This is the hill side Catholic cemetery in the samll town of Wawelnice, in eastern Poland. These grave lamps appear in bulk at most major religious festivals, particulalry Christmas, Easter and All Saints/Souls. They get bigger every year, especially with the increasing use of plastic in the lamp construction.
To see a hill side cemetery lit up at night is remarkable, and there are many such cemeteries here as hills are otherwise unusable for agricultural purposes.
Monday, January 5, 2009
020-Citroen C1 Winter Sun
Went for a long drive today to the northern part of the Lubelskie region of Poland and, although it was very cold, there was sun for most of the day. Saving a copy of the picture and editing that means it doesn't matter if the experiment goes wrong.
I try to take pictures of the car as I see it in my mind's eye, rather than it actually appears in a carpark. Taking a photo of part of the car instead of the whole car can help, as can taking a picture while kneeling. Playing around with the basic editing functions of a photo editing program can help - such as trimming the picture down and removing unwanted background detail. The sky here, for example, is from a different picture I took on the same day.
Note the scrape on the wheel arch - we have dents down both sides due to other idiots bumping into it while we were away.
I try to take pictures of the car as I see it in my mind's eye, rather than it actually appears in a carpark. Taking a photo of part of the car instead of the whole car can help, as can taking a picture while kneeling. Playing around with the basic editing functions of a photo editing program can help - such as trimming the picture down and removing unwanted background detail. The sky here, for example, is from a different picture I took on the same day.
Note the scrape on the wheel arch - we have dents down both sides due to other idiots bumping into it while we were away.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Hot off the line
You know the feeling - the lights turn green and the middle-aged, middle-class business type whose total contribution to achieving rapid take offs is his or her investment in an expensive driving machine. They have, as it were, bought a heavier right foot than you. If it were some lad in a cooking and aging near-future scrap yard material it is not so bad, it's what you expect - young and desperately pushing.
Why then, is my 1 liter Citroen C1 in standard trim almost always the first across the junction?
If you find yourself at the front of the queue at the lights, do not stop on the line but instead something like a meter before. Road regulations usually state something like you are not supposed to cross that line except when the lights are green - so you need to be rolling forward on amber in order to cross on green, hence you must first have stopped before the line.
When the light has been red for a while it is time to slip the car into first, lift the clutch slightly, hold the car stationery on the handbrake / parking brake with that little button pushed in, and your right foot resting on the gas - not on the brake. When the light turns amber / orange, start moving forward, the exact timing will depend on how long your set of lights spends on amber before turning green.
You will be surprised ho much advantage being moving makes, and you do not have to burn rubber to achieve it.
Why then, is my 1 liter Citroen C1 in standard trim almost always the first across the junction?
If you find yourself at the front of the queue at the lights, do not stop on the line but instead something like a meter before. Road regulations usually state something like you are not supposed to cross that line except when the lights are green - so you need to be rolling forward on amber in order to cross on green, hence you must first have stopped before the line.
When the light has been red for a while it is time to slip the car into first, lift the clutch slightly, hold the car stationery on the handbrake / parking brake with that little button pushed in, and your right foot resting on the gas - not on the brake. When the light turns amber / orange, start moving forward, the exact timing will depend on how long your set of lights spends on amber before turning green.
You will be surprised ho much advantage being moving makes, and you do not have to burn rubber to achieve it.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Culture Model
Since my Art-Craft Model image was getting a little crowded, I decided to produce a different version to help explain what people mean by 'culture'. This ios my first version, and I am sure that I will be adjusting it and trying to make it more user friendly.
You can find many attempts in books, on courses or even on the internet where someone attempts to define what art is. They fail for many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that they fail to understand that a great chunk of culture is missing from the standard definitions. A good sign as to what is valued and what is ignored in society, and I do not mean what is good or bad, is how much language there is devoted to it. Cooking is chock full of language that is freely borrowed from other languages to express ingredients and methods. Here, though, that large white area exists without a vocabulary, and without a vocabulary something does not, or almost does not exist to most people.
A good and common example of this can be found here in Poland, where I live. I am English, but I am not described as a Polish-Englishman - yet if I were Polish and went and lived in the USA I could be a Polish-American. Culturally, I do not exist. My case might not seem important to you if you are not having to live a life of being a permanent outsider. Worse still is the case of Jewish people - neither English nor Polish have a term for Poles who are Roman Catholics, and therefore history texts talk about 'Poles' and 'Jews', as if 'Jews' were not Poles.
There are many unmapped areas of culture, and each removes the rights to be from those who exist in those areas in favour of those who lived in well-marked areas.
My Art, that little note below the question mark, sits in the unmarked zone - you cannot ignore it because it has Art, and yet it would be difficult to sell it because the lack of Craft is so obvious. If, instead of photographs, you saw my actual Art as thoughts about how humans interact with human systems, and realized that the photographs - and graphs like this - were nothing more than attempts to communicate to you from a land with little vocabulary, then is the lack of Craft in the photographs so important? The high Craft elements of my Art are largely invisible and yet in my working life continual to generate irregular extra income. How? Well, once I transform my Art into a visible concept - some diagrams for example, they change the way managers think about their industry, their departments or whatever.
