#2pho632.y

[vanoudgaardenalex]

Feedback from Robert Smith. Robert Smith is a current photographer, teacher and lecturer. His feedback I found to be very helpful as he gave me the idea to narrow in on a specific type of photography and industry. His feedback also allowed me to have an idea on how many images to produce. The industry he believes is best represented by my images was editorial as he believes my photographs of the old man I took stood out the most.

[vanoudgaardenalex]

Portfolio feedback thoughts

The feedback I got on my portfolio I found to be constructive. I was aware there was many different styles of photography but felt as if they nestled under a wider name of documentary. The feedback that I am yet to upload outlined that my best work and the work I should centre my portfolio around would be considered editorial albeit slightly documentary themed. I am pleased with the outcome and views on my portfolio as it will help me to narrow my focus on a particular theme rather than a broad range. 

[mah-sard]

Soga Shokaku Daruma, Tengu (Shinto God)

Keeping on our Daruma theme, here is a standing version by the Kyoto painter Soga Shohaku (1730-1781). While Shohaku sometimes produced paintings of the greatest care and precision, he also worked in a freer style, as in this example.  Bodhidharma’s body is quickly outlined in broad strokes. His face, which turns back to the viewer, brings the painting alive through a few masterfully rendered strokes that produce a typically enigmatic expression.

 The attitude is consistent with a Zen value of freedom from restraint, which is seen in many eighteenth-century works from Kyoto. The painting is about four feet tall, and it was probably painted with a large straw brush.

http://7junipers.com/log/tag/daruma/

http://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/masahisa-fukase/

[mah-sard]

The many unpredictable ways in which Japan has shaped his imagination.

Kojiki is the oldest surviving written work in Japan which influenced by Chinese literature and displays a sophisticated mastery of writing conventions. The mix of dialogue, song, narration and commentary stretches back to the heavenly deities of heaven and corresponding to myth, legend and history. Kojiki ‘borrows conjunctions used in reading Buddhist scripture aloud in Japanese in order to give its sentences their distinctively clipped style’.

With use of sprit, Kojiki sketch out natural processes and their attendant human activities. First Kojiki found a wide audience in early modern period (1600.1867). Kojiki attracted more attention among archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, linguists and folklorists in the post-war word. 

Merleau-Ponty My sensory beliefs are doubtful.

‘In particular, DA (dream argument) tries to establish that all sensory beliefs (and any scientific knowledge inferred from them) are uncertain, and therefore cannot provide a solid basis for genuine knowledge.’ (Marcus Sacrini, Merleau-Ponty’s Responses to Skepticism: A Critical Appraisal) 

Merleau tries to refute the idea that there are no features that permit us to trace a distinction between a dream and a perceptual experience of reality.

The short passage where Merleau-Ponty analyses DA is the following: ‘skeptical doubt is insurmountable because it is not radical; it presupposes extra-mental things as the ideal term of knowledge and it is in relation to this inaccessible reality that dreams and perception take on the character of equivalent appearances’ (SB, p. 195). But insofar as reality is defined as inaccessible to both dreams and perceptions, there is no manner

of distinguishing between them.

[mah-sard]

One can learn through Karasu and its unification of art and life that full humanity needs to surrender to the down side of life as well as the upside. Michel Foucault points out, ‘we have always treated ‘the insane’ as outcasts even when they reflect our own more finely tuned responses to reality’. (Kingsbury, 2002, P, 3) Fukase discovered a liberating freedom and endless energy (hysteria) through the aesthetic of uncontrolled antinationalism.

 He wrote in 1972 that: ‘I have … ordinary (nichijo) and extraordinary (hinichijo), in other words positive (purasu) and negative (mainasu) in myself. I am only interested in these extremes, not the middle areas of my life’ (Charrier, 2016, 42).

Masahisa Fukase, Karasu (The Solitude of Raven), Afterword’s by Akira Hasegawa, Introductory note by David Travis (Fukase’s Face and Photographs), Bedford Arts, San Francisco (1991)

[mah-sard]

Over a long period of 10 years, Fukase continuously took pictures of a mythical and strange woman, called Yohko. She was his lover and his wife.  A series of photographic narration viewed as continuously theatrical plays on life. He began photographing her from their wedding day and published them in magazines and various media. Continuously he photographs his subject, perhaps in photographing her and then looking at photographs of her, he is discovering himself, his inner being (Fig. 14). He published Yohko in 1978, a book that chronicles their 13 years of marriage, 3 years after she left him.

The camera became a tool for Fukase to discover the inner self. Every man needs a philosophy to carry one. The camera mingled his art and his philosophy. The goal was to live in present time and to receive the enlightenment from the transient moments. To become a man of knowledge, he needed to listen to the inner voice. Like a mirror, camera reflected his shadow in all that things that appeared as beings for him. The upside down senses of reality helped him to observe the reality in a different perspective. 

Masahisa Fukase, Yohko, Sonorama Shashin Sensho 8. Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1978

[mah-sard]

Forms, Squares, Isolates spaces

Francis Bacon:

“I have a feeling of mortality all the time,” Francis Bacon once told the art critic, David Sylvester. “Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you.

Between birth and death there is always been this aspect of violence of life.

What is life but sensation. we born and we die and thats it.  

Reality is what exists. fresh and blood. How to remake that?

[mah-sard]

Eikoh Hosoe, kamaitachi

The concept of ‘lived body’ from Eastern perspectives explains about the importance of the body, as how the body we live in is mush closer to what we understand by the world ‘spirit’ than it is to matter or biology. As how Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohono Kazuo with their marvelous dance, Butoh, as a dancer of darkness used their body to represent this circle of nothingness

Tarkovsky wrote:

‘The man who recognizes that the meaning of existence lies above all in the fight against the evil within ourselves, so that in the course of a lifetime he may take at least one step towards spiritual perfection’.

‘

The act of remembering places the self at center stage in the drama of freedom, the choice between good and evil, and allows it to channel its actions towards the enlightenment of life, rather than the desolation and destruction of death.

For Andre Tarkovsky, remembering is a choice of love and mercy, a gamble of faith and hope that liberates the hearth from the pain of events that are now over, dead and finished, towards the openness of new and different way of life that is still connected to the present.

Eikoh Hosoe , Kamaitachi / - 2009 Aperture trade ed.

Instant Light, Andrew Tarkovsky, Tonino Gueraa, / - 1983 Thames & Guerr