Category: Life

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Nature Vs Nuture

This image [colour version – follow link below ] has provoked quite an extraordinary response on my Flickr stream these past few days. The responses have ranged from the flippant to the thoughtful, from the concise to the lengthy reflection, in public and an unusually bulky private message Inbox.

As someone wrote publicly: “Street documentary is a controversial subject. I agree with whomever it was that wrote that it is here to provoke an emotion. Which emotion that is is individual but the job of the photographer is to present the image so that it is felt by the viewer.”

And another message privately: “…[I like photos that] provoke discussion …it’s a chance for people to hear themselves think.”

(Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will_gortoa/6788154931/in/photostream)
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An Extraordinary Story

I was listening to the radio on Friday morning, and heard one of those stories that simply stops you in your tracks:

Thirty years after the Second World War had ended, a man was travelling with his wife on a train. They went to the buffet car to get something to drink. The woman serving them kept looking at the man and eventually said “I know your face. I’m sure. It’s you!”

Thirty years earlier, that man had been one of the first allied soldiers into the concentration camp at Belsen; the scene that greeted their arrival has long since been tragically and horrifically well documented. The soldier found a young girl, a bag of bones and barely alive. He picked her up, sat her down and gave her his last rations of chocolate. She smiled.

Thirty years later, she was serving that same unnamed face tea on a train rushing through the European countryside.

The story was relayed by the man’s son. I can only imagine the emotion of that extraordinary moment.

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Reflecting : Evolution

iPhone… iPad… iPod… iAm a materialistic gadget monkey… Is this you? Next time I go out and have a coffee, I’m going to take an abacus with me and proudly plonk it down on the table next to my cappuccino and stare at it with an air of earnest intellect and detached cool.

For some time now I’ve imagined our evolutionary future… A brain housed inside a body which has morphed into a huge chair, with one long digit to operate the remotes and screens; taking in liquidised junk food and coffee intravenously. It would seem this creature is evidence of that evolutionary leap – albeit its currently still taking the coffee and junk food in the conventional way.

(Source: http://bighugelabs.com/onblack.php?id=6122721711&size=large)
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Which Way Is Up?

I went to an artistic photographic lecture recently, where the guy actually said at one point [amongst other noteworthy pretentious intellectual, er, waffle] “I wanted my photography to explore the, uh, Arcadian periclinal realm…” For a briefly disconcerting moment there, I thought the poor man was having a seizure!

“Look, I’m not an intellectual – I just take pictures.” Helmut Newton [Thanks, Carlein. : )]

(Source: http://bighugelabs.com/onblack.php?id=2830154701&size=large)