View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
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.
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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.
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.
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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
Chiharu Shiota, site specific installation
Exhibition view "Francis Bacon and Existential Condition in Contemporary Art", CCC Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze
© photo Martino Margheri
Rondreis West Amerika met Djoser ...
Hier werk van Lucien Freud ...
Lucian Michael Freud (Berlijn, 8 december 1922 – Londen, 20 juli 2011) was een Britse schilder van Joods-Oostenrijkse afkomst. Hij was een kleinzoon van Sigmund Freud en was de vader van schrijfster Esther Freud en modeontwerpster Bella Freud.
Het werk van Freud behoort tot de hedendaagse kunst en het neorealisme. De bekende criticus Herbert Read noemde hem ooit "de Ingres van het existentialisme".
Naast portretten en naakten schilderde Freud ook bomen en planten. Vaak figureert een hond of een plant op de schilderijen van mensen.
Freud wordt ook wel gezien als een exponent van het existentialisme, de geschilderde modellen lijken niet echt aanwezig, hebben een blik die vooral naar binnen gericht is. De kijkrichting is meestal naar een punt buiten het schilderij. De naakten zijn vaak in een zeer exposerende positie afgebeeld, de geslachtsdelen vragen prominent de aandacht. Het werk wordt daarom soms confronterend gevonden.
Het werk van Freud is duidelijk autobiografisch, zoals dat van Pierre Bonnard of Balthus, maar met soberder kleurgebruik. Freud wordt door voorstanders als één van de grootste kunstenaars van deze tijd beoordeeld, maar er zijn ook kunsthistorici die zijn schilderwerk niet van deze tijd vinden, evenals felle tegenstanders. Het werk brengt hoge prijzen op: een portret van Kate Moss uit 2002 bijvoorbeeld 3,9 miljoen pond in 2005. Het schilderij Benefits Supervisor Sleeping heeft in New York een recordbedrag van 30 miljoen dollar (19,4 miljoen euro) opgebracht, het hoogste bedrag dat ooit voor een werk van een nog levende kunstenaar op een veiling is betaald.
Zie verder bron: nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Freud
Het Getty Center is een gebouwencomplex in Brentwood, een wijk in het westen van Los Angeles, waarin onder meer een deel van de collectie van het J. Paul Getty Museum en de wetenschappelijke instellingen het Getty Research Institute en het Getty Conservation Institute gehuisvest zijn.
De verzamelingen van het J. Paul Getty Museum gaan terug op de privécollecties van de oliemagnaat Jean Paul Getty, die daarvoor in 1953 een museum in de wijk Pacific Palisades oprichtte. Het Getty Center, waarvan de bouw in 1997 voltooid was, werd ontworpen door de Amerikaanse architect Richard Meier, in Nederland bekend door het stadhuis van Den Haag. De verzameling voorwerpen uit de Klassieke Oudheid bevindt zich sinds 2006 weer in Malibu in de Getty Villa. Het gebouw uit 1974 is een imitatie is van de Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum. Zowel de Getty Villa als het Getty Center worden beheerd door de Getty Trust.
De verzamelingen van het Getty Museum omvatten het volgende:
Fotografie
Kunsthandwerk
Oudheidkundige (kunst)voorwerpen
Schilderijen
Tekeningen
Verluchte handschriften
Why a fox? Why not a horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? I'm saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who am I? And how can a fox ever be happy without, you'll forgive the expression, a chicken in its teeth?
Mural by Okuda San Miguel aka @okudart at the Wynwood Walls outdoor museum in Miami, Florida.
Okuda San Miguel, known as OKUDA, is a street artist based out of Madrid. Since 1997 his pieces have appeared on railroads and abandoned factories around his hometown.
His multicolored geometric structures and patterns are combined with gray bodies and organic forms in artistic pieces that can be categorized as Pop Surrealism, with a clear influence of street forms. His works often raise contradictions about existentialism, the universe, the infinite, the meaning of life, and show a clear conflict between modernity and our roots.
His works can be found in the streets and galleries around the world including India, Mali, Mozambique, United States, Japan, South America, South Africa, Mexico and the European continent, among others.
As I'm sure we all know French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said 'Words are loaded pistols'. I think we can all appreciate the sentiment behind this statement as surely we've all said something we regret every once in a while. And once those words are said the pistol has been fired and there's no turning back.
This design started life as the image of existential French Jean Paul Sartre's head with his loaded pistol words alongside but as I love an earworm if I can possibly get away with it I took some inspiration from the world of music to see if I could get Cher's seminal 1989 hit 'If I could turn back time' playing unheeded in your brain.
In the song Cher utters the immortal words 'Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes' and this rang a bell in my brain as it seemed close enough to Sartre's words to make use of. Hopefully that will strike a chord in your brain and you'll be singing it all day. Mission accomplished!