Their are many ways that I use to communicate my Art, and I do not have time to become high Craft in each method - there are too many, and I rather need the time to perfect my Art.
If any of my images or my texts alters your perception of the world, then my Art has touched you - even though it might be through an imperfectly utilised channel of communication.
You can find many attempts in books, on courses or even on the internet where someone attempts to define what art is. They fail for many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that they fail to understand that a great chunk of culture is missing from the standard definitions. A good sign as to what is valued and what is ignored in society, and I do not mean what is good or bad, is how much language there is devoted to it. Cooking is chock full of language that is freely borrowed from other languages to express ingredients and methods. Here, though, that large white area exists without a vocabulary, and without a vocabulary something does not, or almost does not exist to most people.
A good and common example of this can be found here in Poland, where I live. I am English, but I am not described as a Polish-Englishman - yet if I were Polish and went and lived in the USA I could be a Polish-American. Culturally, I do not exist. My case might not seem important to you if you are not having to live a life of being a permanent outsider. Worse still is the case of Jewish people - neither English nor Polish have a term for Poles who are Roman Catholics, and therefore history texts talk about 'Poles' and 'Jews', as if 'Jews' were not Poles.
There are many unmapped areas of culture, and each removes the rights to be from those who exist in those areas in favour of those who lived in well-marked areas.
My Art, that little note below the question mark, sits in the unmarked zone - you cannot ignore it because it has Art, and yet it would be difficult to sell it because the lack of Craft is so obvious. If, instead of photographs, you saw my actual Art as thoughts about how humans interact with human systems, and realized that the photographs - and graphs like this - were nothing more than attempts to communicate to you from a land with little vocabulary, then is the lack of Craft in the photographs so important? The high Craft elements of my Art are largely invisible and yet in my working life continual to generate irregular extra income. How? Well, once I transform my Art into a visible concept - some diagrams for example, they change the way managers think about their industry, their departments or whatever.
Their are many ways that I use to communicate my Art, and I do not have time to become high Craft in each method - there are too many, and I rather need the time to perfect my Art.
If any of my images or my texts alters your perception of the world, then my Art has touched you - even though it might be through an imperfectly utilised channel of communication.
Art_Craft Model and Tradition
I have now added a few elements, some just to try and make it more clear the difficulty of achieving Art, and one to show another cause for the easy drift away from the search for Art.
Tradition can set in at any time - you might decide that some ancient religious value should prevent you from some area of Art, or that photographs cannot be arty if they are not black and white and taken with a German Leica camera from the 1930s. Perhaps, even, that you must use Photoshop.
If you fail to recognise Tradition, it will push you away from Art into the acquisition of Craft, or event push you out of the arena entirely.
It is worth remembering that if you allow yourself to be blown by Tradition, your works will contain less and less of you and more and more of the people who have gone before you. You may find that society, or some part of society may prefer you to do this, because there is a strong element in society that wants to prevent the discomfort and envy comes when other people achieve things that are new. You may even recognise this feeling within yourself.
You have to decide for yourself how much of yourself are you prepared to sacrifice in order to ensure the comfort of the more restrictive elements of society.
Tradition can set in at any time - you might decide that some ancient religious value should prevent you from some area of Art, or that photographs cannot be arty if they are not black and white and taken with a German Leica camera from the 1930s. Perhaps, even, that you must use Photoshop.
If you fail to recognise Tradition, it will push you away from Art into the acquisition of Craft, or event push you out of the arena entirely.
It is worth remembering that if you allow yourself to be blown by Tradition, your works will contain less and less of you and more and more of the people who have gone before you. You may find that society, or some part of society may prefer you to do this, because there is a strong element in society that wants to prevent the discomfort and envy comes when other people achieve things that are new. You may even recognise this feeling within yourself.
You have to decide for yourself how much of yourself are you prepared to sacrifice in order to ensure the comfort of the more restrictive elements of society.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
What you see you think
What we see and what we think we see are not always the same thing, although a lot of the time it really does not matter. You might see what you think is a broken table in someone's garden, but what it might really be is a temporary slide for the owner's children. You might argue that it is still a table - but how many table's do you know with two legs that sit in the garden and children slide down it? It could be made into a table again, but the inability to see it as an object with many potential uses is your own block on your own perceptions - how can you ever create something new if everything you see is already categorized?
The table-slide issue seems irrelevant, and yet we use exactly the same process in people - or at least we allow politicians and journalists to use the same process on us, blinding us to any alternative view. You do not believe me - go read some forums on different subjects and see how other people perceive humans by categorising them as Black, Jews, White, islamic, Buddhists, and how they speak about them. As a White Roman Catholic Man in Poland i should be equal to the average Pole, one might think, but I am not because most people only see me as Foreign, and I am treated as such whatever the legal position might be. Imagine then if I were not White Roman Catholic Man, but Black Jewish Woman?
If you see people by category first instead of Human first, then you are part of the problem, unwittingly you are removing these people of some of their most basic of Human rights, their right to their own identity.
