Obsession
314 creative works found
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i love deer.
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painting on plastered board. / all hail the bean / nectar of the gods / obsession / addiction / worship / mmmmm
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painting on plastered board / series of 6
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i collected these for weeks
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Many people find a fascination with youth, beauty and the advancement of old age. As we all know looks fade and with age, there is another source / of beauty despite the wrinkles and apparent signs of aging that we all must face in what has been referred to as “the croning years.” In Western culture, there is so much emphasis on external beauty that women and men feel compelled to find surgical solutions, creams, botox, liposuction and any method possible to slow down the aging process and retain the appearance of youth. For hundreds of years we in the West have been taught to deny ourselves. “Mind over Matter” is a time-honored maxim that has merit in treating illness, but the danger is that true body wisdom or the messages we receive about our bodies must be ignored or denied. Every magazine gives us methods of ridding ourselves of undesirable pounds and the newest trends and fads for reversing the aging process. One woman born in the Netherlands and moved to the United States expressed her pain about her anorexic daughter who did not feel accepted or physically attractive unless she was frightfully thin. Her mom asked, what happened to the idea of “aging gracefully?” She felt that her elderly mother was more beautiful with age and the wrinkles on her aging face showed a wisdom and inner beauty that was absent in youth. Observing her daughter’s fierce compulsion to stop the clock and pursue anything that would mask the aging process was very painful to her mother, an immigrant to the United States who had enjoyed values that helped her deal with aging and the passage of time. She told me that the term “immigrant grief” described her inability to teach her daughter who was in her mid thirties that she was more beautiful now than ever before. Many women and men can not face aging and the general result is that the body and its functions have been relegated to the shadow side of life;regarded as dark and possibly evil. As Jung points out, “The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like;there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of the shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.” We need our animal selves, our bone, muscle, and instinct-laden physicality to survive on this planet. One wonders why we as a culture have become so anti-body, as our very flesh were a disease against which we must wage war. Jung hoped that “we can reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth that the spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body is the outer manifestation of the living spirit.” / For centuries many terrible cures attempted to cleanse the collective psyche or the ancient goddess worship that honored the female body as the matrix in which there were no divisions. There are many books that celebrate the return of the Goddess, to cherish the power of the feminine and to accept all the disowned parts of the psyche that lead us to illness and become pathological enough that we are forced to notice. When disowned aspects of ourselves are repressed, fear is projected onto the body in such forms as siren, enchantress, witch, hag and devouring mother. When we face our greatest fears, we also see the glimmering hope of of a new creative life. / When we accept that as we age our bodies are mortal, we can embrace our terrors and our failures and the hope for the celebrations to come, when what we have incubated emerges from the underworld. Legend and myth tell us again and again that transformation is possible. The maiden becomes the queen. The dragon becomes prince or princess. The fool becomes wise. The naive attitudes of youth change and develop. Slowly we become ourselves, free to be the keepers of memory and wisdom. We learn when to be silent and when to speak, what can be shared and what is secret. We learn to honor our bodies even as they begin to fail. We come to a visceral understanding of the cycles of change and our part in them. Ulrich Schaffer writes in his book of poems, Surprised By Light; “Again and again the miracle takes place / in the amazing transformation / in which the air turns into leaves / and the earth becomes roots, / in which the sun fills the seed to bursting / then lets it break open and sprouts, / New life breaks through / in the transformation of death. We are sustained by the surprise of the miracle, / by the change of the seasons, / and I am a link in this miraculous chain, / In me the unchangeable also changes, / and I know that I would break / the rhythm of creation / if I did not change / I would be dead to life / even as I continued to live. I am not yearning for great miracles, / but for the daily change, / the almost imperceptivle rebirth, / the insignificant miracle of growth, / which is greater than all others. “ It is a sad fact that as we approach old age, the deterioration or our bodies / seem loathsome. In fright, we run off into frantic activity, becoming too busy to think or feel as we sink deeper and deeper into a paralyzing depression. / Only rarely do we have the wisdom to honor our changes and allow their development. Most of us, unguided and untaught, flee in fear from the life that precedes our old age and death. Today in the Western world the human life span is increasing, and as it does, the need grows for a deeper wisdom that can help older persons honor rather than deny the physical and psychological relinquishing that precedes a late blooming. We are explorers of a stage of life that is different than it was for previous generations. The years of coming to age are now a new challenge and like most challenges bring the stresses of relinquishing familiar ways. Going through the changes of this time can be as exciting and as difficult as any outer journey. Those of us now coming to age are pathfinders, hopefully marking a way for others to follow.
