View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
Some Fridays call fro a quick nine hole break from the office, the phone and the computer. For days like that, I try to find nice mellow courses where I can meet with the golf gods and discuss life and existentialism.
Gilded in the oak savanna.
In the leaning hills, where the summer sun turns the grassland to tinder, the savanna is a wind chime, rustling a harmonious lullaby like a new deck of cards in nimble fingers. Grasshoppers and mayflies and the chaff of newly dried seed catch in the sun. A dry, hot blizzard in an amber streetlamp.
The Arastradero Open Space Preserve is home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and mountain lions and innumerable flavors of insects and birds, yet it is the trees that bring me here time and again. Before the axe and the wheel came to this land, enormous oak savannas like this one stretched across the midwest, the southwest and here along the west coast.
But the axe and the wheel did come and the savannas left. I like to think of the craggy and twisted forms that remain as wounded but unbent descendants of the stalwart soldiers who resisted the blade and the advance of civilization to hold the dusty California soil to the ground and to provide shade for the coyotes and mountain lions and rattlesnakes that weave through the tall grass of the American Veldt. As these sentinels slowly march from mother to child up and down the wind-tousled steppe, we flit about the outskirts of this preserve as insects, building and gnawing and living and dying. I hope that’s all we’ll ever do.
I came to the Arastradero preserve to connect with a particularly beautiful oak I’d passed (and photographed) on hikes before. I found her on the hillside as ever, arms outstretched, singing in the late evening breeze, fluttering fingers of bright green.
As I stood for a while here on the hillside, gilded in the afternoon, alone with my thoughts but for the oak and the whisper of the breeze and the hum-drum clicks and tweets of grassland animals, I thought, “I’ve been away too long,” and was reminded of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I came back to the preserve to reconnect with a spot where I’d taken an old photo. Only now do I realize that same photograph was made nearly a year ago to the date. Oliver (who now runs and speaks and laughs) was with us then, asleep as an absolutely tiny three-month-old infant.
The change over the last year in Oliver provided, for me, a stark contrast with the constancy of the natural world, of these stalwart trees. How little they’ve changed. How little indeed will they change over the next century. Long may they roam on these hills and long may they feed my heart.
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In the leaning hills.
I’ve cared a great deal about taking photographs for a long time. When people ask me how long I’ve been “into” photography, I often don’t have an answer. I can vividly remember becoming interested in my father’s camera when I was a kid. No idea how old.
In point of fact, my mother was cleaning house recently and asked that I sort through some old papers of mine. Tucked in a bunch of junk were loads of old prints made with a Vivitar point and shoot given me by my parents sometime while I was in fifth grade. The landscape/candid ideas are all there, but the execution was a long way from developed (and often still is)!
I found a renewed passion for image making when I was in college and then again in graduate school, although if truth be told, it’s been relatively steady for most of my life and those moments of renewed energy are likely just an interpretation of mine in hindsight.
I often return to the question of “Why?” Why should photography feel a bit like breathing and why should I derive so much satisfaction from it? I have loads of standard answers that you see on photoblogs and photo news sites ad naseum, revolving around physical/emotional enjoyment and the risk/reward of creativity and sharing, but these are pretty unsatisfactory.
I’ll tell you that the social networking and community aspects of photography are not what drives me to carry a camera to beautiful places. Neither is building a portfolio of images what puts my feet out the door. Although I run this blog and make every effort to post frequently, I often find myself going to great lengths to make images I find interesting and then leaving them on the hard disk at home for months or years at a time.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy every part of the process, from shooting to publishing; it’s just that, if those weren’t a feature of the photography/photoblog world, I would still shoot.
There is something about images and cameras that has always spoken to me, something in the process of making an extraordinary image that drives me across states and out of bed at strange hours. Images lie at the boundary between real and surreal, between ordinary and fantastic. They can tell the truth, they can lie, but good ones never let you know which. I find it thrilling to compare the different truths of the reality and the image made after. I like to imagine for a moment that the world is as strange as photographs make it seem, then I realize it’s far stranger.
I photograph because that’s who I am, it’s an authentic expression of myself. I mean authentic in the existential sense—that I am doing what comes naturally and being true to who I am. Sometimes explanations and reasons are trite and you just have to accept that you are what you are. Simply put, photography is.
Of course, existentialism takes for granted that, to the mind, the material world presents itself as incongruous and absurd. And maybe that’s what I find so damned rewarding about photography; the world is messy and strange and absurd, but there is a great harmony and undeniable humanity in standing amongst the nodding, tawny, and wind-threshed grain, catching on a wafer of silicon a few trillion photons that have spent eons bouncing around the interior of our sun, all the while inundated with the smells of flowering plants and buzzing insects, luring one another to sex and death in the burning heart of the afternoon, in the leaning hills.