When you see people as Humans, such concepts as 'mixed marriages' no longer have any meaning as what can you mix in the Human race Is the intention to deliberately breed humans so that they are no more than cats, dogs or farm animals, each variation proud to be that variation?
If you feel a need to be proud, be proud of the good achievements of individual Humans, just don't classify these Humans by the nations they happen to belong to. You do not have to love everyone around you, just make sure it is you who makes the decision on what Humans you love or hate, don't hate a Nation just because they have members who believe in hateful actions, for they do not all believe in such things, just as you do not believe in all the hateful things members of your own society engage in.
The table-slide issue seems irrelevant, and yet we use exactly the same process in people - or at least we allow politicians and journalists to use the same process on us, blinding us to any alternative view. You do not believe me - go read some forums on different subjects and see how other people perceive humans by categorising them as Black, Jews, White, islamic, Buddhists, and how they speak about them. As a White Roman Catholic Man in Poland i should be equal to the average Pole, one might think, but I am not because most people only see me as Foreign, and I am treated as such whatever the legal position might be. Imagine then if I were not White Roman Catholic Man, but Black Jewish Woman?
If you see people by category first instead of Human first, then you are part of the problem, unwittingly you are removing these people of some of their most basic of Human rights, their right to their own identity.
When you see people as Humans, such concepts as 'mixed marriages' no longer have any meaning as what can you mix in the Human race Is the intention to deliberately breed humans so that they are no more than cats, dogs or farm animals, each variation proud to be that variation?
If you feel a need to be proud, be proud of the good achievements of individual Humans, just don't classify these Humans by the nations they happen to belong to. You do not have to love everyone around you, just make sure it is you who makes the decision on what Humans you love or hate, don't hate a Nation just because they have members who believe in hateful actions, for they do not all believe in such things, just as you do not believe in all the hateful things members of your own society engage in.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Tradition for who?
This picture was an experiment, hence the odd looking angles of the 'children', although i am not concerned because it meets my 'pure Art without Craft' specification - in that I could have spent the time improving my craft to get the camera angles 'right', but in doing so would have lost the Art, which is in the message and how i produce that message.
Being born English and living in Poland means that I am surrounded by people, possibly people like you, who are continually trying to strip away elements of me and replace them with 'Polish' elements. I am under pressure, even from the nicest of people to conform, simply because that increases their comfort. What is the problem in accepting people as they are instead of trying to forever ram them into shapes that they do not fit? It is nearly Christmas, and we will have a small pre-Christmas party at the office, where people expect me to either bring some Polish or British Christmas food, the latter for the 'ooh' factor and because many obviously believe that living the British tradition is what I most desire. Why can I not bring something from a third culture or, may i be burnt at the stake for contemplating it, something that is not of the standardised version of any culture's Christmas tradition? Well, I will be bring white bread, a toaster and some marmalade - that is what i want and, since few people here have ever had such a combination, I want to share it with them - and sharing is supposed to be a core element of the Polish Christmas tradition.
The sad fact is that few people even bother to think about the meaning of tradition, and by such a lack hurt people from outside their vision without even understanding they are doing so. What partly makes me me is the ability and care I have in thinking about things, so in the case of the Christmas party if they want to bring what they consider to be traditional then fine, I will be happy for them, but why can they not be happy with me?
The answer is that they have too tightly moulded their tradition - it no longer serves its purpose but instead is a mere passage to oppress more people in the future - and my ego is not so large as to insist that future people have to live by my custom. So what if they do forget all we do now, will there lives be any less for it, or will they indeed have enough people of talent to create new traditions?
Being born English and living in Poland means that I am surrounded by people, possibly people like you, who are continually trying to strip away elements of me and replace them with 'Polish' elements. I am under pressure, even from the nicest of people to conform, simply because that increases their comfort. What is the problem in accepting people as they are instead of trying to forever ram them into shapes that they do not fit? It is nearly Christmas, and we will have a small pre-Christmas party at the office, where people expect me to either bring some Polish or British Christmas food, the latter for the 'ooh' factor and because many obviously believe that living the British tradition is what I most desire. Why can I not bring something from a third culture or, may i be burnt at the stake for contemplating it, something that is not of the standardised version of any culture's Christmas tradition? Well, I will be bring white bread, a toaster and some marmalade - that is what i want and, since few people here have ever had such a combination, I want to share it with them - and sharing is supposed to be a core element of the Polish Christmas tradition.
The sad fact is that few people even bother to think about the meaning of tradition, and by such a lack hurt people from outside their vision without even understanding they are doing so. What partly makes me me is the ability and care I have in thinking about things, so in the case of the Christmas party if they want to bring what they consider to be traditional then fine, I will be happy for them, but why can they not be happy with me?
The answer is that they have too tightly moulded their tradition - it no longer serves its purpose but instead is a mere passage to oppress more people in the future - and my ego is not so large as to insist that future people have to live by my custom. So what if they do forget all we do now, will there lives be any less for it, or will they indeed have enough people of talent to create new traditions?
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