View allAll Photos Tagged self-reflection
Reflection of me.
Mesmerizing mirror lamps at Schiphol Airport.
--
Spiegellampen, Schiphol, Thee bij Cafe Chocolat, Schiphol
This building in Manchester is on the approach to Manchester Piccadilly railway station, and snakes along the road. It has shops at ground level and this uniform structure above. Notable among the shops is the Ian Allan bookshop.
The building is curved enough that it can be made to reflect on itself. That appeals to me.
Day 240 of 365
Week 32, Assignment 2 for Take A Class With Dave And Dave.
Self-Portrait With Camera - We've all seen the lazy self-portrait where the photographer points his camera at a mirror and clicks the shutter button. The challenge here is to take a photograph of yourself taking a photograph of yourself...and find a way to make it interesting.
A photo of myself taking a photo of myself taking a photo of myself taking a, well, you get the picture.
To make it more interesting, I applied the Droste Effect to the original.
"Self Reflection"
made by casting a reflection in a pocket mirror in a field of prairie forbes and blooming Coryopsis.
This Series is meant to show isolation during social distancing and the Covid-19 Pandemic, and the effect it can take on peoples mental health.
this one attempts to capture that even in a bright flourishing environment, the self does not always reflect that.
“My inability to verbalize my feelings has transformed itself into a visual dialogue between my lover and me: I crave for a wordless understanding simply because I am afraid. I don’t want to clear thing out too much when there will be a possibility that my lover might fail to decipher my unspoken message. I find my self caught up in this inescapable paradoxical: I try to hide the passion from her, (the word Cacher = to hide in French) but the act of documenting heavily our daily private lives and spaces, her body and mine, is an act of opening up myself to vulnerability. I suppressed my feelings but my photographs release it.” Cacher by Thy Tran (2/4)
REFLECTIONS OF A JAILBIRD
It can be quite hard to force myself to concentrate on writing when myriad distractions abound: I have the internet, snacks at hand, and a curious mind that prefers wandering than getting stuck into the arduous task of gathering my thoughts and organising them into one structured essay.
What is worse is that there are also myriad birds outside my windows that are eager to show off how free they are - while it is me that is cooped up inside an aviary. And this has been my daily life for months already here, in the middle of Istanbul.
The world has surely been turned upside down.
And my state of being has now too.
Have you ever been to prison without being involved in a crime?
The laws of lockdown have worked; they have successfully restricting my body to the house, but it has also set loose thoughts and emotion; and the things that stir inside an idle being.
In fact, I am usually the opposite: a busy body with a braindead head – not a rioting soul in a dead body.
Thus, has been a rare chance to engage in some very unique, albeit testing, self-reflection and what I have observed is that my own mind is actually hell-bent on getting away from me.
Out of due respect for public health, I have not really been anywhere for a full three months. And during this home-sentence, I have been battling with another prison: a mental prison consisting of high walls that forbid me from doing any proper constructive written work.
The summer warmth has arrived in Istanbul; finally replacing the long, wet winter - the heat and sunlight have come and replenished the empty hole that is known as ‘lockdown’. This is a very good change in events. Weather does alter one’s mood.
The uplifting summer-scented air has called me to begin writing down a few notes to share with you all. Although, however lovely days of sunshine and birdsong may be, it seems my newly-found prison-life has offered some useful (and dire) insight into how many lives are lived.
*
Morning after morning after morning, I wake up in the same fashion, with the sound of pigeons outside my bedroom window. They sit there and mumble the same stuff at each other. I get up for a coffee. The sparrows chirp like mad in the big leafy trees from morning till dusk and I am always here to hear it. Now that all forms of unnatural noise have subsided over the past weeks, the world has revealed that there are even chickens living on the banks of in front of the apartments opposite me.
Who would think chickens exist in a city of fifteen million people? Well, I believe it. It is hard not to believe it when their bleating is sometimes all that is left over now that cars and engines sounds have left the room. Right now, it is a bird’s world and I feel as if I am the only living creature that sits around stagnating all day.
Those birds are busy with their lives and I am the one who is sat in the bird cage waiting for some sort of seeds to appear in my bowl.
*
During my lifetime, I have always wondered how come old people so often tend to be miserable.
