View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
flamingos mostly are in a big crowd, but this one has chosen, to think all over while being separated ...
Robert Indiana, an American Pop artist known for his "scuptural poems," is best known for his "LOVE" with a titled "O." This image, first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, was included on an 8 cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." This sculptural version on Sixth Avenue in one of many. The others can be found on the Pratt Institute campus in Brooklyn, NY; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Scottsdale's Civic Center, in so called "LOVE Park" in Philadelphia, the New Orleans Museum of Art's sculpture garden, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, at the Museum of Modern Art at Brigham Young University, on the campus of Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, outside the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan, at the Red Rock Resort Spa and Casino in Las Vegas, in Shinjuku Tokyo JAPAN, and on the world-famous Orchard Road, Singapore.
Infamously, Indiana failed to register a copyright for the work, and found it difficult to deter unauthorized commercial use. The image has been reproduced in countless times in varying forms, including sculptures, posters, and 3-D desk ornaments. It has been translated into Hebrew, Chinese, and Spanish. It strongly influenced the original cover of Love Story, the Erich Segal novel. It was parodied on the Rage Against the Machine album cover for Renegades, as well as the cover for Oasis' single Little by Little from the 2002 album Heathen Chemistry. Recently it has been parodied by London artist D*Face with his "HATE", the "A" tilted similarly. The LOVE emblem has been adopted by skateboarders, frequently used in skateboard magazines and videos. After skateboarding was banned in Philadelphia's LOVE Park, the emblem was used by organizations opposing the ban.[
Indiana moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls "sculptural poems". Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like "EAT", "HUG", and "LOVE". He is also known for painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city's U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court.
Indiana, born Robert Clark,moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism. Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like "EAT", "HUG", and, of course, "LOVE". He is also known for painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city's U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court. Despite his early success at the center of the art world, Indiana retreated to rural obscurity in later life. Indiana has lived as a resident in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine since 1978.
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, dies in Ramatuelle, France, 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 !!! 😰 😰 😰
my friend Klaas doing his favorite job: throwing his shadow like a sundial - a German saying: "Mach es wie die Sonnenuhr, zähl die heitren Stunden nur"
Mirrored Metropolis: Finding Self in the Cityscape
Story:
I am lost in the endless cycle of this cityscape, constantly seeing myself reflected in its modern shiny surfaces. The red traffic light blinks intermittently in a never-ending cycle, symbolising urban monotony. Taking a selfie, I see myself being captured in countless fragments, reflecting the driver, pedestrian, and street lamp. I am a quantified self, trapped in the repetitive narrative of city life. Each photo is a breadcrumb leading me back to myself. I am a loop within a loop, echoing endlessly in the digital corridors of eternity. To break free, I must acknowledge the prison of my gaze. But for now, I remain trapped in the perpetual selfie of existence, a figure multiplied yet diminished. It's just another form of content.
Description:
Dive into a visual journey where philosophy meets urban photography. "Echoes of Existence" is a series that explores the Sartrean concept of self through the medium of the selfie. Witness the seamless blend of self-awareness and city vibrancy, and join us in pondering the eternal question of existence amidst the chaotic beauty of urban life.
Keywords:
Urban Philosophy, Self-Reflection, Existentialism, Cityscape Photography, Selfie Art, Sartrean Thought, Reflective Imagery, Contemporary Art
Blogger: www.jjfbbennett.com/2024/04/finding-self-in-cityscape.html
I saw him sitting on a ledge in downtown Toronto on a sunny, chilly late-winter day. His hat and beard caught my attention as features that would contribute to a good street portrait. As I got closer I became even more interested in photographing him and having a chat. He was, however, on his phone with a shopping bag at his feet (see comment photo below) so I would have to wait.
I walked down the block a few meters and decided to give him time to complete his phone call which appeared to be a relaxed social chat. I used the time to evaluate the location and think about the light. He was in harsh backlight but next to him was a fence that provided open shade. The building across the street was reflecting a softer light from the north. After five minutes I was feeling uneasy. Not only was I beginning to feel like a loiterer, but I was putting in a lot of time waiting for a stranger who might very well decline my request. I decided to stick it out a bit longer and soon I could see that he was wrapping up the call.
