I saw them walk in and quietly let out a sigh, as I knew my day would now be filled with conflicting ideas of some sort from these two.

Sure enough, their food and drink orders arrived and we were in the midst of a very loud and controversial discussion….reincarnation.

Now as you may know….I think I’ve mentioned it here a couple times…I hate talking about religion or anything to do with it. It’s a notorious subject and never gets you anywhere when talking about it. You get people who are very much in love with it, and people who are not, with a smattering of people undecided.

Religion is something that you deal with in your own 4 walls…what you do in your own house is your business….as long as you do not start going around preaching it about.

In my experience, talking about religion gets tiring…I’d rather walk away, believe me. But where friend are concerned, it’s not nice to do that…walk away I mean. That would be very rude.

So I sat there, listening to the chatter, until after about an hour-half I couldn’t take any more.

I managed to get them to let me speak. And what I told them ended the discussion and left them pondering.

What I told them was a story a Christian guy once told me….”reincarnation, reincarnation…blah, blah, blah…yes, we all know about it…we’ve all heard about it. Nobody knows for sure if it exists. It’s purely a belief. I say it could be due to the fact that we do not finish everything we want to do in our lives. If we were able to do that, maybe those that think we are reborn again and again, wouldn’t be born more than once. We should all try to do everything we always wanted to do, within reason. Then when our time comes to die, we won’t have any niggling regrets about not having done this or that, for it’s my belief that the reason we may all continue in some kind of cycle of birth and rebirths, is purely because we fail to do everything we wanted….so Nature in its infinite wisdom, may give us as many chances as we like, to do just that. That in my mind is reincarnation…with all the fancy religious stuff taken out!”

And with that, I took my leave….

“All he needs is a dirty raincoat to complete his outfit…”

“..I have never, in my whole life, seen anything so disgusting, so demeaning to women, than his pictures!”

“Photographer?! Are you crazy? He’s a hyped-up porno-pusher masquerading under the guise of an artist…”

These, and many more unprintable responses are what I have heard whenever I mention this man, who some say, is the foremost genius of our times.

This man is Nobuyoshi Araki, the Japanese photographer.

Whatever we call him, his prolific output of photos and books is unmatched, perhaps anywhere in the world. He has released 450 books to date, and many a time will churn out more than 20 a year.

But it is his subjects that arouse the most vehement criticism around the world, subjects that range from shots of his wife in a state of sexual climax, to his portraits of women tied up in varying positions, often naked and explicit, to his pictures of simple, everyday objects made to look sexual…..he is the only person I know who can take a shot of a crack in a sidewalk and make it look like a part of female genitalia.

His work has always been the subject of intense criticism and censorship, but that has not deterred him. It is as if, like a naughty schoolboy, he relishes this notoriety that has been thrust upon him.

That said, sexual depiction of bondage has always been a part of Japanese culture, ever since the Edo period of the mid 1800s, so it’s not as if it is something totally new there.

His followers say that there is something hidden, perhaps an unseen mesmerism in his photos. That could be a valid point.

My view? I’m out with the jury on this one! There’s no doubt that Nobuyoshi is an artist, with an unorthodox eye for sure. And he is one hell of a character with an equally voluminous personality. But for me, and this is my view entirely and in no way reflects on his status…..for me, some of his shots take his fetishistic ideas a bit too far…..everyday we in the West hear of kidnappings, murders, attempted murders, rapes, and a whole load of other serious crimes committed against women….heaven help us, the least we want more of is material that shows those crimes to be somehow acceptable……so, with a deep intake of breath, I would say that only some of his work is artistic….the rest is very, very dangerously close to depicting serious deprivation and subjugation of women.

I stand to be corrected if I am wrong in my assumptions.