I was confused as to why oldies were always angry when kids’ balls come over their fence. I thought that old people should know that life goes along better when the world is a tolerant and friendly place - after all, judging by their bent posture and wrinkly skin, it could be safe to say that they have been around for a bit and should be aware of the tricks of the trade.
The world over, I have been yelled at by grumpy old people – usually for noise or some other form of unruliness. But my anticipation for some eventual grey-haired wisdom to save the day always fell through as they most often would revert back to their own form of unruliness – that being their decrepit emotional composure in the face of something minor.
I always liked to imagine that someday, I will become the seemingly only old man in the world who is patient, kind and unconcerned with little things that are of no apparent bother. I thought I would be the kindest granddad who would come out of his house, and instead of shouting with a stick in hand, he would come with a packet of chocolate biscuits and tell the kids just how great they are doing with their soccer skills.
But now I get it.
A silent, idle life, void of real things to do and people to talk to just makes people become dank. Now I understand. A rattle in the refrigerator has the power to really piss people off. I never knew of that rattle when my life extended beyond these four walls.
In a tiny little world, tiny little things just appear so big.
Now I realise, I too, in the future, am capable of becoming an angry old man.
*
In Istanbul you often have company from giant seagulls which are a key part of the infrastructure of this giant port city. Istanbulites love to feed animals, and these massive birds easily get their beaks into heavy pieces of stale bread. They do not want to share their findings with others and so they fly onto the rooftops and drop it, hack at it and throw it around in order to break it into smaller, edible size pieces.
I live on the top-floor and often have to deal with them stomping around on my roof. I have a rooftop sky-window that I can open up and be part of the goings on up there, but they are too busy to care. They are very happy. I am not though, and I give them the evil stare from under the window pane. And, again, they are too busy being happy to care.
*
May is the month of Ramadan and at times some very rhythmic Anatolian music seeps out from behind some bushes somewhere near where those chickens live. There is also drumming at 2am each night. Sometimes I hang myself out the fifth-floor window to try to get a piece of the vibe. I always found the concept of music to be extremely fascinating. Music is such a human thing.
I admit I have felt a bit self-conscious before dancing in front of other people, but I have to say that I feel downright embarrassed doing so in front of animals. So, I don’t. I am sure animals understand the pleasure in moving around and having fun, but the style we do it in… well, I don’t know about that. We must look absolutely ridiculous. But it is Ramadan, and it is a time for celebration.
There is a family of crows that lives in a branch – rent-free – just opposite my biggest windows in the lounge area. I enviously watch them coming and going, and taking turns at sitting on their babies. They screech and caw, as I do when I think I am singing.
As I hum along to these sudden outbreaks of traditional folk tunes, I wonder why we humans feel the need to offer a bit of our own noise to an otherwise good-enough piece of music. We also like to move our bodies along with to the beat, as if that was called for. If you can get past your own two feet, that is, then this timely shuffling is generally known as ‘dancing’.
So, it seems that adding some singing, some lyrics, and well, ultimately some sort of mouth and body movement to the music, it just makes it all come alive.
*
We humans make order of our thoughts through speech. We navigate our world through the use of the mouth; through words; through language, through lyrics, through conversation, through stories, constantly feeling the need to incessantly release some form of mouth-made noise with/to/towards/at other people: we engage in civil, amicable chitter-chatter; we emit our oral vibrations out of rage at poor kids who have lost their ball over the fence, we thrust our noises into the music as we groove along in tow…
…and somehow this makes us feel better about the world.
I can honestly say I am utterly embarrassed to be a human. But, the innate, instinctive need for talk and movement dictates our psyche. The necessity for social interaction with other people and physical interaction with our environment is indisputable. This is the source of a large part of our health. And without it, well…
We humans are a group mammal after all – perhaps more so than the feathered ‘free-folk’ outside that even feel free enough to crap all over my windowsills. But it is obvious: being around people and engaging in meaningful conversation regulates our mood and emotions so that we can avoid entering the otherwise guaranteed free-fall to hell…
…where a lot of us are right now.
All of this has now become starkly clear as I sit in here doing the opposite of what a healthy person does. All the animals accentuate the fact that they can get more done in life now that us human-beings have ceased to be part of the furniture; and we are not around anymore to bother them. Unless I decide to dance behind the glass or something - and that could bother a soul or two.