I approached him, introduced myself, and made my project request. His response was a very comfortable one. “Oh. Ok. That’s fine. I do, however, need to make one more quick call if you don’t mind waiting. Then I’ll be happy to do it.” I said I would remain nearby and having made the connection, I felt more comfortable waiting. When his call was finished he introduced himself. Meet Stephen. “But people call me The Dude.” He showed me his t-shirt from the cult movie The Big Lebowski with Jeff Daniels portrait on it and the movie quote “The Dude Abides.” Quirky and intriguing.
I positioned Stephen against the brown fence I had decided upon and took a few photos with minor adjustments to manage reflections on his glasses. I gave him my contact card and explained a bit more about the Human Family project and I could see his interest. He pulled out his own business card and gave it to me and I noticed that it detailed medical credentials. He smiled and said e said “I’m a Philosopher Psychiatrist.” Knock me over with a feather. I am surprised and amazed by the fascinating people I meet while pursuing my Human Family project.
As we began to talk, Stephen suggested we walk a bit because he was to meet his friend nearby. He peeked into a nearby restaurant window – no friend there. Since his friend wasn’t in the restaurant he would be next door. He suggested we step inside the next building to get out of the wind while finishing our chat. Inside the doors we stood on the dim, cramped landing between the door and a staircase. As we got acquainted a few men came in and out, politely excusing themselves for squeezing between us in the cramped space. “You probably don’t realize it, Jeff, but this is a gay sauna.” I explained that I had worked many years just a block away on the edge of the gay village but had not known this nondescript building to be a gay sauna.
I learned that Stephen and I are the same age (72) and that he just celebrated his birthday with a party last night. He grew up in Toronto and began studies for a medical career as encouraged by his parents. They were “liberal Jews” and having a doctor for a son suited their plans. He discovered that he had little interest in medicine but pursued it for a couple of years to please his parents before switching to philosophy which was a much better fit. He got a Master’s degree in Philosophy but later returned to medical school when he became interested in psychoanalysis. Upon completing his medical and psychiatric training he did, in fact, become a psychoanalyst. He met the famous “radical psychiatrist” R. D. Laing and was strongly influenced by his existentialism and phenomenology. He worked with R. D. Laing and his group while also working for the National Health Service. In all, he spent 25 years in London England before returning to Toronto. You can read more about his fascinating and accomplished background here: livinginstitute.org/stephen-ticktin and here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Ticktin. Stephen currently maintains an Existential Psychotherapy practice in Toronto’s west end.
As should be the case with any good psychotherapist, I found Stephen warm, friendly, and easy to talk to. He had a sense of humor that sparkled. What about The Dude t-shirt? He displayed it again and told me “If you haven’t seen the movie, you should. It’s a fun movie and The Dude is a great character.” I wanted a photo of Stephen’s Dude t-shirt but it was challenging because I needed to somehow prop the door to the street open enough to let in enough light and also contend with getting enough distance in the cramped entryway of the building to capture his face and the shirt. I held the door open with one hand, squeezed myself against the wall, and held the camera awkwardly in my other hand. Stephen provided another popular culture reference to his world by suggesting that I visit the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Wikipedia summarizes the song as follows: “Dylan's song revolves around the mishaps of a Mr. Jones, who keeps blundering into strange situations, and the more questions he asks, the less the world makes sense to him.”
Hey, I told you Stephen is an interesting fellow.
Stephen’s advice to his younger self? He smiled and said “Go with your passion. If I had followed my passion when young, I would have been a musician, not a doctor.” His message to the project? “It would be the same advice I sometimes share with my patients: “Establish a comfortable distance.”
Just before we said goodbye, Stephen introduced me to a friend who was trying to get past us while exiting the building. Stephen greeted him and said “Meet Jeff. He’s doing a photography project and has been taking some photos of me. Hey, by the way, you missed a heck of a party last night.” His friend apologized for missing the birthday party and said he knew he had a good one but he had another obligation.
It was great meeting you Stephen. Happy Birthday and thank you for being part of my project. This is my 701st submission to The Human Family Group on Flickr.
You can view more street portraits and stories by visiting The Human Family.
Hmmm. Alternatively, ice may not exist. If ice does exist, then we've assumed something exist and, therefore, anything could exist. If ice can exist, then I can exist. God can exist. Perhaps the world around me is not just an illusion. Oh wait, this sign could be an illusion. Time to read some more Kant, Hume, Camus, Popper and Schopenhauer.
If the world exists, then I still want to know why.
Who would have guessed that the department of transportation could have been so philosophical?
