of Bucharest, Romania (Europe) and imagined this image. My subject wouldn't pose for me, so I posed and he took the shot.
L'homme sans qualités ~ Le Louvre ~ Paris ~ MjYj
FIAC 2009
Please don't use this image on websites,
blogs or other media without my explicit permission.
© All rights reserved
At first he headed straight into the waves and strong headwind. Gaining confidence he turned 90 degrees and rolled sideways in the swells for a long stretch. Then back into the wind head on. He figured out what sailors know. Tacking on an angle against the wind is the best way to make progress against it. A tack is to paddleboarding what a switchback is to a hiker. By tacking starboard and port, this paddleboarder moved 10 cottage lengths forward. He was out there a good 45 minutes when he took three falls in quick succession. Time to turn tail and let the wind do the work of pushing him back to shore.
Shot was taken with a 35mm summilux, the original aspherical version. (So called AA). I had not set the manual option on the camera lens detection, hence EXIF is wrong.
The refuge of my doubts
Wanting the significance that cause and effect
might have (we see it in little things where it is)
not seeing it in any place
important to us (it is in our lives but in ways
that deny each other) and the totality,
I suppose, is what I mean—it isn’t there—
we look around: the possibilities,
dreams and diversions, whatever else there is.
》William Bronk, The Effect of Cause Despaired
Sirius (instrumental) - The Alan Parsons Project
If you look for the Truth outside yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are.
《 Tung-Shan ... Paths of Water
Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.
Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.
Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.
'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times
The mighty iron horse roars past the signalman every day and I wonder if he has existential dilemmas that cloud his being with thoughts of insignifcance and being stuck to his station in life on a forlorn railway crossing in Maharashtra.
Much like what life is for most people. Watching the world move, go by fast and frenetic taking some select people to their momentous destinies,
This is from a series of shots done at a railway crossing in February 2011. Meherabad is a hamlet quite close to Ahmadnagar. Meher Baba lies in eternal peace and the place wears an atmosphere of serenity and solace.
Dates
Taken on February 16, 2011 at 3.54PM IST (edit)
Posted to Flickr December 20, 2013 at 11.39AM IST (edit)
Exif data
Camera Nikon D300
Exposure 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture f/22.0
Focal Length 24 mm
ISO Speed 320
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash No Flash
_DSC9719 nef
let us open our hymnals.
excuse me, I'm not really here for the service.
no? what then?
I just stopped in to get out of the cold.
I see. you know that the homeless shelter is down the street.
oh, I'm not homeless.
no?
in fact, I just moved in next door.
you mean. . .
we're neighbors.
well then, I hope to see you at mass.
I doubt it. but if you want to come watch the game on tv, you're welcome.
very kind of you, I'm sure.
you can bring the food.
oh?
it's my sense of spiritual priorities you see. eating right, and often, is definitely one of them.
good to know.
so bring lots.
right.
"Alberto Giacometti A Line Through Time" Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery summer 2019. This is must see. Giacometti lived 1901-1966 with his primary studio in Paris.
The post-war era in Europe lead to an overwhelmingly existential crisis embodied in the feeling of fragility, isolation and alienation in the works of artists like Giacometti.
I had to use my cell phone there...no regular cameras permitted.
Tried to find myself, but got lost on the way back.
Image imagined in MidJourney AI and finished with Topaz Studio and Lightroom Classic.
COMMENT: Of Bots and Bad Pandas
After trying to log in to Flickr numerous times without success earlier today, I gave up. Too many Bad Pandas. No point posting photos if half the people can't get on to see them. I don't know why this platform is the only one we know that goes down so regularly. Looking at the Help Forum this is a worldwide problem. But that happens to be the least of our problems on Flickr.
There is something more important existentially that goes on every single day on everyone's page that far too many people are turning a blind eye to. I'm talking about bot use. For those who still live in a prelapsarian social media world, bots are either (1) pieces of internet code written specifically to trawl the pages of Flickr faving and in some cases commenting (generically) in order to garner reciprocal visits - you can buy them, or (2) humans behaving in a bot-like manner, simply faving and following as many people as possible in the hope of achieving the same goals - inflated views, faves and followers. Frankly I'm sick of it.
So much so that I will block any person I see that exhibits this bot-like tendency. My list of blocks is hundreds long. Of course this has seen a falloff in my own view numbers. We don't seriously think that all those views of our old photos are real do we? If say you post 3 photos a day and each of them gets 500 views in 24 hours and your total view count for the day is 5,000. I would argue a good percentage of all those extra 3,500 views are in fact unblocked bots.