"Danbo's impressive new installation Danbo et les sables du temps - Tate Modern Mar 2015 to Oct 2016 - sees the metallic auteur grappling with his inner-self and exploring conflicting ideas of existentialism and examining the futility of mortality within the context of his time here on earth. It's a powerful exposé of humanity and humility in robot form. An unmitigated triumph. Five stars." - Waldemar Januszczak.
744 stills, interval of 2.5s, 60 fps, TriggerTrap on Time Lapse. Sequence to assemble. iMovie for PP.
listen to me, playing Johann Sebastian Bach, Praeludium BWV 999
profile.ultimate-guitar.com/frizztext/skills/play150281
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portrait done with available (bad) light by my wife Barbara
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Johann Sebastian BACH, Prelude 999, comes into my mind - listen to my guitar at
profile.ultimate-guitar.com/frizztext/skills/play150281
for colleagues: take a look at the tabs at www.chordie.com/chord.pere/?url=http://www.lindesign.se/u...
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compare flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/weekly-photo-chal...
... takes me back to the fire hyrdrant playing days of my youth. This kid will probably never learn how to aim the water with a sawed off soda can, nor will he be allowed to... (comment by joe wig)
Week 2 Dogs (2) (1006 – 1010)10/06 – 10/10/2019 ID 1009
Henry Koerner American (born in Vienna, Austria), 1915-1991
Under the Overpass, 1949
Oil on Masonite
In 1938, Henry Koerner immigrated to America from Vienna to escape persecution by the Nazis. Koerner later learned that his family members were among the millions of Jews who were systematically murdered in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. The artist described how that personal trauma and the general destruction wrought by the violence and chaos of the war made him feel that “Reality had turned into surreality…’normal’ life into existentialism.”
Under the Overpass is a meditation on the transience of life and pain of loss and death. The changing colors of the leaves and the streaks of rust on the overpass evoke time and decay. What looks like an urban streetcar or trolley could represent the train that transported the Koerner family to the concentration camp. Scholars believe the artist’s mother is the crying woman in the yellow dress as well as the woman on the train (sitting next to his father). The scene is intentionally ambiguous. His magic realist style—visible in the painting’s hyper-realistic details, improbable shifts in scale, and elimination of shadows—creates a low-frequency sense of confusion and unease in the viewer.
Marion Stratton Gould Fund, 2012.33
From the Placard: Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Koerner
Enlightenment
This is an image of a man nearly completely alone in the vast gallery. The darkness around him emphasises his isolation, reflecting human nature as solitary.
He disregards the gallery's purpose. Is he using his phone for answers, a distraction, or a different connection?
The contrast between his white hair and darkness suggests ageing and the inevitable. Is he using his phone to fill time? The phone, a symbol of modern technology, serves as a connection despite isolating individuals from the physical world. Does it provide a virtual community to counteract his physical isolation? Is he seeking meaning and purpose?
Art may symbolise the vastness of human experience, but the phone symbolises our agency. Even when faced with existential questions, we choose our own worldview.
The photo raises questions but doesn't provide answers. Is the man lost or thinking? Is technology a barrier or a lifeline? The image reminds us that we are human even in apparent isolation.
In my case, it’s true !
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Juliette Gréco, French singer and actress, grande dame of French art song, icon of post-WWII France and the St-Germain-des-Prés “existentialist” scene, died in Ramatuelle, France, today at age 93. A very classy and talented lady, a “free singer and songstress of freedom,” as the daily Le Figaro described her. 😰 😰 😰
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From BBC News
Juliette Gréco, the sexy chanteuse who personified the spirit and style of post-war Paris and who later inherited Édith Piaf's exquisite mantle as grande-dame of French song, was born on 7 February, 1927 in Montpellier on the French Mediterranean coast.
Captured by the Gestapo
Her father, a police commissioner from Corsica, walked out when Juliette was still small. She, and her sister Charlotte, were raised mainly by their grandparents, and the nuns at the local convent, until their mother moved them to Paris.
It was wartime and Paris was an occupied city. Juliette's mother risked everything working with the Resistance. In 1943, disaster struck and the Gestapo arrested them all. "A French Gestapo officer humiliated me," she recalled. "I became so upset that I punched him on the nose. Well, that cost me!"
As a teenager, Juliette Gréco was captured by the Gestapo and thrown into prison. Her mother and sister were hauled off to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. It was a women-only prison opened on the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler.