I mean, if you have to be a human being, then you also have to know how to meet a human being’s needs. That is not to say I dance, but it does mean one needs to be able to think well, speak properly, and move more.
This may seem obvious and straightforward, but I can assure you… it is not.
Just as one may think six months at home would be heaven, and when it comes around you realise it is actually a nightmare. Human beings may sit around in their homes dressed in clothes with their fancy gadgets, but can assure you, we do not always really understand what it is that we need. Nor do we properly see things for what they are…
A lot of us have never learnt to think, nor learnt to move, nor learnt to speak. Properly, that is.
*
Over the years, I have had a number of students who could fall under the category of ‘depressed’; or ‘hell-bound’ would be a better way to put it.
There is a thing called clinical depression, but this dispiritedness is often just simply an environmental, psychological, physiological or sociological inadequacy or imbalance. Sort of like a form of vitamin deficiency that comes good again with the right adjustments.
That is basically to say… yes, as it seems, a lot of melancholy folk typically seem to lead a full-time lifestyle of lockdown.
Try that! What a bloody existence…
I have observed many teenagers of mine who regularly take part in physical activity in their daily lives, be it sports or dance, are generally much more mentally and emotionally healthy – not to mention physically so. They tend to hold onto less negative energy and have a lighter, bouncier kick in their way of being.
Those that have good social, conversational and inter-personal skills tend to have these similar healthy characteristics. In short, those that are well-equipped to meet their simple human needs fare well in the world.
But this species of well-equipped kid is actually depressingly rare. A huge number of adults do not qualify either. That has frustrated me for a long time.
*
Normally at this time of year, I would be busy preparing for the summer holidays for when my students and I hit the long road with our backpacks on.
This year, that is not going to happen though, which is a pity because we were planning for some very exotic locations (Cuba, Madagascar…). And it is also a pity for some of my students that are, and/or have always been full-time-lockdown-lifestylists who would greatly benefit again from a couple of weeks-long de-shackling from the mundane.
However, this virus has offered me a very unique opportunity:
With the ditching of my passport and car-keys and the forgoing of my usual travel-lifestyle, I now get the chance to exist on this great planet in another fascinating way…
By being in prison, experiencing the psychological state of depressed prisoners, getting to know and understand the inner-world of many of my students, rehearsing for when I am old, and getting to write about it all.
More unfortunate is getting to brush up on my knowledge about myriad aspects of birdlife and how damning similar it is to ours. Even more unfortunate than that is the succumbing to the fact that I am capable of using words like ‘myriad’ myriad times in a six and a half page-long essay…
13 May 2020
(Period of lockdown from Covid-19)
An artpiece from MoMA's PS1. You guys should be able to spot where I am, put a note on it if you find me and my camera. More details to come
Day 53. 080627.
10/07/08
For FGR, Self Reflection. (lovely choice, Maite!)
I had a good day.
I had coffee.
I got my promotion.
I was busy as hell.
I wanted to scream.
I found out how much my raise was.
It made it all worth it. ;-)
This pic came out sort of freaky looking....like some weird horror movie or something....
And I'm a bit sore I didn't desaturate the texture over the desaturated reflection, but eh, what can you do. :-))
Hm. Ah, and of course, mucho thanks to the fabulous Jessi for the texture. You're a genius, girl. :)
Trying to understand and keep me...me and not others reflections of me. Need to work on the lighting next.
This is Part 34 of 50 in a randomly updated, sporadic series. They're just flying by now
When I started this "Origin of States" thing, there were certain states I really looked forward to tackling. Not so much because I liked these states more than the others, but because the entry of these states into the Union signaled a shift. Kentucky was the beginning of westward expansion. Louisiana took that expansionist idea to a level previously unimagined. Missouri exemplified both the benefit and folly of compromise. Iowa kicked off our Manifest Destiny dream, and California showed just how far that dream would take us.
But now, with this state and the state that comes after, we've finally reached the biggest turning point in all United States history. (So far.) We've finally made it to Bloody Kansas.
Kansas is one of those states that pundits like to use to imagine what average, generic America looks like. Historically, I think there's some appropriateness to that, though not necessarily for the reasons the pundits think. I think if you ask any American with a capacity for self-reflection to name the two greatest sins the United States ever committed, they'll likely land on two things: Indian removal and slavery. Kansas was born in violence from the bloody debris of both.