I'm teaching Existentialism for Little Children in an entirely thrifted outfit - a Vivienne Westwood for John Smedley knit, a Kookai skirt & Golden Italian Leather Sandals. Homemade necklaces by me & bangles from 'Diva'.
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Radikale Transzendenz * | Radical Transcendence *
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... Looking into the mirror - Seeing my face in it - And the words and signs on the mirror glass - Looking deep - Long and deep - And even deeper - Deeper - So deep until I look through my face - Looking into me - Until the thoughts dissolve - Until the face dissolves in its familiar forms - Until the words and signs dissolve - Until I dissolve in this form - And come to me deep inside at the same time ... *
- * -
... In den Spiegel blicken - Darin mein Gesicht sehen - Und die Worte und Zeichen auf dem Spiegelglas - Tief hineinblicken - Lang und tief - Und immer tiefer - Tiefer - So tief bis ich durch das Gesicht blicke - In mich hineinblicke - Bis sich die Gedanken auflösen - Das Gesicht in seinen bekannten Formen auflöst - Die Worte und Zeichen sich auflösen - Bis ich mich in dieser Form auflöse - Und gleichzeitig tief im Inneren zu mir gelange ... *
- * -
Photo: Patricia Adler
- * -
Wolfgang Sterneck:
In the Cracks of the World *
Photo-Reports: www.flickr.com/sterneck/sets
Articles and Visions: www.sterneck.net
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John Macquarrie - An Existentialist Theology
Pelican Books 1535. 1973
Cover Design: Germano Facetti
Cover Artist: Max Bill - "Two Separate Accents"
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II (1/6), 1960, bronze, 188.5 × 27.9 × 110.7 cm (National Gallery of Art)
Oct 25th, 2015 -- There is bittersweet beauty in knowing that the waves will inevitably wash away all his hard work. The evanescent nature of this piece is a reminder that moments in life are fleeting. When the tides begin to rise, the waves will either wash away a blank canvas, or the waves will wash away a work of art; inexorably, the beach will return once again to being blank.
But be present for when the canvas is not blank.
Like a camera capturing a memory in a picture, be sure to store away those fleet moments in your memories.
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.
Is he falling or is he recovering?
Is he panicking or is he regrouping?
Is he giving up or is he about to charge?
...the answer lies only within himself.
(Done using watercolour pencils and a black biro pen)
one of my humorous friends playing a Mexican musician after he crossed successfully the border between Mexico and the USA...
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More at my art site: rsmithings.com
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Moving from scene to scene, how do we know when the elements are right for a moment? By not thinking about it, perhaps. So we grasp for understanding from ground, to sky, climbing many branches to get there. Maybe this is what it might look like.
Contact emiller@lightflightstudios.com to buy a high quality version or rights to the picture. This is copy-righted material.
dobro, sunlight + cat: my national steel, resonator guitar (dobro) reflects some sunlight, while our cat is on her early morning patrol - P.S.: the idea for the title is by André Fromont :-)
I almost didn't take this shot -- I was watching those small black clouds vanish before my eyes and this was all that was left of them by the time that I was able to snap a photo.
I had some thoughts verging on existentialism associated with this photo, but it's way too late at night to think of such things. And there's much to do tomorrow. Perhaps another time.
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.
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.
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.
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II (1/6), 1960, bronze, 188.5 × 27.9 × 110.7 cm (National Gallery of Art)
sent to my group www.flickr.com/groups/abc-visualized for the letter C: 1. Happy Furry weekend..., 2. Maiden Flight Concorde 002, 3. Colliding planes, 4. Untitled
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II (1/6), 1960, bronze, 188.5 × 27.9 × 110.7 cm (National Gallery of Art)
Mae hwnna wedi bod ar ei wyliau. Arhosodd rownd y gornel o'r caffi hanesyddol hwn a chafodd frecwast yma (yn hen sedd Jean-Paul?). Cliciwch yma am ragor o wybodaeth: Cafe de Flore
Hwnna has been on his holidays. He stayed around the corner from the legendary Cafe de Flore
From an assignment set by module leader Tatiana Bachkirova
Image editing assistance by Joseph Elliott-Coleman
Key
Light Blue for Maslow
Dark Blue for Eisenberg
Orange for Wilson
Brown for Piaget
Light green for Kohlberg
Dark green for Rodgers
Red for Krishnamurti
Purple for existentialism
The foremost left image and connections in the transpersonal area came about from a discussion with the mind that is Benjamin Stone
Cyanotype drawing and exposure.
www.russellmoreton.blogspot.com
Possible Worlds (2001)
Reviewed by Jason Korsner
Updated 11 July 2001
The fourth film by the French Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage - his first in English - cements his reputation as a film maker with a unique vision.