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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been posting infrared images taken from a trip I took recently to the Antarctic Penisula. This small body of work was loosely called the ‘Taking me Home” series. In this body of work I have been trying to share how I felt to be there and what it meant to me and how I felt about finding my self there. The Infrared images and the titles of them refer in some way to a completion of a journey but it occures to me that if I don’t post the images from the point of were my fascination/obsession with this magical land of light and ice began then I can’t really expect people to really come to a point of understanding my own connectedness with the place. So I’m going to go back nine years to where it all began. In 1999 I had just completed my first masters degree in photo-media and was feeling pretty chuffed. As a reward my favourite uncle gifted me with a flight over Antarctica. Qantas do these wonderful New Years Eve luxury flights and he invited me to be his guest. Now lets be straight…. he’s not rich and neither am I. But he is a fantastic jazz muso who’s trio had the gig of providing the entertainment onboard and who all got to take a guest as part payment….. He’d done this a few years running and had taken his wife and the following year his daughter and then finally it was my turn… Woopee….. I flew cargo class with the band over Antarctica…. wonderful stuff and it was really a great adventure.. I, however had now idea how this trip was to impact on my future direction. I’ve been working with Infrared film for many years and truly love it so when I knew for sure I was going I gathered up a whole gaggle of cameras to take with me including my special infrared only SLR. This image I have posted is pretty much what I expected from my flight…. its shot around midnight high up in the sky from the window of the plane and shows the striated layers of the atmosphere and the tops of mighty mountain ranges coming up through the heavy cloud cover that was obsuring a clear view of the continent…..because of this heavy cloud the pilots of the plane kept turning and arcing around in the skys to find a good spot for us to view from….but we passengers were having a great time and the bar was open and flowing so we didn’t really think about it…. and remember this is what I imagined I shoot…. nothing more and nothing less. The next image I will post however has haunted and facinated me ever since that time and it is the peculiar and inexplicable nature of this one particular image that has led to my specific and unrelenting quest to find out what ever I can about the nature of light at the Poles…. Antarctica in particular…. it has shaped and determined my journey through life since I shot it all those years ago…I still haven’t worked it out and it still facinates me…. But that’s the next photograph and it will be the beginning of the journey back to the magical mysterious land of ice and light that tempers my very being. That journey will include a number of landscape and the light images also taken with Infrared film that I call the ‘The Neverland Collection” So bear with me this little trip will take a week or so to come to the point but today right now I’m going to start with this reasonably unremarkable image of the continent of Antarctica taken a mile up in sky at midnight on a New Years Eve nine years ago…. it’s the begin of a remarkable journey inward that I have taken and that I feel I would like share with you all…....
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You need to do something before this whole thing consumes you…. /
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For monochrome lovers everywhere…
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This is not at all in character with us but we created this for Mike’s dad as a birthday present. Apparently it’s a great hit at all the senior citizen conventions…
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snapped with a HOLGA.