Whilst we were painting it some hapless busybody decided to try and let me know that I'd misquoted Sartre but, of course, I hadn't as she had neglected to read my 'Jean Paul Sartre as paraphrased by Cher' small print graffiti. id-iom 1 - random passerby 0. Ha! In your face!
Cheers
id-iom
Stereolab, ‘Transient Random-Noise With Announcements’, 1993. Ah, the ‘Lab. I loved them. Saw them play in a small Camden pub early 1992. Bought the single ‘Super Electric’ and saw them whenever I could. Gigs were small and full of happy dancing bodies. During Britpop I lived abroad and when I saw them again after a gap of 3 years it was at the Kilburn National. A big venue as befits a band who’d been on ‘Top of The Pops’ (something that had happened whilst I was away) and it was… sad. From seeing this lovely little groop in a pub only a few years before they were now flavour-of-the-month Indie. Nobody danced. It was all standing and gawping. We’re cool coz we’re watching a cool band. No joy. Killed it for me.
So, with my lockdown hat on, I dug out an album. I had fun but definitely a band who were ‘better live, prefer their old stuff’. This double album has everything you need from the band. Extended motorik beats (the drummer was a rockin’ machine live!), Ye-Ye French pop vocals (lots of “ba-ba-ba”s), analogue synths, locked guitar riffs, fierce bursts of electronic squall, pretty floating harmonies and melodies. Singer Laetitia is French, which lends the whole thing an air of inscrutable cool. Plus, the lyrics reference Marxist thought, underground cinema, Sixties pop, Existentialism and the like, but all slightly tongue-in-cheek.
‘Tone Burst’ swirly keyboards over jangly riff. ‘Our Trinitone Blast’ female voices driving another riff and beat. ‘Pack Yr Romantic Mind’ pretty and floaty with Sixties pop feel fused with riffage. ‘I’m Going Out of My Mind’ channel the Velvets in another extended riff with droning keyboard. ‘Golden Ball’ slowly building riff – what they do best. ‘Pause’ is slow woozy keyboards before veering off into Bontempi beats and French voices. ‘Jenny Ondioline’ is more Velvets-esque/Krautrock riffing, with harmonies, filling up all of Side 3. Good driving track. ‘Analogue Rock’ is more metronome beat with stabbing keyboards and harmonies. ‘Crest’ the same, but different. ‘Lock-Groove Lullaby’ big strummed bass and noises with floaty French vocal.
Nice. A lovely little jewel of a pop combo.
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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:
On appelle claustrophilie (φιλία philía) cet amour inconditionnel du photographe qui fait qu'il aime le mur pour ce qu'il peut lui prendre quand il le prend, et non pour ce qu'il peut lui cacher lorsqu'il le montre aux autres .. ou autre chose comme ça.
One calls claustrophilia (φιλία philía) this unconditional love of the photographer which makes that he loves the wall for what it can take to him when he takes it, and not for what it can hide to him when he shows it to the others .. or something else like that.
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(...) Self ? Ego ? . . this worst common concept is this trap set by anthropocentric theologisms, narcissistic existentialisms, etc. "Cogito ergo sum !" as "I think my self, so I am my self !" is the worst game strategy born of "being/otherness" dualism, reduced to "individualism", this "ism" as illusive as its reciprocal "collectivism".
If we hope to play again the desperately jotful game of Entropy's wanderings, let's jump on a rebirth vanishing line : "We are thinking, so we are rhizoming !". In our dis-re-evolving noosphere, only collaborative games between our cognospheres, are able to be performative enough to survive the next round, i.e. to maintain at once the persistence of our memory and of our creativity, i.e. to maintain the persistence of our plane of emergence.
Don't let us be only what we can, let's become what we want together." (...)"
Yo mismo? Es el “Yo” lo que no admito. El peor y más común de los conceptos en esta trampa ideada por teologismos y existencialismos antropocéntricos. “Cogito ergo sum !” como “yo pienso entonces soy yo mismo !”, es una estrategia de Juego tan mala.
Si tenemos la esperanza de seguir jugando, saltemos a una línea de renacimiento: “Estamos pensando por ende estamos rizomando !” En nuestra des-envolvente noosfera, sólo los juegos cooperativos entre esferas cognitivas son capaces de interactuar lo suficiente como para sobrevivir.
No nos permitan ser sólo lo que podemos, volvámonos lo que queremos juntos.
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| . rectO-persO . | . E ≥ m.C² . | . co~errAnce . | . TiLt . |
Sterlings statement via RedLine
"My art making practice is exploratory in nature and involves me in a wide variety of subject matter. I am currently working in video, digital imaging software, computer programming/data visualization, traditional/non-traditional image making and objects.
