This is worth watching.

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words of others | on photography

via words of others.

~Susan Sontag ~

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

~ Roger Scruton~

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

~ Terence Donovan ~

The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.

~ Elizabeth Metcalf ~

The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photograph of herself.

~ Elliott Erwitt ~

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

~ Ruth Orkin ~

Being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at.

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson ~

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

see more… words of others.

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No mention of the common cold| Halliday on Hegel and Antemath

reblogged from David Halliday’s Work “No Mention of the Common Cold”

The preface is a quote from Hegel, a very important German philosopher. Who I based my master’s thesis on. He is a very difficult man to read. In English. I can’t imagine he is any easier in German.

Here is the preface:

“Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what falls within its experience; for what is found in experience is merely spiritual substance, and, moreover, object of its self.

Mind, however, becomes object, for it consists in the process of becoming an other to itself, ie. An object for its own self, and intranscending this otherness.

And experience is called this very process by which the element that is immediate, unexperienced, ie. Abstract – whether it be in the form of sense or of a bare thought – externalizes itself, and then comes back to itself from the state of estrangement, and by doing so is at length set forth in its concrete nature and real truth, and becomes too a possession of consciousness.”

G. W. F. Hegel

Preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind.

Fun reading, eh? I struggled through Hegel for 8 months. Learned some things. About human nature. Like pretentiousness. Which I was tainted with. I think I’m still a bit of a snob. (I like Starbuck’s coffee.)

The first poem is called Antemath. Its supposed to be some overriding opus on the condition of man. How his journey into consciousness was a mixture of madness and accident. No mention of the common cold.

continue reading…David Halliday’s Work “No Mention of the Common Cold”

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Why You Don’t Have to be Perfect

Words of wisdom from 90 year old Ilana Royce Smithkin, interviewed by Ari Seth Cohen…

http://youtu.be/R5B6P4vxrA0

And there are more bits and bites on Ari’s blog Advanced Style –
Ilona Smithkin: Wisdom From a 90 year old Lady.

Enjoy!

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Leaves and Flowers

Leaves and Flowers

Leaves and flowers are never rated the same:
Flowers put into pots of gold; leaves turn to dust.
Still there are the green foliage and the red blooms.
Folded, stretched out, open or closed: all naturally beautiful.
These flowers, these leaves, long mirror each other’s glory:
When their greens pale, their reds fade —
it’s more than one can bear.

–Li Shang-yin, Chinese poet.

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