I would point out that these shots of Nobuyoshi here are just an acceptable selection of his better work…..I have omitted to show numerous pictures of women in explicit positions in order not to offend.

all photos courtesy http://www.flickr.com unless otherwise stated

Reblogged from dyermccalla's Blog:

Reblogged from untilmake photography:

June 8, 2013
Nearby Pitt River, Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada
Yashica MAT 124, Kodak Tri-X, Epson V750M

Read more… 5 more words

One of Miroslav’s many cameras

When you first look at this, you may think it’s just a toy fashioned by a child in a kindergarten school class.

But this, and many other such contraptions, have been built by a man whose name I certainly had never heard before, Miroslav Tichy (pronounced “tikki”).

Born in 1926 in Czechoslovakia, where his father worked as a tailor and other as a secretary. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and then returned home, taking up painting and drawing as his main subjects of interest.

Very early on in his adult life, Miroslav decided that the strict rules and regulations that controlled everything and everyone in his country were not for him, and he sought the company of other similar-minded people, all of whom happened to be involved in the art movements, namely Brno Five, a group of painters who broke away from the State-sanctioned regimen, which decreed that all artists were forbidden from drawing or painting nude models, instead replacing female models with men in working overalls! Miroslav and his friends were not having any of that nonsense, so they decided to carry on working on their own terms, in their own, time-honoured ways, which of course drew attention to them from the people running the country.

Because of this, and possibly because of his flouting of public and social etiquette, he was closely monitored by the State as a non-conformist dissident. Soon after, the powers of his country ruled that all dissidents be institutionalised, and it us thus that he was placed in a prison, in his case, a mental prison, as the authorities thought he was a madman.

He was to be thrown into such institutions more than once in his long life.

Miroslav’s workshop equipment

Miroslav’s last days in his cramped 1 bedroom apartment

On those occasions when he was out of prisons, he continued to paint, only stopping to take up his other interest, photography, in the 1960s. Working for an old wooden shed in his garden, he constructed unique, handmade cameras, sometimes cannibalising old junk cameras, but mainly making his own designs up from scratch, using cardboard, wood and lenses that he actually laboriously ground himself in his garden shed!

Not caring about his physical appearance, he walked the streets wearing tattered clothing and long, uncut hair and beard, his crude camera in hand and a strict limit he set himself of no more than 3 rolls of film a day, searching out shots to capture.

Initially he had concentrated on shooting street scenes or landscapes, but for some reason only known to him, he changed abruptly from those subjects to women. If you look at the majority of his photos, you’ll see that all of them depict ladies and ladies’ bodies, in other words, their legs, faces, backsides etc, which today would make him a stalker or worse, earn him a place in any number of police station cells.

But if we instead look closely at his work, you can see a semblance of intuition and drama, where he is trying to tell a story, albeit a story about each woman whom he shoots…..some shots show women talking subversely, some gossiping, and generally sharing private moments of friendship amongst each other. Some ladies struck elegant, deliberate poses for him if they saw him taking their shots, thinking that the cameras he carried were nothing but toys, but little did they know! In my mind, this doesn’t make him a weirdo, but I say that looking at his work, not searching his mind…..some say he was mentally disturbed.

Whatever, it seems that he was well-known in his city, and most likely the locals grew accustomed to his presence and his unorthodox ways, such as appearing at the town swimming baths to take his photos (he wasn’t allowed to go into the swimming baths, so he took his shots from the outside looking in, his lens poked through the wire fence, which you can see in some of his photos, adding a taste of forbidden fruit to his works). The truth is most likely that people regarded him as an eccentric, carrying cameras that obviously didn’t work, being made of materials you can find in any home….old cardboard shoe boxes, cardboard toilet paper rolls, lenses he made himself out of plexiglass and ground with toothpaste and cigarette ash.

His photographs are also totally unique. It is said that he always encouraged people to throw his prints onto the ground and walk upon them. Some of his prints show damaged surface layers, blobs, dried chemical markings…some are dog-eared, torn, scratched, some have their outlines drawn over with pen or pencil. It is things like this that have led some observers to say he had a mental problem. I don’t call it that….just look at the world’s genuises…all of them without doubt had their eccentric mannerisms, so is Miroslav any different?