Many were gassed, thousands more perished of disease, starvation, overwork and despair. In all, 50,000 women died within its walls before the war was over.
Juliette was spared the camps. Just 15 years old, she was thrown into the notorious women's prison in Fresnes, just south of Paris. It was a foul place where the Gestapo held, tortured and often murdered members of the Resistance.
Released a few months later, all she had were the blue cotton dress and sandals she'd been wearing when she was rounded up. It was the coldest winter on record and she had no home to return to. So Gréco walked the eight miles back into town.
Miraculously, both mother and daughter made it through Ravensbrück. After the liberation, Juliette went every day to the Lutétia hotel, where survivors were arriving. One day, among a crowd of skeletal, liberated prisoners, she spotted them. "We held each other tight, in silence. There were no words for what I felt at that instant."
Existentialist muse
The war over, Juliette moved to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the left bank of the Seine, making ends meet singing in cafes. "I had no food, so I bought a pipe and some very strong tobacco, and I smoked it in my room so I could forget my hunger", she said.
Orson Wells and Juliette Gréco were friends from the post-war Parisian social scene. Dirt poor, she was reliant on male friends to lend her things to wear. Everything was too big but it kept out the cold. The baggy clothes, the long black hair, her stunning looks and dark makeup meant you couldn't miss her. She was "the black muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés", captivating the Parisian post-war beau-monde.
In 1946, they would gather at the famous cellar club, Le Tabou; Juliette Gréco at the microphone, Picasso, Orson Wells and Marlene Dietrich at the bar. Marlon Brando would give her a lift home on his bike.
The existentialists loved her for the way she looked. Juliette was fascinated by their unconventional style and mindset. "Black provides space for the imaginary," she said. They all believed in living for the now.
Photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson captured her beauty with their cameras. Jean Cocteau asked her to star in his film, Orpheus.
But she was also loved for her voice, the perfect interpreter of melancholy songs capturing a post-war generation's hunger for life as freedom returned to the city.
Philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus both wrote lyrics for her. "Her voice carries millions of poems that haven't been written yet," Sartre insisted. "It is like a warm light that revives the embers burning inside of us all. In her mouth, my words become precious stones."
Miles Davis
Existentialism gave post-war Paris its intellectual identity. But its soundtrack was American jazz. They had a passionate love affair but never married. "You'd be seen as a negro's whore in America", he told her.
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Django Reinhardt were all huge stars. Of course, she knew them all. One night, unable to afford a ticket, Gréco snuck back stage at the Salle Pleyel on the Rue Faubourg Saint Honoré, to watch the legendary jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis.
It would be the beginning of a passionate love affair that would last until the end of his life. He was already married, with a child fathered at the age of 17. He spoke no French, she had no English. None of that mattered in bohemian Paris.
Gréco was transfixed by his looks and his talent. "In profile, he was a real Giacometti", she said. "He had a face of great beauty. You didn't have to be a scholar or a specialist in jazz to be struck by him. There was such an unusual harmony between the man, the instrument and the sound - it was pretty shattering."
"Why don't you marry her?" asked Jean-Paul Sartre. "Because I love her too much to make her unhappy," came Miles Davis' reply. The problem was his colour. "You'd be seen as a negro's whore in America", he said. "It would destroy your career."
Years later, there was a terrible incident in New York, which Davis said proved him right. Gréco had a nice suite at the Waldorf Hotel and invited Miles to dinner. "The face of the maitre d'hôtel when he came in was indescribable", she recalled.
"After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces. The meal was long and painful, and he left." She took the waiter's hand, made as if she were about to kiss it, and spat in his palm.
At four o'clock in the morning, Davis called her. He was in tears. "I couldn't come by myself," he said. "I don't ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible." She realised they had made a terrible mistake. The humiliation bit deep.
"In America, his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn't even notice that he was black", she later wrote.
He was not her only lover. There were dozens of heartbroken men, and some women, left reeling in her wake. Some even committed suicide after she left them.
She was unapologetic that she spread her affections so widely. "What do I care what other people think?," she'd say to anyone who asked.
It was said she loved the philosopher, Albert Camus, and the racing driver, Jean-Pierre Wimille, until he was killed in the Buenos Aires Grand Prix.
There was Hollywood movie mogul, Darryl F Zanuck. He gave her a starring role in John Huston's Roots of Heaven, alongside Errol Flynn. Another tycoon, David O Selznick, sent her a private plane so she could dine with him in London and offered her a fortune to sign a 7 year contract.