"Possible Worlds" is a poetic study of the nature of human existence, wrapped up in a murder mystery.
George Barber (McCamus) is found dead with $1000 in his pocket but with his brain missing. Interspersed with the subsequent police investigation, we see moments of George's life as he struggles to make sense of the world - or worlds - he lived in. "Each one of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds," he muses, as he keeps meeting the same woman, Joyce (Swinton), although each Joyce he meets has a different past, a different present, and a different personality.
Lepage employs exquisite visuals as he explores George's imagination and the role it played in his life, asking fundamental questions like do our thoughts exist before we think them? Or is there another me?
Tom McCamus displays just the right amount of vacant confusion, while Tilda Swinton gives a remarkable performance - or four performances - reprising the same character in different but simultaneous worlds.
The pace is slow and deliberate, but any faster and the audience would get lost. "Possible Worlds" is not easy to watch, and poses more questions than it could ever hope to answer, but this intelligent film will certainly achieve the director's goal of inspiring discussion.
“There has been no century in human history that has made despair more plausible than the century that is now passing away,” says a 1999 TALK MAGAZINE. It is suggested, on this basis, that Samuel Beckett neatly fixes the twentieth century with this exchange from “Waiting for Godot.”
ESTRAGON: “I can’t go on like this.”
VLADMIR: “That’s what you think.”
In these two simple lines, expressing a theme he would come back to repeatedly in his work, Beckett—The Irishman who wrote in French, who was a friend of James Joyce, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969—neatly summed up existentialism and the resolve which fueled the century: Life is cruel and meaningless. There is no hope. Now, let’s all get on with our lives.
________________________________________________________________
Saint-Germain-des-Prés (French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ ʒɛʁmɛ̃ de pʁe]) is one of the four administrative quarters of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France, located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Its official borders are the River Seine on the north, the rue des Saints-Pères on the west, between the rue de Seine and rue Mazarine on the east, and the rue du Four on the south. Residents of the quarter are known as Germanopratins. It forms part of the Latin Quarter.
The areas cafés include Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, le Procope, and the Brasserie Lipp, as well as many bookstores and publishing houses. In the 1940s and 1950s, along with the rest of the Latin Quarter, it was the centre of the existentialist movement (associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). It is also home to the École des Beaux-Arts, Sciences Po, the Saints-Pères biomedical university center of the University of Paris, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and the Musée national Eugène Delacroix, in the former apartment and studio of painter Eugène Delacroix.
History
The Middle Ages
Until the 17th century the land where the quarter is located was prone to flooding from the Seine, and little building took place there; it was largely open fields, or prés, which gave the quarter its name.
The Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey in the center of the quarter was founded in the 6th century by the son of Clovis I, Childebert I (ruled 511–558). In 542, while making war in Spain, Childebert raised his siege of Zaragoza when he heard that the inhabitants had placed themselves under the protection of the martyr Saint Vincent. In gratitude the bishop of Zaragoza presented him with the saint's stole. When Childebert returned to Paris, he caused a church to be erected to house the relic, dedicated to the Holy Cross and Saint Vincent, placed where he could see it across the fields from the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. In 558, St. Vincent's church was completed and dedicated by Germain, Bishop of Paris on 23 December; on the same day, Childebert died. Close by the church a monastery was erected. The Abbey church became the burial place of the dynasty of Merovingian Kings. Its abbots had both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over the residents of Saint-Germain (which they kept until the 17th century). Since the monastery had a rich treasury and was outside the city walls, it was plundered and set on fire by the Normans in the ninth century. It was rebuilt in 1014 and rededicated in 1163 by Pope Alexander III to Bishop Germain, who had been canonized.
The church and buildings of the Abbey were rebuilt in stone c. 1000 AD, and the Abbey developed into a major center of scholarship and learning. A village grew up around the Abbey, which had about six hundred inhabitants by the 12th century. The modern rue du Four is the site of the old ovens of the monastery, and the dining hall was located along the modern rue de l'Abbaye. A parish church, the church of Saint-Pierre, also was built on the left bank, at the site of the present Ukrainian catholic church; its parish covered most of the modern 6th and 7th arrondissements. The fortifications of King Philip Augustus (1180–1223), the first recorded walls to be built around the entire city, left Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés just outside the walls.
