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August 30, 2006

successful photojournalists

A good photojournalist is first of all a journalist.

Today's successful cameraman is curious about the world in which he lives. He must know a great deal about many things. He must have the sensitivity of a poet and the tough skin of a Marine Corps sergeant. Successful photojournalists are knowledgeable, tough, sensitive, perceptive, and alive to all that is going on around them.

The photographer has to put his sensibility and heart into his work. Only in this way can he understand and translate into visual images the reality of things. He must give a message full of humanity and truth.

Once on location, the photographer becomes an involved, sensitive observer and an honest reporter of the scene before him.

Clifton Edom - Photojournalism

Posted by amin at 7:17 PM

August 29, 2006

dylan on popular music

There are so many layers on records today. There are so many tracks in studios, and producers think they have to use them. This is no art form. It's just corporate sound. Because there's very little there, you have to dress it up with all these tracks. For me, everything has to have a purpose or it should get lost.

The beat stuff people play, that's as far away from real rhythm as the sun is from the moon. Those beats make people pose, but they don't make people move or change their lives. They're low-key and laid-back, and that's what popular music has come to. Even metal is ponderous.

I'm sure there's a lot of good songs getting recorded today, but I can't hear them. I'm just hearing buzz. There's a superficiality to it which might be successful, but people forget about it real quick and go on to the next one instantly. I don't want to be a performer like that.

Bob Dylan

Posted by amin at 4:44 PM

August 26, 2006

what is a saint?

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers

Posted by amin at 2:27 AM

August 25, 2006

a sunset around earth

That your dying be no blasphemy against man and earth, my friends, that I ask of the honey of your soul. In your dying, your spirit and virtue should still glow like a sunset around the earth; else your dying has turned out badly.

Nietzsche

Posted by amin at 11:58 PM

August 24, 2006

schopenhauer on mysticism

In the widest sense, mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of that which is not reached by either perception or conception, or generally by any knowledge. The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.

Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation

Posted by amin at 4:35 PM

August 11, 2006

what is enlightenment?

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!

Immanuel Kant

Posted by amin at 7:06 AM

August 6, 2006

hegel on love

Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me...The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me.

Hegel - Philosophy of Right

Posted by amin at 8:14 AM

August 3, 2006

beauty beckons

To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism. If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. A piece that has no more surprises left—a piece you really feel you know “inside and out”—has no more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or because you think that it may have something to give to someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you. Beauty beckons.

Alexander Nehamas

Posted by amin at 7:49 AM