The following is a list of my recent interest: perception, new media techniques, emptiness, space-time, humans, existentialism, computing, self narratives, entropy, and post-humanism in relation to a technological singularity. "
Left: Geekgirly
Right: me
This week for The Divine Diptych Project I was paired with the lovely and very talented Geekgirly. Our theme was 'Absurd', and I think my part at least needs explaination.... As I discovered when I actually looked into the meaning of the word absurd, there is a whole philosophy behind it. Absurdism being the result of humans searching for meaning when there is none. The only escape from absurdity is suicide or faith. Well I was very stuck on how to interpret that, so looking further I saw connections to existentialism, especially Camus, and Absurdist literature, such as The Nonsense Poets, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear... Ideas started to form.
So this is an absurd self portrait representing existentialism and absurdist literature..... clear ? ; )
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II (1/6), 1960, bronze, 188.5 × 27.9 × 110.7 cm (National Gallery of Art)
The "American Pickers" were just starting to garner national attention when I stopped by their original (and at the time, only) shop for a few photos on the evening of July 23, 2011 after attending Train Fest in Rock Island. The "Pickers Car" is a 1950 Nash Statesman Super.
"Memories"
This image is being submitted as part of the #Flickr21 Photo Challenge, celebrating Flickr's 21st anniversary on February 10, 2025. The theme for the 12th day of the 21 day photo challenge is "Memories." There are lots of possibilities for this theme. One could state that every photograph is a memory. After all, the overarching purpose of photography is to capture a moment in time. By extension, one could argue that Flickr's entire purpose is a repository for memories. But now is not the time to fall down the existentialism rabbit hole.
I chose this image for the "Memories" theme for what it represents. Not only does "American Pickers" function as a show preserving the past, but the show itself is has been on long enough (15 years as of this writing) that it is full of memories in and of itself. Not only that, but the show is on a channel that is all about history (well, it was; I don't know how much aliens and swamp hunters have to do with history, but I digress).
But even more than that are MY memories attached to this image. Train Festival 2011 was my first time visiting the Quad Cities area by myself. It was my first encounter with many steam locomotives that I has since seen operate many times since. It was my first time meeting railfans that I would later count as friends. It was my first time seeing the original "American Pickers" store. And this trip was the beginning of a multi-month whirlwind that would (until 2024) be the busiest of my life; two days later I would be on a plane to Los Angeles for my first ever work trip, and a week after that, I'd be in Salt Lake City. So I have lots of memories tied to this image, and it is probably my favorite image taken during this time and remains one of my favorite images ever taken to this day. I even have a large format print of this on metallic paper hanging on my wall.
30/52: Prime
Cannes, France
This picture accurately describes my current feelings for this project.
I attempted to complete the primary colour scheme of the backstage stairwell in the Palais des Festivals in Cannes by wearing the only yellow thing I own upside-down, but that didn't turn out as well as I'd liked, so here is an intermediary picture of the process of trying to wear clothes creatively.
A bee from two years ago, long dead and withered, but look at how it used its time, buried nose-first in beauty and what really, really mattered. An existential model for all of us to follow.
I'm resisting the urge to ask for more, because what I have is amazing.
Note how the bee stores what it gathers on its legs. Amazing.
AI creation on Nightcafe with Dreamshaper XL Lightning
I was using two different prompts, with the higher prompt weight on the tardigrade.
PROMPT 1:
tardigrade (water bear or moss piglet) extreme environment, 16k resolution scanning electron microscopy tardigrade research tardigrade anatomy. tubelike mouth, barrel-shaped body four pairs of legs ending in claws. range in size from 0.1 to 1.5 mm, tough chitinous exoskeleton, simple digestive system, brain and several ganglia. Cryptobiosis, cryptid taxidermy in Bogomil's Universe, Surrealism. A colossal tardigrade adrift in a void, its microscopic form rendered monumental and distorted. Spectral figures writhe and grasp at its shell, embodying the concept of fate. Neo-expressionist brushstrokes convey a sense of existential dread. A single, harsh spotlight illuminates the scene from above. Digital painting, unsettling, cosmic horror, existentialism, body horror, grotesque, high detail, dramatic lighting, 8k.
PROMPT 2:
The surrealistic monster landscape of H.R. Giger - assisted by Arcimboldo and Bosch, highly detailed extremely detailed fantasy oil on canvas imperial colors fantastic view hyperrealistic cinematic postprocessing Hieronymus Bosch Giuseppe Arcimboldo H.R. Giger Surrealism Giger Alien, fantasy illustration, detailed painting, deep color
compare flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/dream/ - grabbed my guitar, remembered a story, once heard, threw all my black & white photos of my FLICKR set into the slide show software - I hope I'm not boring you with my voice, I'm not a singer, it's just home-recording for fun... - view this video on black: bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=3328218100&size... - visit the youtube version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksfQhC8fI8M
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