The Saint-Germain Fair
Beginning in the Middle Ages, Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés was not only a religious and cultural center, but also an important marketplace, thanks to its annual fair, which attracted merchants and vendors from all over Europe. The Foire Saint-Germain was already famous in 1176, when it allocated half of its profits to the King. The fair opened fifteen days after Easter, and lasted for three weeks. The dates and the sites varied over the years; beginning in 1482 it opened on 1 October and lasted eight days; in other years it opened 11 November or 2 February. Beginning in 1486, it was held in a portion of the gardens of the Hôtel de Navarre, close to the modern rue Mabillon. There were three hundred forty stalls at the fair of 1483; Special buildings were erected for the fair in 1512, which contained 516 stalls. The fair was also famous for the gambling, debauchery, and the riots that ensued when groups of rowdy students from the nearby university invaded the fair. The buildings burned on the night of 17–18 March 1762, but were quickly rebuilt. The fair continued annually until the Revolution in 1789, when it was closed down permanently.
The Renaissance
At the end of the 16th century, Margaret of Valois (1553–1615) the estranged wife of King Henry IV of France but still officially Queen of France, decided to build a residence in the quarter, in lands belonging to the Abbey near the Seine just west of the modern rue de Seine, near the present Institut de France. She built a palace with extensive gardens and established herself as a patroness of literature and the arts, until her death in 1615.
17th–18th centuries: theatre and the first cafés
In 1673 the theatrical troupe in the city, the Comédie-Française, was expelled from its building on Rue Saint-Honorérue Saint‑Honoré and moved to the left bank, to the passage de Pont-Neuf (the present-day rue Jacques‑Callot), just outside the Saint‑Germain quarter. Its presence displeased the authorities of the neighboring Collége des Quatres-Nations (the present Institut de France) and in 1689 they moved again, this time to the rue des Fossés des Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés (the modern rue de l'Ancienne‑Comédie), where they remained until 1770. The poor condition of the theater roof forced them to move in that year to the right bank, to the Hall of machines of the Tuileries Palace, which was much too large for them. In 1797 they moved back to the Left Bank, to the modern Odéon Theatre.
The first café in Paris appeared in 1672 at the Saint-Germain Fair, served by an Armenian named Pascal. When the fair ended he opened a more permanent establishment on the quai de l'Ecole, where he served coffee for two sous and six deniers per cup. It was considered more of a form of medication than a beverage to be enjoyed, and it had a limited clientele. He left for London, and another Armenian named Maliban opened a new café on the rue de Buci, where he also sold tobacco and pipes. His café also had little commercial success, and he left for Holland. A waiter from his café, an Armenian named Grigoire, born in Persia, took over the business and opened it on rue Mazarine, near the new home of Comédie-Française. When the theater moved in 1689, he moved the café to the same location, on the rue des Fossés‑Saint‑Germain. The café was then taken over by a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who had worked as a waiter for Pascal in 1672. He renamed the café Procope, and expanded its menu to include tea, chocolate, liqueurs, ice cream and configures. It became a success; the café is still in business.[4] By 1723 there were more than three hundred eighty cafés in the city. The Café Procope particularly attracted the literary community of Paris, because many book publishers, editors and printers lived in the quarter. The writers Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have planned their massive philosophical work, the Encyclopédie, at Procope, and at another popular literary meeting place, the Café Landelle on the rue de Buci.
The Treaty of Paris
A significant event in American history took place on 3 September 1783 at the Hotel York at 56 rue Jacob; the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Britain and the United States, which ended the American Revolution and granted the U.S. its independence. The signing followed the American victory at the Siege of Yorktown, won with assistance of the French fleet and French army. The American delegation included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay. After the signing, they remained for a commemorative painting by the American artist Benjamin West, but the British delegates refused to pose for the painting, so the painting was never finished.