"I declined politely, trying not to laugh," she said. "Hollywood was definitely not for me."
There were three marriages; to actors Philippe Lemaire, with whom she had a daughter, and Michel Piccoli. And then, for twenty years, to the pianist Gérard Jouannest until his death in 2018.
Music and politics
Gréco was less a composer than a great interpreter of other people's songs, notably Jacques Brel and George Brassens.
The French newspaper, Libération, said she spat and caressed "the words like a Fauvist painter crushes colours onto his canvas with his knife".
Si tu t'imagines, Parlez-moi d`amour, and Je suis comme je suis were the big hits of the early years. Later, there were collaborations with Serge Gainsbourg, never one to miss working with a beautiful woman.
She became a sought-after performer far beyond the cafes of Saint-Germain, constantly in demand world-wide, including Germany, the US and Japan.
Scarred by her experience with the Gestapo, she hesitated to star in the country responsible for Ravensbrück. She finally agreed in 1959, singing with tears in her eyes remembering her mother's treatment.
She was very proud that young people made up most of the audience. But she kept returning to Hamburg and Berlin, mixing her own material with songs by her friend, Marlene Dietrich. In 2005, she even released an album in German, Abendlied (Evening Song).
Politically, she was firmly on the left. She campaigned against the wars in both Algeria and Vietnam. And then, there was her command performance for Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator in 1981.
He thought it was a coup persuading the great star to perform in Santiago. She walked on to rapturous applause and gave him a show entirely consisting of songs he had banned. "I went off to dead silence", she recalled. "It was the greatest triumph of my career."
Musically, she forever experimented. In 2009, she released Je Me Souviens de Tout, an album mixing the traditional with cutting-edge French song, including rapper-cum-slam-poet, Abd Al Malik.
Gréco refused to remain forever the existentialist it-girl of the 1940s, preferring to look forwards rather than back.
But a few years later, at the age of 87, it was time to say goodbye. It would not be long before a stroke would cut her down. She launched a worldwide farewell tour, Merci. Thousands packed the great Olympia Hall in Paris, to see the legend for the last time.
The “high priestess» of existentialism played out in style, treating the crowds to classics such as Déshabillez-moi, Sous le ciel de Paris, and Jacques Brel’s great anthem, Amsterdam.
The grande-dame of French song, she may have been. But on that emotional night, she performed to an audience made up almost entirely of young people.
After an astonishing life and career that had lasted more than 70 years, Juliette Gréco was immensely proud of that.
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Adieu, mademoiselle Gréco, et merci !!! 😰 😰 😰
Overwhelming in its repetition and immensity!
* Important note* please enlarge the picture to truly get the full visual effect!
Seen in EXPLORE
Photo by: Eugene La Pia
as a nation we must prioritise correctly. so far our choice has been wrong. power at the cost of nature will leave us nowhere
Gilded in the oak savanna.
In the leaning hills, where the summer sun turns the grassland to tinder, the savanna is a wind chime, rustling a harmonious lullaby like a new deck of cards in nimble fingers. Grasshoppers and mayflies and the chaff of newly dried seed catch in the sun. A dry, hot blizzard in an amber streetlamp.
The Arastradero Open Space Preserve is home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and mountain lions and innumerable flavors of insects and birds, yet it is the trees that bring me here time and again. Before the axe and the wheel came to this land, enormous oak savannas like this one stretched across the midwest, the southwest and here along the west coast.
But the axe and the wheel did come and the savannas left. I like to think of the craggy and twisted forms that remain as wounded but unbent descendants of the stalwart soldiers who resisted the blade and the advance of civilization to hold the dusty California soil to the ground and to provide shade for the coyotes and mountain lions and rattlesnakes that weave through the tall grass of the American Veldt. As these sentinels slowly march from mother to child up and down the wind-tousled steppe, we flit about the outskirts of this preserve as insects, building and gnawing and living and dying. I hope that’s all we’ll ever do.
I came to the Arastradero preserve to connect with a particularly beautiful oak I’d passed (and photographed) on hikes before. I found her on the hillside as ever, arms outstretched, singing in the late evening breeze, fluttering fingers of bright green.
As I stood for a while here on the hillside, gilded in the afternoon, alone with my thoughts but for the oak and the whisper of the breeze and the hum-drum clicks and tweets of grassland animals, I thought, “I’ve been away too long,” and was reminded of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I came back to the preserve to reconnect with a spot where I’d taken an old photo. Only now do I realize that same photograph was made nearly a year ago to the date. Oliver (who now runs and speaks and laughs) was with us then, asleep as an absolutely tiny three-month-old infant.