Miroslav’s work is the main focus ever since he was “discovered” a few years ago. Obviously his subjects are all female, but again, if looked at closely, there is movement, contrast and composition at work in them. Professional photographers sometimes poo-poo his work, saying it’s all out of focus, vignetted, badly composed, bugged by dust inside the camera, poor developing technique and hundreds of other excuses. But in answer to detractors, Miroslav was known to have said “A mistake? That’s what makes the poetry!”

But what about his equipment? If anybody looked at his garden shed-cum-workshop nowadays, you wouldn’t think that cameras and photographic processing was going on there. The workplace was strewn with odds and ends….empty bottles, tins, cardboard, wood, wire, odd sheets of metal.

An example of a typical camera he would make would be a small wooden box, with road asphalt used as sealant to block light entering, a small thin piece of plywood as a shutter, operated by a pulley system using empty cotton reels and dress-maker’s elastic. For a lens, he would sometimes use old spectacle lenses, or as mentioned earlier, cut them out of Plexiglas and grind them himself.

To take some of his shots unnoticed, he used rudimentary but functional telephoto lenses, made them out of cardboard or plastic pipes. And his enlarger with which he produced his prints, was just a few pieces of sheet metal 2 pieces of wooden slats from a fence, a light bulb and a tin can.

Developing and printing was all done very carelessly it seems. He only ever made one print from each negative, and if he liked it, he would paste it onto cardboard, sometimes outlining the subjects with a pen or pencil or adding artistic designs around the photo.

Lacking any room to store his shots, he would stack them together into piles, tie them up, and throw them in odd corners of the space he had, open to rats, mice, insects and his own shoe prints.

So he thus roamed his hometown of Kyjov, taking shots that can only seriously be taken by a person who has an artistic eye.

And it is rather ironic, that a “foundation” sprouted up suddenly when people in high places started admiring the work, a foundation purporting to help arts and support Miroslav and his works. This claim has been emphatically denied by Jana Hebnarova, who grew up with Miroslav as their neighbour. Miroslav’s work was apparently taken from him under the guise of “protecting and preserving” it, by a Dr Roman Buxbaum, another local neighbour……Miroslav was known to be fond of a drink or two, and a few judicious drinks at the right time sealed Miroslav’s signatures on hurriedly-drafted documents allowing Buxbaum to be the only person permitted to hold the work.

Today, in our days of pin-sharp digitallly-perfected images, his work has brought a suddenly refreshing breath of fresh air to the scene, and his shots are now found in many prized collections all over the globe.

Miroslav died in 2011, without receiving a single penny for his work which by then had been shown in the USA and other parts of the world.

Miroslav Tichý – October 2009

“”First of all, you have to have a bad camera..then, if you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

Marislov Tichy (1926-2011)….a forgotten genius of our times!

:O

all photos courtesy flickr.com, unless otherwise stated

to remind me about this week’s favourite blogger nomination!

Ok, without any more faffing around, here’s this week’s Favourite Blogger….it is……www.lesleycarter.wordpress.com…..yaay!

Drop in to that blog if you can….I think you’ll like it!

Reblogged from A L A N A L A:

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To continue with my previous post 'My Home'. Here's another follow-up.
Most of the citizen of Hong Kong are living in a crammed apartment with family. I'm one great example. There's no patio, backyard, basement, and even not a proper bedroom for myself. As populated as anyone could imagine here, each apartment building has gone as high as 40-50 story these days.

Read more… 320 more words

Reblogged from toemail:

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Hi Toemailers!

I always smile when I see new “toe” photos on your website.

Sights from all around the world….with that signature barefoot or toe.
Such an interesting and unique idea!

Well……

I was so excited when I arrived in Kauai.
A few days later, while I was walking on the beach, I laughed and took a photo of my sandy feet (thinking of you).

Read more… 153 more words