The French Revolution
Because of its numerous printers and publishers, Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés, and especially the Cordeliers Section of what is now the 6th arrondissement, became centers of revolutionary activity after 1789; they produced thousands of pamphlets, newspapers, and proclamations which influenced the Parisian population and that of France as a whole. The prison of the Abbey of Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés, a two-storey building near the church, was filled with persons who had been arrested for suspicion of counter-revolutionary motives: former aristocrats, priests who refused to accept the revolutionary Constitution, foreigners, and so forth. By September 1792, Paris prisons were quite full. The former king and queen were political prisoners and were moved from the Tuileries Palace to the old Knights Templar towers on the right bank, where there was less risk of rescue or escape. France was at war; the Duke of Brunswick had just issued his menacing manifesto, stating that if the former monarchy were not restored, he would raze Paris, and his troops were only a few days away. Now these political prisoners began to be viewed as a genuine threat, should any of them be conspiring with France's enemies. In what was a planned but inhumane tactic, politicians at Paris sent bands of criminals, armed mainly with pikes and axes, into each prison. Although at least one deputy from the Convention accompanied each band, the results were horrifying. Hundreds of prisoners were cut down in the first week in September. As Englishman Arthur Young noted, the street outside one prison literally ran red with blood. The former Cordeliers Convent, closed by the revolutionaries, became the headquarters of one of the most radical factions, whose leaders included Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, though both would be run out by ever more extreme factions. The radical revolutionary firebrand, Swiss physician Jean-Paul Marat, lived in the Cordeliers Section.
The Monastery of Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés was closed and its religious ornaments were taken away. The buildings of the monastery were declared national property and sold or rented to private owners. One large building was turned into a gunpowder storeroom; it exploded, wrecking a large part of the monastery.
Another large monastery in the quarter, that of the Petits-Augustins, had been closed and stripped of its religious ornamentation. The empty buildings were taken over by an archaeologist, Alexandre Lenoir, who turned it into a depot to collect and preserve the furniture, decorations, and art treasures of the nationalised churches and monasteries. The old monastery officially became the Museum of French Monuments. The paintings collected were transferred to the Louvre, where they became the property of the Central Museum of the Arts, the ancestor of the modern Louvre, which opened there at the end of 1793.
The 19th century
The École des Beaux-Arts
The École des Beaux Arts, the national school of architecture, painting and sculpture, was established after the Revolution at 14 rue Bonaparte, on the site of the former monastery of the Petits-Augustins. Its faculty and students included many of the most important artists and architects of the 19th century; the faculty included Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Gustave Moreau. The students included painters Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and the American Thomas Eakins. Architects graduated from the school included Gabriel Davioud, Charles Garnier, and the Americans Julia Morgan, Richard Morris Hunt and Bernard Maybeck. The painter Eugène Delacroix established his residence and studio at 6 rue de Furstenberg and lived there from 1857 until his death in 1863.
Haussmann
The vast public works projects of Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the 1860s dramatically changed the map of the quarter. To reduce the congestion of the narrow maze of streets on the Left Bank, Haussmann had intended to turn the rue des Ecoles into a major boulevard, but the slope was too steep, and he decided instead to construct boulevard Saint‑Germain through the heart of the neighborhood. It was not completed until 1889. He also began a wide south to north axis from the Montparnasse railroad station to the Seine. which became the rue de Rennes. The rue de Rennes was only completed as far as the parvis in the front of the Church of Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés by the end of the Second Empire in 1871, and stopped there, sparing the maze of narrow streets between boulevard Saint‑Germain and the river.
Oscar Wilde
The quarter was also the temporary home of many musicians, artists and writers from abroad, including Richard Wagner who lived for several months on rue Jacob.
The writer Oscar Wilde spent his last days in the quarter, at the small, run-down hotel called the Hotel d'Alsace at 13 rue des Beaux‑Arts, near the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He wandered the streets alone, and spent what money he had on alcohol. He wrote to his editor, "This poverty really breaks one's heart: it is so sale, so utterly depressing, so hopeless. Pray do what you can." He corrected proofs of his earlier work, but refused to write anything new. "I can write, but have lost the joy of writing", he told his editor. He kept enough sense of humor to remark: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go." He died on 30 November 1900, and was first buried in a small cemetery outside the city, before being reburied in 1909 at Pere Lachaise.
The small hotel where Wilde died became famous; later guests included Marlon Brando and Jorge Luis Borges. It was completely redecorated by Jacques Garcia, and is now a five-star luxury hotel called L'Hotel.
The 20th century: non-conformism
In the first half of the 20th century, Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés and nearly the whole of the 6th arrondissement, was a densely populated working‑class neighborhood, whose population was declining. The population of the 6th arrondissement was 101,584 in 1921, and dropped to 83,963. In the postwar years, the housing was in poor condition; only 42 percent of residences had indoor toilets, and only 23 percent had their own showers or baths. By 19-0 the population of the 6th fell to 47,942, a drop of fifty percent in seventy years. In 1954 workers represented 19.2 percent of the population of the quarter; 18.1 percent in 1962.