The change over the last year in Oliver provided, for me, a stark contrast with the constancy of the natural world, of these stalwart trees. How little they’ve changed. How little indeed will they change over the next century. Long may they roam on these hills and long may they feed my heart.
------------
In the leaning hills.
I’ve cared a great deal about taking photographs for a long time. When people ask me how long I’ve been “into” photography, I often don’t have an answer. I can vividly remember becoming interested in my father’s camera when I was a kid. No idea how old.
In point of fact, my mother was cleaning house recently and asked that I sort through some old papers of mine. Tucked in a bunch of junk were loads of old prints made with a Vivitar point and shoot given me by my parents sometime while I was in fifth grade. The landscape/candid ideas are all there, but the execution was a long way from developed (and often still is)!
I found a renewed passion for image making when I was in college and then again in graduate school, although if truth be told, it’s been relatively steady for most of my life and those moments of renewed energy are likely just an interpretation of mine in hindsight.
I often return to the question of “Why?” Why should photography feel a bit like breathing and why should I derive so much satisfaction from it? I have loads of standard answers that you see on photoblogs and photo news sites ad naseum, revolving around physical/emotional enjoyment and the risk/reward of creativity and sharing, but these are pretty unsatisfactory.
I’ll tell you that the social networking and community aspects of photography are not what drives me to carry a camera to beautiful places. Neither is building a portfolio of images what puts my feet out the door. Although I run this blog and make every effort to post frequently, I often find myself going to great lengths to make images I find interesting and then leaving them on the hard disk at home for months or years at a time.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy every part of the process, from shooting to publishing; it’s just that, if those weren’t a feature of the photography/photoblog world, I would still shoot.
There is something about images and cameras that has always spoken to me, something in the process of making an extraordinary image that drives me across states and out of bed at strange hours. Images lie at the boundary between real and surreal, between ordinary and fantastic. They can tell the truth, they can lie, but good ones never let you know which. I find it thrilling to compare the different truths of the reality and the image made after. I like to imagine for a moment that the world is as strange as photographs make it seem, then I realize it’s far stranger.
I photograph because that’s who I am, it’s an authentic expression of myself. I mean authentic in the existential sense—that I am doing what comes naturally and being true to who I am. Sometimes explanations and reasons are trite and you just have to accept that you are what you are. Simply put, photography is.
Of course, existentialism takes for granted that, to the mind, the material world presents itself as incongruous and absurd. And maybe that’s what I find so damned rewarding about photography; the world is messy and strange and absurd, but there is a great harmony and undeniable humanity in standing amongst the nodding, tawny, and wind-threshed grain, catching on a wafer of silicon a few trillion photons that have spent eons bouncing around the interior of our sun, all the while inundated with the smells of flowering plants and buzzing insects, luring one another to sex and death in the burning heart of the afternoon, in the leaning hills.
Highest that I know of in Explore- #236 on 9.27.07
For as long as I can remember, I've felt viscerally tied to the ocean.
One of the rare clear memories of my first few years, when we lived in New Jersey, was of my father walking along a boardwalk carrying me on his shoulders. He would stand at the rail and we would gaze out over the water to the horizon for what seemed like forever. I think it's because of that that I've always vaguely associated my love of the ocean with him. He had grown up in Germantown, Philadelphia, and occasionally when I was older and after my younger siblings had arrived, we would vacation with the extended family- grandparents, aunties and honorary uncles, and a gazillion cousins- in Ocean City, New Jersey... escaping the heat in the same place his family had when he was young. Salt water taffy and carny rides and boardwalk pizza vendors who expertly spun dough on their fingers ... it was a paradise for impressionable kids like me.
When I was five we moved to a small house in Stratford, Connecticut that was just half a mile from the ocean, and the town's very modest Short Beach. I was there again a few years ago when my siblings and I tried to look casual walking out to the water all dressed up in our funeral clothes to (illegally) scatter my father's ashes near the shore where he'd held our hands as children, and walked his dog daily in his later years. There was a nice architect-designed recreation center and bath house there that day, and a slew of modern condos (probably time shares) lining the beach. But in my childhood, the only things there were a splintery and weathered shack with half doors where you could stand in line to change into your bathing suit, a cooler where a high school kid sold ice cream sandwiches and cold soda, looking bored unless a pretty teen girl walked by, and five ramshackle cottages on the edge of the beach which town residents could rent for a week or two a year.