Dust in the Wind
People have been in Kansas as long as they've been in North America, but Kansas has never had the kind of climate to encourage longterm stays for people who haven't invented centrifugal pumps. You start getting into the dry lands of North America when you hit eastern Kansas, and it just gets drier the farther west you go. The Mississippian Mound builders never came this far west, and the Ancestral Puebloans never came this far east. The indigenous people who lived in Kansas were nomadic types who followed the great bison herds around the grasslands. By the time the Europeans started wandering this way, these groups had become the plains people we know, like the Wichita or the Pawnee.
Kansas is way out in the middle of the continent, though, so those Europeans came in a trickle. In 1541, Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado wandered from Mexico way up into the middle of Kansas. He was looking for the mystical Cities of Cíbola, seven cities of gold that indigenous Mexican people promised were just over some hill to the north. But there was never any gold in Kansas, and all he found was an unusually large village of plains people living on the Great Bend of the Arkansas River. He called the place Quivira and promised to return, but he never did, and nobody ever found the place again.
But Coronado had a lasting impact on the native people he'd met in Kansas. None of them had ever seen horses before, and riding a horse seemed like a far better method to chase down a buffalo than running on foot. So somewhere in the decades afterward, plains people like the Pawnee and the Osage and the Kansa picked up some misplaced Spanish horses and learned how to ride. The next time some Spaniard came wandering over a hill, the plains people would meet him on horseback.
That didn't happen until 1720, when a Spanish military expedition led by Lieutenant-General Pedro de Villasur came up from Mexico looking to capture any Frenchmen who might be intruding on Spanish territorial claims. Villasur didn't find any Frenchmen, but he did tick off a bunch of Pawnee enough that they attacked and killed 47 Spanish soldiers. But they waited until Villasur got to Nebraska for that, so that's more of a Nebraska story.
Heartland of America
That's pretty much it for the story of European exploration in Kansas. Spain had claimed Kansas in its big 16th century collection of "We Own Everything" treaties, and France claimed it as part of their Louisiana Territory, but neither side ever did anything out here. They passed it back and forth in 1763 and 1801, and in 1803, Napoleon sold it and everything around it to the Americans, sight unseen.
And so, the Americans. Those guys weren't as likely to just stand around and let Kansas be Kansas. Now 300 years into the European colonization project, the wave of white people was finally ready to show up.
It started in 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped for three days at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, in present-day Kansas City. I'll be talking about Lewis and Clark a lot a few states down the road.
In 1806, Zebulon Pike passed through Kansas on an expedition to find the source of the Arkansas River. Pike found a dry and unforgiving land of yellow grass and dust, and in his notes, he described Kansas and eastern Colorado as "the Great American Desert." This phrase would stick in the American mind and inform political thinking on Kansas for decades.
In 1812, the political mapmakers in Washington officially rolled Kansas into the Missouri Territory. When Henry Clay pushed through his 1820 compromise that made Missouri a state, Kansas was broken off into an unorganized space that nobody wanted to do anything with just yet. And that gave somebody an idea.
Indian Territory
An underlying theme of the history of the United States so far has been the tendency of people from "back East" -- which might mean England or Virginia or Ohio or some other place, depending on the era -- to come into a land and act like they own it, ignoring the fact that there are always people already living there. "Doesn't matter," the new settlers would say. "Most of 'em'll die of the measles, and whoever don't, we'll kill off or sell into slavery or push off the land to someplace else." Usually, that "someplace else" would be someplace farther west, and that would be fine until the children of those settlers would push onto that land and say, "Doesn't matter."
In Kansas, that process would start to be formalized, thanks in large part to the efforts of President Andrew Jackson.