In the years after World War II, Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés was known primarily for its cafés and its bars, its diversity and its non-conformism. The bars were a popular destination for American soldiers and sailors after the war. It was also known as a meeting place for the largely-clandestine gay community of Paris, which at the time frequented the Café de Flore and the Café Carrefour, an all-night restaurant.[12] Because of its low rents and proximity to the University, the quarter was also popular with students from the French colonies in Africa. There were between three and five thousand African students in the city; their association had its headquarters at 184 boulevard Saint‑Germain and 28 rue Serpente. Because of the number of workers, it also hosted an important bureau of the French Communist Party.
Jazz
Immediately after the War, Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés and the nearby Saint-Michel neighbourhood became home to many small jazz clubs, mostly located in cellars, due to the shortage of any suitable space, and because the music at late hours was less likely to disturb the neighbors. The first to open in 1945 was the Caveau des Lorientais, near boulevard Saint‑Michel, which introduced Parisians to New Orleans Jazz, played by clarinetist Claude Luter and his band. It closed shortly afterwards, but was soon followed by cellars in or near Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés; Le Vieux-Columbier, the Rose Rouge, the Club Saint-Germain; and especially, Le Tabou. The musical styles were both traditional New Orleans jazz and bebop, led by Sydney Bechet and trumpeter Boris Vian; Mezz Mezzrow, André Rewellotty, guitarist Henri Salvador, and singer Juliette Gréco. The clubs attracted students from the nearby university, the Paris intellectual community, and celebrities from the Paris cultural world. They soon had doormen who controlled who was important or famous enough to be allowed inside into the cramped, smoke-filled cellars. A few of the musicians went on to celebrated careers; Sidney Bechet was the star of the first jazz festival held at the Salle Pleyel in 1949, and headlined at the Olympia music hall in 1955. The musicians were soon divided between those who played traditional New Orleans jazz, and those who wanted more modern varieties. Most of the clubs closed by the early 1960s, as musical tastes shifted toward rock and roll.
Existentialism
The literary life of Paris after World War II was centered in Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés, both because of the atmosphere of non-conformism and because of the large concentration of book stores and publishing houses. Because most writers lived in tiny rooms or apartments, they gathered in cafés, most famously the Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp and Les Deux Magots, where the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and writer Simone de Beauvoir held court. Sartre (1905–1980) was the most prominent figure of the period; he was a philosopher, the founder of the school of existentialism, but also a novelist, playwright, and theater director. He also was very involved in the Paris politics of the left; after the war he was a follower (though not a member) of the Communist Party, then broke with the communists after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and became an admirer of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, then of Mao-tse Tung. In 1968 he joined the demonstrations against the government, standing on a barrel to address striking workers at the Renault factory in Billancourt. The legends of Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés describe him as frequenting the jazz clubs of the neighborhood, but Sartre wrote that he rarely visited them, finding them too crowded, uncomfortable and loud. Simone de Beauvoir (1902–1986), famous philosopher, the lifelong companion of Sartre, was another important literary figure, both as an early proponent of feminism and as an autobiographer and novelist.
After the Second World War, the neighbourhood became the centre of intellectuals and philosophers, actors, singers and musicians. Existentialism co-existed with jazz and chanson in the cellars on the rue de Rennes. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco, Léo Ferré, Jean-Luc Godard, Boris Vian, and François Truffaut were all at home there. But there were also poets such as Jacques Prévert and artists such as Giovanni Giacometti. As a residential address Saint‑Germain is no longer quite as fashionable as the area further south towards the Jardin du Luxembourg, partly due to Saint‑Germain's increased popularity among tourists.
Abduction
On 29 November 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, the leader of opposition to the government of the King of Morocco, was kidnapped as he emerged from the door of the Brasserie Lipp. His body was never found.
Transportation
The area is served by the stations of the Paris Métro:
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Mabillon
Literature
Many writers have written about this Parisian district in prose such as Boris Vian, Marcel Proust, Gabriel Matzneff (see La Nation française), Jean-Paul Caracalla or in Japanese poetry in the case of Nicolas Grenier. Egyptian writer Albert Cossery spent the later part of his life living in a hotel in this district. James Baldwin frequented the cafés, written about in Notes of a Native Son. Charles Dickens describes the fictional Tellson's Bank as "established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris" in his novel A Tale of Two Cities.