Every year that we didn't go to Ocean City, my grandparents- who lived in the other half of our duplex- would rent one of the innermost cottages for two weeks. As an adult I kind of shake my head at the notion of "going on vacation" less than a mile from your home, but as a child those trips were magical and something you looked forward to all year. You could swim before breakfast. Noone yelled at you for tracking sand into the house. The adults were always in a good mood. Best of all were the Friday nights. My grandfather would go to a great fish market and bring home buckets of fried fish, french fries, cole slaw, and ice cream. After the feast, after the dishes were taken care of, and just about when the sun was hitting the horizon, the yellow screened-porch lights would be turned on and the games would come out. Yahtzee & Dominoes & Go Fish & Scrabble. The kids would be on one team and the adults on the other, and somehow the kids always seemed to win every game. Later, when the younger kids were falling asleep, as the precocious oldest cousin I was allowed to sit at the table with the adults while they played 500 Rummy and Canasta. They'd make me some equivalent to the popular Shirley Temple to make me feel like I was having a "high ball" like them, and by the time I was in 4th grade, they were letting me sit in on the games. It felt like a momentous rite of passage.
That beach is also where I learned to swim; our local playground would bus us there two afternoons a week for subsidized lessons. Of course, learning to swim in the ocean has its disadvantages as the tides have a will of their own that doesn't conform well to classes at a particular time, so every other week we'd have to walk half a mile past the lighthouse to find water deep enough to dive into. Most of my companions would "belly-ache" about the walking, but I adored the lighthouse, so secretly- and illogically- hoped for more low tides.
Between the weeks at the cottage, and the fact that I was usually the only one on the swim lesson bus who couldn't wait to get there, I developed an obnoxiously proprietary attitude about the beach. An attitude that only got worse when I was about 10 and discovered it was a great and quiet place to study by myself in the fall and spring. Or I should say it was a great place to TRY to study. I'd read a few pages, or do a few math problems, and then my arms would drift to my knees and I would commence to staring at the horizon. Or counting the waves. Or giving names to my favorite seagulls. Or picking up starfish to look at the under side. Or collecting shells. Or following a crab. Or digging for clams. Or, or, or, or.............. the distractions were endless. After the first year, I began to really resent it when the warm weather came and other folks seemed to think they belonged there too. Harumphhhhhhhhhhhh!
Just before junior high school we moved an hour north, and inland. Something felt quite wrong to me the first few months, and it took me about that long to realize it was the ocean I was missing. I couldn't smell it any more. There were no shore birds flying overhead. Storms felt different. I couldn't hear the comforting rhythm of the tide kissing the shore. I was bereft... as if I'd lost a best friend. It was years before I'd live near the shore again. In high school and college I put away my "attitude" about "other people" on MY beach occasionally so I could enjoy outings with my friends (especially in college when beach days inevitably ended up dancing at beach-side bars where the guys were hip and the rum drinks accompanied some hot blues guitarist), but to this day I prefer an empty beach in October to a lively one in July. And I much prefer the lonely rocky beaches of Maine to the sun-bunny playgrounds of San Diego or Miami.
In1973, I worked for the summer in the English coastal resort town of Cromer, not so far from Norwich. I was a lowly waitress and budding bartender, so with an insincere apology, the proprietors showed me to my room in the damp, dank basement of the hotel complex I was working at. The hotel sat on a cliff right above the ocean, and I forgave every iota of mildew in that room when I discovered that the tide broke loudly on the wall beneath my window. It was thunderous and my roommates complained about it all summer, but I found it to be the most comforting sound I'd ever heard. I don't think I've ever slept as deeply as I did that summer.
Most memorable about that summer were the late nights when I, and the co-workers I liked, would close down the bar and take our own drinks (saved up all evening when patrons insisted on buying us one) out to the beach to dance and party. Almost every one of those impromptu gatherings would end up with all of us lying on the beach staring up at the moon, and philosophizing about politics (we were from many countries) and existentialism. I'm pretty sure it was one of those late nights when I came to fully understand the powerful connection between the moon and the tides... an important and compelling concept for me. It's also when I developed the notion that I could never live very far from the ocean. There's a sense of infinity for me that comes from watching the horizon over the tide, and a sense of connection to everyone and everywhere, that is unmatched anywhere else for me except- perhaps- in the/my buddhist notion of karma.
I've lived in the Boston area now for about 27 years, and though I live only a couple of miles from the shore, I don't actually see it near as often as I'd like. Somehow, though, knowing it's nearby is enough for me. Often you'll see a gull swoop overhead... and when a storm's brewing you can smell salt in the air. It's easy enough to get there by subway, and sometimes- when I've been away too long- I make the trip.