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DIY How To: Through the Viewfinder Photography
by Jules CampbellThis is a ‘how to’ do the through the viewfinder or ttv technique written for all of you that have expressed interest recently. It is…
This is a ‘how to’ do the through the viewfinder or ttv technique written for all of you that have expressed interest recently. It is by no means a rule book because I think each person would approach it differently but this is how I manage it..and remember with ttv really there ARE NO RULES :) It will require you to use that creative imagination but this is honestly half the fun of it!! I should give you some background info firstly, it is rumored to have first been thought of by Mr E on Flickr back in 2005 but there are is no hard proof of this just speculation on my behalf. TTV is still really huge on flickr with hundreds of groups dedicated to the different styles and subjects of ttv eg nature, black&white, manipulated, ferriswheels, self-portraits, etc etc So firstly ..what you are going to need, the essentials; / 1- a twin reflex camera eg. Kodak Duaflex, Argus75, or any other camera that has a large viewfinder. NB Most can be picked up from flea markets or ebay for as little as $5. Most take 620 film that is no longer made/available so this is why they are so cheap plus they are a dime a dozen as they were mass produced in the 1950s & 60’s. / 2- a digital camera with a pretty good macro so you are able to zoom in nice and close to the viewfinder / 3- a tripod certainly helps but isn’t essential / 4- something to block out excess light from above that shines onto your viewfinder glass, this can be a specially made box, a round piece of cardboard, or anything else that will do the job that you have laying about. / 5- a good sense of humor and a healthy dose of patience!! Here’s some of my twin reflex kids / This is the argoflex 75 and the kodak duaflex / This is an ansco and not my gun shells there ..its goose shooting season here and I have included them for size comparison. I wouldn’t recommend the ansco to start with as its really fiddley!! / This is looking down at the ansco’s viewfinder. / This is zooming in as tight as possible with my macro lens. / This is the image that has been cropped and is now ready for what ever colour adjustments or processing you wish to do. / OK so this isn’t my image of choice here but you get the general idea.. / This is a random piece of cardboard tube that I now use to block out excess light reflecting on the viewfinder glass. / Here is the side view..if you insist on being really anal about it you get some ideas for building the exact fit to your camera from flickr here If you would like a really indepth tutorial I can recommend Russ Morris’s here A few other points I’d like to add….some may wonder why go to all this trouble when you can do all of this with photoshop (fake ttvs) well my answer to that is I really like being able to see what image I want to create in the field and quite frankly it is so much more fun and creative to be actually ‘out there’ doing it! Secondly I don’t think all images or concepts are suited to the ttv style so this will be a matter of trial and error to see what fits for you. Lastly -the ttv style is all about embracing age and the antique-look of an image so think carefully about your post processing. Alot of ttv actually looks wonderful all on its own and I think many would be shocked at how little I actually do to some ttvs. Please use this link if you wish to find out more about the different processes and for free photoshop downloads here / that help achieve the vintage, grungey look. A great one to start with is urban acid :) Here’s a few more … / An urban acid ttv There you go…I think thats it?? Let me know if you need to know more or perhaps I’ve left something out…and don’t forget there is a Through the Viewfinder / group for ‘real’ ttvs when you are all ready to go!! Cheers Everyone!! Jules :)
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This is my favorite image which I captured a year ago on an 8-day backpack into the incredible canyon. It was my first trip there, and I was with non-photographer/hard-core hiker types. So, I had to shoot on-the-go with very little time to think about my shots. This was the only day that we saw any clouds, and it really helped make the photo work. I didn’t realize this at the time, but the lines really draw the viewer in to the art. Lucky me. I leave tomorrow for another week-long backpack into the Grand Canyon!
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Add Ushna Sardar to your watchlist
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A shirt for lovers..
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Hand holding a burning scroll. Photo based illustration.
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This an improved edition of this model: colours of the shoes have been lightened and improved for a better printing result on black t-shirt. For all the shoe maniacs out there…. This shoe was my first attempt at vector art. I isolated the right shoe in my photo Social Climber and went to work to transform it into vector art. Thirty-five layers and 10 hours later (told you it was my first!), this was the result! Black T-shirt sold on February 11, 2009
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Acrylic & ink on paper, 11×14 inches, 2009
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/ thousands die at noon / sometimes the bodies / can not bee seen / consumed by the first sin / slithering in / casting stones at others / is always the first / the rest / lay waiting for the zenith / of sunspots to burn Frivolity and Passion / / Frivolity and Passion / fused even / Dancing queen in pink / frivolious to the end / passion sings in pure wink / a steay flow of romance / lending each other hand in hand, / a way to fly to the story / that ends in a union fit for life / unseen and unheard of / but created none the less / the roots are deeper than you think
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June 2009. Yay, stalker theme! Canon 5D Mark II.
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ticketytock
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that’s what too much coffee does to you…
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...Sophie’s saliva phobia was out of control again / after a relapse of OCD and agrophobia she was a real mess – life can be so unkind - pen drawing on a slip of scrap paper when far too tired doing silly doodles at 2am – strange thoughts creep in like this one … welcome to Little Profiles – a new series Others in the Little Profiles series: /
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