Economy
At one time numerous publishers were located in the area. Gentrifying real estate values then intervened. By 2009 many publishers, including Hachette Livre and Flammarion had moved out of the community.
(Wikipedia)
Das Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés [kaʀtje sɛ̃ ʒɛʀmɛ̃ de pʀe], kurz Saint-Germain [sɛ̃ ʒɛʀmɛ̃], ist ein Stadtviertel in Paris. Es ist das 24. Quartier der französischen Hauptstadt und liegt im 6. Arrondissement südlich der Seine im Stadtgebiet Rive Gauche. Das zentral in der Innenstadt gelegene Viertel ist nach der dort ansässigen Abtei Saint-Germain-des-Prés benannt und wird vom Boulevard Saint-Germain durchzogen.
Geschichte
Der Namensgeber der Abtei, Germanus von Paris, ließ die Kirche im Jahr 558 AD auf Weideland hinter der Île de la Cité errichten. Daher der Zusatz des Prés, auf den Wiesen.
Das Viertel spielte jahrhundertelang eine wichtige Rolle im Geistesleben Frankreichs. Das dort gelegene Priesterseminar von St-Sulpice (Paris) bildete berühmte Persönlichkeiten aus. Das Viertel galt in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts als Zentrum des französischen Existentialismus um die Philosophen Jean-Paul Sartre und Simone de Beauvoir. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés gibt es berühmte Cafés wie Les Deux Magots oder Café de Flore, die teils schon in den 1920er Jahren, spätestens ab den 1950ern, zum Treffpunkt von Intellektuellen und Künstlern wurden. Literaten, Musiker, Schauspieler und Filmschaffende wie Boris Vian, Juliette Gréco oder Jean-Luc Godard wurden zwischen den 1950er und 1980er Jahren mit dem Viertel assoziiert. In der Rue des Beaux-Arts residierte ab 1955 die berühmte Galerie von Iris Clert.
Heutzutage ist Saint-Germain-des-Prés ein Anziehungspunkt für Touristen. Die Bewohner von Saint-Germain-des-Prés werden im Französischen als germanopratins bezeichnet. Dieses Gentilizium steht wie oft im Französischen der lateinischen Wurzel näher als der Lokalitätsname selbst (frz. pré; lat. prātŭm, Wiese, Aue).
Das Quartier im Film
1949: Rendez-vous de juillet (Jugend von heute) von Jacques Becker
1950: Pigalle-Saint-Germain-des-Prés von André Berthomieu
1951: La Rose rouge von Marcello Pagliero
1958: Les Tricheurs (Die sich selbst betrügen) von Marcel Carné
1965: Episode Saint Germain des Prés (in Paris gesehen von...) von Jean Douchet
1973: La Maman et la Putain (Die Mama und die Hure) von Jean Eustache
1986: Autour de minuit (Um Mitternacht ) von Bertrand Tavernier
Das Quartier in der Musik
1950: Léo Ferré bringt das Chanson À Saint-Germain-des-Prés auf einer Schellackplatte heraus. 1953 und 1969 erscheinen jeweils Neuaufnahmen. Auch andere Interpreten tragen das Chanson vor: Henri Salvador (1950), Hélène Martin, Cora Vaucaire, Anne Sofie von Otter (2013)
1961: Guy Béart komponiert Il n'y a plus d'après… (à Saint-Germain-des-Prés) Auch Juliette Gréco hat das Lied in ihrem Repertoire.
1967: bedauert Léo Ferré in dem Chanson Quartier Latin die Veränderung des Viertels im Vergleich zu seiner Studentenzeit von 1930.
1991: Michel Sardou nimmt La Main aux fesses auf, wo er das Viertel als «Saint-Germain-des-Clébards» betitelt.
Das Quartier in der Literatur
1956: Ed van der Elsken: Liebe in Saint Germain des Prés. Schaden Verlag, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-932187-04-0. („vintage reprint“ der 1956 im Rowohlt Verlag erschienenen Ausgabe.)
(Wikipedia)
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” ― Umberto Eco
. . Because I don't feel like thinking too deeply; because I feel the need to be blank. And yes, my feet were in the shoes. Why did I waste my time? Precisely. . .
Edit Notes: Photo of my shoes (with my feet in - why?) taken in Procamera; Edited in Snapseed then Noir in hard contrast; Blur fx then Vintage Scene, Modern Grunge and Pixrl-o-matic