My sweetheart Matt- who feels about the desert where he grew up much the same as I feel about the ocean- says that the first few years he lived in Boston he only felt at home when he was crossing the Charles River on the subway, because it was the only time he ever felt like he had breathing space and could see the horizon. I understood that intellectually the first time he said it, but didn't understand it emotionally until he took me there and I got to experience how much that endless horizon feels like gazing out to sea.
Matt wants to move back to the desert sometime, and I used to despair that one day I would have to make a choice between the ocean and him. But then the first time we travelled to southern California together, he pulled out of his pocket a stone he'd collected from a beach in Maine on one of our trips there, that he'd brought along specifically to skip it off the Santa Monica Pier... connecting in a small way the east coast ocean with the west coast one. And I knew in that minute that he understood. And that I could go anywhere with him, without fear of losing my connection to the ocean. It's part of me now... like breathing.
Gilded in the oak savanna.
In the leaning hills, where the summer sun turns the grassland to tinder, the savanna is a wind chime, rustling a harmonious lullaby like a new deck of cards in nimble fingers. Grasshoppers and mayflies and the chaff of newly dried seed catch in the sun. A dry, hot blizzard in an amber streetlamp.
The Arastradero Open Space Preserve is home to rattlesnakes, coyotes, and mountain lions and innumerable flavors of insects and birds, yet it is the trees that bring me here time and again. Before the axe and the wheel came to this land, enormous oak savannas like this one stretched across the midwest, the southwest and here along the west coast.
But the axe and the wheel did come and the savannas left. I like to think of the craggy and twisted forms that remain as wounded but unbent descendants of the stalwart soldiers who resisted the blade and the advance of civilization to hold the dusty California soil to the ground and to provide shade for the coyotes and mountain lions and rattlesnakes that weave through the tall grass of the American Veldt. As these sentinels slowly march from mother to child up and down the wind-tousled steppe, we flit about the outskirts of this preserve as insects, building and gnawing and living and dying. I hope that’s all we’ll ever do.
I came to the Arastradero preserve to connect with a particularly beautiful oak I’d passed (and photographed) on hikes before. I found her on the hillside as ever, arms outstretched, singing in the late evening breeze, fluttering fingers of bright green.
As I stood for a while here on the hillside, gilded in the afternoon, alone with my thoughts but for the oak and the whisper of the breeze and the hum-drum clicks and tweets of grassland animals, I thought, “I’ve been away too long,” and was reminded of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
I came back to the preserve to reconnect with a spot where I’d taken an old photo. Only now do I realize that same photograph was made nearly a year ago to the date. Oliver (who now runs and speaks and laughs) was with us then, asleep as an absolutely tiny three-month-old infant.
The change over the last year in Oliver provided, for me, a stark contrast with the constancy of the natural world, of these stalwart trees. How little they’ve changed. How little indeed will they change over the next century. Long may they roam on these hills and long may they feed my heart.
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In the leaning hills.
I’ve cared a great deal about taking photographs for a long time. When people ask me how long I’ve been “into” photography, I often don’t have an answer. I can vividly remember becoming interested in my father’s camera when I was a kid. No idea how old.
In point of fact, my mother was cleaning house recently and asked that I sort through some old papers of mine. Tucked in a bunch of junk were loads of old prints made with a Vivitar point and shoot given me by my parents sometime while I was in fifth grade. The landscape/candid ideas are all there, but the execution was a long way from developed (and often still is)!
I found a renewed passion for image making when I was in college and then again in graduate school, although if truth be told, it’s been relatively steady for most of my life and those moments of renewed energy are likely just an interpretation of mine in hindsight.
I often return to the question of “Why?” Why should photography feel a bit like breathing and why should I derive so much satisfaction from it? I have loads of standard answers that you see on photoblogs and photo news sites ad naseum, revolving around physical/emotional enjoyment and the risk/reward of creativity and sharing, but these are pretty unsatisfactory.
I’ll tell you that the social networking and community aspects of photography are not what drives me to carry a camera to beautiful places. Neither is building a portfolio of images what puts my feet out the door. Although I run this blog and make every effort to post frequently, I often find myself going to great lengths to make images I find interesting and then leaving them on the hard disk at home for months or years at a time.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy every part of the process, from shooting to publishing; it’s just that, if those weren’t a feature of the photography/photoblog world, I would still shoot.
There is something about images and cameras that has always spoken to me, something in the process of making an extraordinary image that drives me across states and out of bed at strange hours. Images lie at the boundary between real and surreal, between ordinary and fantastic. They can tell the truth, they can lie, but good ones never let you know which. I find it thrilling to compare the different truths of the reality and the image made after. I like to imagine for a moment that the world is as strange as photographs make it seem, then I realize it’s far stranger.