I've already talked about Jackson a couple of times in this series and in other places. He was a Tennessee man who'd made himself famous as a heroic military general in the War of 1812 by holding off a particularly misguided British army at New Orleans. After that, he'd led the army through a vicious series of wars against various Native people through Alabama and Georgia and Florida. Then he went political and got himself elected President in 1828, and one of the top items on his agenda was cleaning up the rest of that Indian problem he'd been handling in the Southeast. His solution was simple. Everything east of the Mississippi should be given over to white men and women (and, where applicable, their African slaves). All the Indians should be pushed west across the Mississippi. And when Jackson looked at someplace west of the Mississippi, he and all his political buddies saw that vast, still unused land in the old Louisiana Territory that Zebulon Pike had called the Great American Desert. Nobody useful's going to want to live in a desert, Jackson said, so let's put all the Indians there. In 1830, Jackson talked Congress into passing the Indian Removal Acts, making his scheme law.
This act officially established the Indian Territory in Kansas and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase -- minus the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and part of future Minnesota, which was at that time in its Michigan Territory phase. Over the next decade or so, an assortment of treaties and forced removals would pluck every Native group from the East and shove it onto the Plains, whether they wanted to go or not. This required a lot of shuffling to fit everybody in -- a bunch of tribes that already lived in Kansas were forced down into Oklahoma so that tribes from, say, Wisconsin could be given the old Kansas tribe's spot. But once all this was done, people said, the Indian Problem would be solved. The Indians would finally have a space of their own, and white settlers would have more than enough room to spread out wherever they wanted.
Except that's not how any of this works at all. Even before the forced removals were done, white settlers started slipping over the line from Missouri into the Indian Territory and squatting illegally on Indian land. And of course, the United States wasn't going to do anything about this other than build a bunch of forts to protect the squatters from Indian attacks. And in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which carved two official territories from what was supposed to be Indian space. And everybody in Washington said, "Doesn't matter. We'll just push'em all south. Problem solved."
But solving that problem created another. And here we are, talking about that slavery thing again.
Bloody Kansas
You'll recall that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a deal Kentucky Representative Henry Clay came up with to avoid civil war by keeping the balance of power between the slave states and the free states equal. Slave-holding Missouri would join the union at the same time as freedom-loving Maine, and everything would be as perfectly balanced as a see-saw. At the same time, the feds would draw a line west of Missouri through the unorganized lands at 36.5° N latitude. Any new states south of that line would allow slavery while new states north of the line would be free.
And that all worked fine for a while, as new states happened to come into the Union in balanced pairs of slave and free. But then the Mexican War added a bunch of new territory and changed all that, and California joined the Union in 1850 as a free state. Free Minnesota and free Oregon followed, and all of the sudden the slavers were at a three-state disadvantage. And now here we are with Kansas and Nebraska both north of 36.5° N latitude and, according to Clay's compromise, destined to be free. The slavers were starting to get really itchy. Something had to be done.
The first thing to do was stop the Kansas-Nebraska Act. And they were successful at keeping it from passing on its first attempt. They managed to add a catch to the second go-round. In this version of the act, passed in 1854, the Missouri Compromise would be repealed. 36.5° N latitude no longer mattered. All new states could decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery.
The second thing to do was to make damn sure Kansas decided it wanted slavery. And the way to do that was to move as many slavers into the Kansas Territory as they could. Slaver squatters poured over the border from Missouri and streamed up from Arkansas and Mississippi and Alabama. Abolitionists responded by sending squatters of their own from New England and Illinois and Wisconsin. Kansas turned into a sort of arms race of settlement, where the weapons were homestead cabins.
In 1855, the weapons became weapons.
It started in March with the election of the first territorial legislature. A bunch of Missouri people -- collectively, Missourians became known as the Border Ruffians -- sauntered over the border and voted in Kansas voting booths, stuffing the ballot boxes with pro-slavery votes that elected an overwhelmingly pro-slavery legislature. Abolitionist Kansans weren't going to have that, and bands of them gathered together into little militias called Jayhawkers that went after the Border Ruffians.
History refers to the next three years as the "Border Wars" or "Bleeding Kansas" or "Bloody Kansas." The territory fell into an escalating cycle of violent raids pitting Jayhawkers against Ruffians that sometimes turned into actual pitched battles. History records dozens of incidents: the Wakarusa War, the Sacking of Lawrence, the Battle of Osawatomie. Sometimes the Ruffians were the aggressors. Sometimes it was the Jayhawkers. Maybe given a chance, President James Buchanan might have said there were good people on both sides -- really, he was the type -- but it would have been damned hard to find any.