Opponents of bots on social media platforms (and Flickr is by no means the worst here) estimate that up to 50 percent of all traffic on these sites is bot-driven. Now bots are easy to understand when the corruption of monetarization comes into play. That is not the case on Flickr. But ego is. And it seems to me that ego will drive some people to do very bad things to attract attention to themselves.
Have you ever wondered why that awful out of focus picture of the Grand Canyon has attracted 65,000 views and 1,500 faves? Well very likely this person is using a massive bot. And many people fave unthinkingly. Go to the Activities Feed and press the fave star and you don't even need to visit a person's page. You can fave thousands in an hour or two doing that. But what a hollow feeling. And what does it do for the photography community?
Explore is another area rife with gaming strategies. How many times do you see the usual suspects turn up on a person's page with "Congrats on Explore"? That's the only time they'll visit your page by the way (that's if you're lucky enough to ever get Explored because it seems only magic accounts do every 16-19 days). These are a group of people who fave (or by proxy their bot does) every one of the 500 Explored photos each day, in the belief it will garner them more "followers" (how I hate that word - CONTACTS is so much better). So if you have been in the habit of doing that there is an excellent chance I will have blocked you.
Of course the most dangerous bots of all are the ones pretending to comment. People think they are real, but AI is very clever now. And one in particular has been at the centre of attention during this week. Banned by Flickr after being clearly outed by a "bot catcher". He gets banned, and then the whistleblower gets banned too for exposing the biggest bot commenter on Flickr. All this ended up with the whistleblower rightly being restored, but also the return of the bot user. Some of you will have followed proceedings very closely.
Frankly I've advocated for a long time for view counts to be discontinued. Thousands of views do not make a good photograph. Social media has been bad for photography in that regard. It's made photographers complacent, and even worse, made them conform to particular styles or genres that "succeed" - as if that matters. Photography is an individual art and everyone is unique.
Always remember that not another soul saw Vivian Maier's photographs before she died. And I dare say you rarely see photographs on Flickr even half as good as the ones she spent a lifetime taking.
So if you feel like I do about the integrity of Flickr and bot use, please join us at this group:
....don't like bot-comments/faves? Join us, post your photos there.
Please post it to the Anti-Bots and Anti-Fake group.
* A final point. Mr Ed was a talking horse and not a bot user.
2 more from the "On the road '72"series which I have now (2010) been able to scan for the first time (the slides were too dark for my old scanner). This is a second and more subjective version of my "existential" On the road 1 image. I am not sure which I prefer - what do you think?
In 2017, looking at the full-frame photo again I realised what was wrong with it – that it was two completely different ideas combined, because I liked both of them and didn't want to lose either. The (fairly obvious in retrospect) solution is to make it into two separate images: this is the first, expressing the idea described already* and focussing on the subjective viewpoint. I shall post the other one next... ( → done).
* In summary "the idea is: humanity struggling towards an unknowable future, trying to follow a rather vague idea / belief (the white line) under difficult conditions." Please see the comments (below) for a more detailed discussion.
PS: This photo is now archived, having been posted for 10 years.
PPS 17/2/23: I have posted new higher quality versions of both the images based on this photo, to go with the other image I posted earlier.
Questions about Life, Death, and Everything
Looking deep into the night sky, raises existential questions.
Sharpless 171 is a red emission region in the constellation Cepheus. With its smaller companion, Sharpless 170, it resembles an exclamation mark up in the sky. But looking more carefully, Sharpless 171 gives the vague impression of a scull floating in the stars of the milky way. It is surprising that the star illuminating the nebula is one of the hottest stars discovered near our Sun, exhibiting a surface temperature of nearly 45000 degrees Celsius and a luminosity about 100000 times that of the Sun en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_7822.
Technical Details:
89 x 60 sec frames taken under suburban skies on September 29, 2019. Canon 550D at ISO 800, Samyang 135mm f/2. Tracked with a Star Adventurer Mini bundle. More details at AstroBin.
For We're Here - The Three Stooges Existential Balloon Factory
Put some zing into your 365! Join We're Here!
“…a mysterious intersection of chance and attention that goes well beyond the existential surrealism of the “decisive moment”. -Lee Friedlander
WAH are visiting the three stooges existential balloon factory. I am the first to admit that I am a bit of a Brit philistine. I have of course heard of them, but haven't knowingly ever watched anything they have done. so this is a copy cat of an internet shot (see comments) This was the only decent shot. but was fun (116/215)
Also for uncertain wednesdays