I photograph because that’s who I am, it’s an authentic expression of myself. I mean authentic in the existential sense—that I am doing what comes naturally and being true to who I am. Sometimes explanations and reasons are trite and you just have to accept that you are what you are. Simply put, photography is.
Of course, existentialism takes for granted that, to the mind, the material world presents itself as incongruous and absurd. And maybe that’s what I find so damned rewarding about photography; the world is messy and strange and absurd, but there is a great harmony and undeniable humanity in standing amongst the nodding, tawny, and wind-threshed grain, catching on a wafer of silicon a few trillion photons that have spent eons bouncing around the interior of our sun, all the while inundated with the smells of flowering plants and buzzing insects, luring one another to sex and death in the burning heart of the afternoon, in the leaning hills.
then I suddenly noticed the chess field in the player's glasses... - as I once saw the piano blacks and whites in a pianist's glasses...
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
playing with the Man Ray group
www.flickr.com/groups/man-ray/discuss/72157600006647641/
original image from Grand Paul
anymore.
FGR: Dr. Nik Rox My Sox
The last time I slipped this dress on I was pounds lighter and a few years younger...A Junior in High School to be exact.
Dr. Nik'sphoto got me thinking about the changes I've gone through since High School, mentally and physically...
For one I have blue hair (even if you can't tell in this photo) and a few piercings and tattoos that I didn't have then. I've grown some bigger boobs too:)...which I can take or leave.
I've gone through a lot of struggles after my Junior year... I've been diagnosed Bipolar and have developed a fainting disorder as well.
I've gone to college and cosmetology school, and have learned so much from both.
I got my first boyfriend and lost him pretty soon after the relationship began.
I made some great friends and lost a few as well.
I've come to know myself more than ever before.
So I ask myself...Have I changed for the better?
And my answer is "I really don't know..."
I just wish I could go back to when times were simpler...much, much simpler.
Song of the Day: Existentialism on Prom Night by Straylight Run
What I looked like back then...
Date of birth, existentialism in a simple online form.
I think, but still I am not in this world yet.
mochalo
“Суботний вечер, и вот опять,
Я собираюсь пойти потанцевать.
Я надеваю штиблеты и галстук-шнурок,
Я запираю свою дверь на висчий замок” F. Chystiakov
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Outlining a Theory of General Creativity . .
. . on a 'Pataphysical projectory
Entropy ≥ Memory ● Creativity ²
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Study of the day:
What's existentialism experience in a rhizome 2.0 ?
1 - a self-image for sale
2 - or a sale-image for self ?
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| . rectO-persO . | . E ≥ m.C² . | . co~errAnce . | . TiLt . |
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–51, oil on canvas, 242.2 x 541.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)
Pictured is a poster created by Phillip Gallant for the picture book What Does Cilantro Go With? by Phillip Gallant available at Amazon here: www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07R23T85Z?ref_=dbs_s_def_awm_dirs...
Died from complications of Covid-19 April 7, 2020. His influence was wide ranging. He'll make you laugh, he'll make you cry, he'll make you think. He was first discovered by Kris Kristofferson. He was 73.
Click the link for one of his iconic songs, appropriate for today given the majority of people who die of Covid-19 are older people. Don't forget about them, say "Hello In There": www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKoYHFVBpEA
From Wikipedia:
Prine is widely regarded as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.[45][46][47]
In 2009, Bob Dylan told The Huffington Post that Prine was one of his favorite writers, stating "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. 'Sam Stone' featuring the wonderfully evocative line: 'There’s a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.'[48] All that stuff about 'Sam Stone', the soldier junkie daddy, and 'Donald and Lydia', where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that."[49]
Johnny Cash, in his autobiography Cash, wrote, "I don't listen to music much at the farm, unless I'm going into songwriting mode and looking for inspiration. Then I'll put on something by the writers I've admired and used for years — Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Guy Clark, and the late Steve Goodman are my Big Four ..."[50]
Roger Waters, when asked by Word Magazine in 2008 if he heard Pink Floyd's influence in newer British bands like Radiohead, replied, "I don't really listen to Radiohead. I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music — and he lives on that plane with Neil Young and Lennon."[51]
a tribute to Christine Keeler, once posing in a similar way... - portrait shot in an abandoned factory session by my wife Barbara + I've just discovered the "flickr" GALLERIES-button to make some features... - compare also retrorambling.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/on-this-day-in-196...