The most famous of these Bloody Kansas incidents is the Pottawatomie massacre. On May 22, 1856, an abolitionist wild man named John Brown was heading toward the Free State stronghold town of Lawrence with a large group of Jayhawkers when they heard a pro-slavery gang had attacked and looted the town and burned down the Free State Hotel. This enraged Brown, so he and four other guys struck off by themselves to nearby Pottawatomie Creek and raided five cabins in the middle of the night. Brown knew pro-slavery settlers lived in these cabins, and he and his buddies forced them all from their beds, lined them up in the dark, and hacked five of them to death with broadswords. Brown left the territory soon after this and was never brought to justice for what he'd done there. But that's only because he was brought to justice for something else he'd do in a few months. That's a story for next time.
Carry on My Wayward Son
In the middle of the violence of Bloody Kansas, various collections of Kansans kept trying to call themselves a legislature and work out a state constitution, but nobody was on the same page with any of this, so different factions wrote different constitutions.
There were four.
The Topeka Constitution was a Free State document that the Kansas legislature sent to the U.S. Congress in December of 1855, but pro-slavery senators blocked it.
The Lecompton Constitution was a document written by a pro-slavery legislative convention in November of 1857. This constitution dictated that the people of Kansas would vote on whether to accept slavery -- probably, it was assumed, with Missouri help -- but every time they tried, one side or the other boycotted the vote. The U.S. Congress rejected the document because they couldn't establish its legitimacy.
The Leavenworth Constitution was written by a Free State convention in April of 1858. It also was put to a vote with results similar to the Lecompton Constitution, and the two constitutions wound up tangled with each other in Congress.
The Wyandotte Constitution was the one that finally took. It was adopted by the Kansas legislature in July of 1859, and the people of Kansas voted to accept it that October. That constitution banned slavery, but people were so tired of constitutions by this point that it did almost nothing else. But nobody cared. They had their constitution, and they sent it to the U.S. Congress for approval. It got bogged down in Washington for a year, but it finally passed on January 29, 1861, and Kansas became the 34th state of the Union. The abolitionists won.
So the final tally, then is 19 free states and 15 slave states. And that's the last of these tallies we'll see, because this was the moment the dam broke. Maybe it was Kansas, or maybe it was that abolitionist from Illinois who'd just squeaked by to win the Presidential Election of 1860. Either way, shots had already been fired and blood had already been spilled on Kansas ground. And while those shots aren't considered the first shots of the Civil War, they made it just that much easier for the guys in that fort in South Carolina to fire a few shots of their own a few months later. The next time I revisit this series, I'll be writing about the middle of a war.
This was a special evening, i'll be chasing this sunset for the rest of my life. I'll never tire of looking at the pictures, the colors (not shown here, haha) were something you only see in dreams. Moments like this are the reason I am a photographer.
Macromondays: Theme is Coloured Glass
This is part of a coloured glass paperweight. I liked how the paperweight reflected itself in each bubble... it also reflected my home made light tent tho :-(
Posting early this week, tired, need bed and can't be sure will get on tomorrow. Will add my comments on all your shots tomorrow night!
Model: Nikki Barrager
MUA: Laetitia Make up Mons
Strobist info: Nikon SB900 through very narrow vertictal barn door right from model at 30º, 1/16 power; Elinchrom BX250Ri on 1,5 through 60x60 softbox left facing at 45º angle towards the camera, Elinchrom BX250Ri on 1,5 through 60x60 softbox right facing at 45º angle towards the camera, a little bit higher than the model's face. 100 cm round reflector on the right of the model, bouncing back the light from the Elinchrom strobes
102/365
I think we all have times where we have to stop and open ourselves up to self analysis, be it good or bad.
I've had many periods in my life where I have self analysed and reflected on who I am as a person and what I wish to be in the future... sometimes it instigates huge changes, like moving city, changing career, having a baby or sometimes it's just the little things that I work on, like saying 'I love you' a bit more often or being more forgiving.
At times like this I can feel very vulnerable, because I've lost my confidence in myself, I look in the mirror and am not proud of what I see, for whatever reason and this is why I make the change, not to please other but so I can look in the mirror and be proud of the person staring back at me... for me, that is probably the most important of all my values because it affects every aspect of my life and is intrinsic to my feeling of self worth.
MAM-self reflection