Monday, 30 January 2012
STREET PHOTOGRAPHY: Check out this free 'e-book' on by Chris Weeks
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Abraham Menashe - outstanding 'humanistic' photographer
Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable - 7 tools to help shut it down.
You may remember that there was a time when apartheid in South Africa seemed unstoppable.
Sure, there were international boycotts of South African businesses, banks, and tourist attractions. There were heroic activists in South Africa, who were going to prison and even dying for freedom. But the conventional wisdom remained that these were principled gestures with little chance of upending the entrenched system of white rule.
“Be patient,” activists were told. “Don’t expect too much against powerful interests with a lot of money invested in the status quo.”
With hindsight, though, apartheid’s fall appears inevitable: the legitimacy of the system had already crumbled. It was harming too many for the benefit of too few. South Africa’s freedom fighters would not be silenced, and the global movement supporting them was likewise tenacious and principled.
In the same way, the legitimacy of rule by giant corporations and Wall Street banks is crumbling. This system of corporate rule also benefits few and harms many, affecting nearly every major issue in public life. Some examples:Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Photographers/photography rights - Nick Turpin
Some interesting comments about this - click through to YouTube
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Monday, 16 January 2012
"There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly presented." - Lisette Model
Maria Friedlander, Southwestern United States, 1969
II. Lee Friedlander (b. 1934)
Lisette Model said, “There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly presented.” Lee Friedlander’s photographs are both clear and mysterious.
Click on link to read & see much more.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Vivian Maier: A life's lost work seen for first time BBC interview with John Maloof
Click on link to read the article
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Science and Spirit - Prof Rupert Sheldrake
Here is a link to his most recent book
The Science Delusion
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Delusion-Rupert-Sheldrake/dp/1444727923/ref=s...
The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake Independent review by Colin Tudge
The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake
Colin Tudge
Friday, 6 January 2012Science is wonderful and necessary - one of the great creations of humankind. Most importantly, it is helping us to see just how extraordinary life and the universe really are, far exceeding the unaided imagination even of the greatest poets. At its best, too, science lives up to its own mythology: a disinterested, self-effacing search after truth, carried out by people of humility in true generosity of spirit. As a fairly considerable bonus it has led us to create a wide range of "high" (science-based) technologies that have improved the lives of a great many people, and have the potential to help all humankind and our fellow creatures too.
But alas, in large measure, science and the idea of it have been seriously corrupted. That some of its high technologies are not in the general good is all too obvious – although it isn't always obvious which ones are and which ones aren't. Even more to the point, and in some ways more serious, is that science all too often becomes the enemy of what it should stand for. Although it must have rules and methods – in particular, the ideas of science must be testable – it should be open-minded. It should go where the data lead. That's what the myth says it does do – but the reality is very different.
Click here to read this review
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Zen Art: Water Speaking Water, - YouTube
Zen Art. Photographed by John Daido Loori Roshi among the rivers and streams of Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, NY, this video reflects on ways of seeing water, attempting to go beyond appearances to capture the direct experience of water in its myriad manifestations.
Words by Zen Master Dogen.
Monday, 9 January 2012
Vivian Maier, Photographer Extraordinaire - wonderful presentation of her life as a first-person narrative
So beautiful - a true homage to an extraordinary woman and the story of her new beginning.
Worthy of BBC Radio 4 at its very best - I would love to hear it broadcast and/or televised in the UK.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
One of the world's great photographers, Carol Guzy - Pulitzer-Prize Winning Photographer for the Washington Post
US troops occupied Haiti to restore order after a military coup. Guzy was covering a pro-democracy march when a grade went off. "The mob was about to tear apart the man they thought had thrown the grenade," she says. "The soldier had pulled him out and definitely saved his life. I had fallen to the ground and got this shot looking up at the action."
Full-Screen Slideshow: Guzy's Pictures From Haiti, Kosovo, and Colombia
Editor's note: This slideshow contains some graphic images.
She had just returned from family leave to her job as a photographer for the Post. Her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Guzy had been by her side in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “I promised her I would help her through the journey,” Guzy says. “If it had been anywhere but Haiti, I could not have considered going. But I had to.”
She packed in 20 minutes, hitched a ride to New York with AP photographer Gerald Herbert and Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan, caught a flight to the Dominican Republic, and made her way to Port-au-Prince. “It was a surreal scene,” she says. “To see places I had been so many times, with people dead under schools, palaces, churches, apartments.”
Click on link to read the article