WELCOME all new posts are below this welcome message…

Welcome! – all new posts are below this welcome message.  This is my meta-blog, most posts to my specialist blogs start or gather here.

THEMES : STREET PHOTOGRAPHY & Social Justice, Media matters, Personal Development, Learning to Heal, Life-coaching, Holistic Education, Humour, Inter-Spirituality, The Arts & Spirituality, Karen Armstrong & Perennial Philosophy, Human-centred Studies.  Enjoy – & send me a discussion point or question! – Roger.

MY STREET PHOTOGRAPHY is at -http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunwalk999/sets/72157628116828705/

Compassion – an infinity of teaching in a short piece

SOURCE is HERE

Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable – 7 tools to help shut it down.

 

 

 

You may remember that there was a time when apartheid in South Africa seemed unstoppable.

Sure, there were international boycotts of South African businesses, banks, and tourist attractions. There were heroic activists in South Africa, who were going to prison and even dying for freedom. But the conventional wisdom remained that these were principled gestures with little chance of upending the entrenched system of white rule.

“Be patient,” activists were told. “Don’t expect too much against powerful interests with a lot of money invested in the status quo.”

With hindsight, though, apartheid’s fall appears inevitable: the legitimacy of the system had already crumbled. It was harming too many for the benefit of too few. South Africa’s freedom fighters would not be silenced, and the global movement supporting them was likewise tenacious and principled.

In the same way, the legitimacy of rule by giant corporations and Wall Street banks is crumbling. This system of corporate rule also benefits few and harms many, affecting nearly every major issue in public life. Some examples:

 

 

Click on link HERE to read article

Segal Gregg : photographer

Reblogged from KROUTCHEV PLANET PHOTO:

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“My mother tells me she knew I’d become a photographer when, after she got me a camera for my eleventh birthday, I photographed our neighbor’s garbage. I’m lucky I had the sort of mother who saw photographs of garbage as art – or at least as materiel worth of documentation. For several years, I saw it as my duty to document, especially the mundane and overlooked: stepfather taking apart motorcycle, brother practicing his bowling stride, cats mating. At 16, I was majoring in photography at …

Super-man cleaning the loo – ho ho

Split -screen: a love story – a great vid on Vimeo

Drexl Caryn : photographer

Reblogged from KROUTCHEV PLANET PHOTO:

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« First, some basic info: I’m Caryn, newly in my 30′s, living in smallish Palm Coast, Florida. I love my dog. Sometimes I love my cat. I definitely love my girl of 11 years I love my family, though I often don’t like most of them, and I lovelove the color green. The love list also includes old houses, old clothes, new england, lace, tv depressing music, long hair, books, eco friendly stuff, Joss Whedon, fresh baked bread, coke slurpees and chocolate chip cookies. I could go on for a while, but I figure …

A fountain of creativity – quite stunning. I wish the light at least equalled the dark or am I being unfair.

16 Great Examples of Street Photography Without People by the Community — Eric Kim Street Photography

via erickimphotography.com

Click on link to go to Eric Kim’s site

“There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly presented.” – Lisette Model

Maria Friedlander, Southwestern United States, 1969

II. Lee Friedlander (b. 1934)

Lisette Model said, “There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly presented.” Lee Friedlander’s photographs are both clear and mysterious.

via americansuburbx.com

Click on link to read & see much more.

Vivian Maier: A life’s lost work seen for first time BBC interview with John Maloof

via bbc.co.uk

Click on link to read the article

Science and Spirit – Prof Rupert Sheldrake

via youtube.com

Here is a link to his most recent book

The Science Delusion

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Delusion-Rupert-Sheldrake/dp/1444727923/ref=s…

The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake Independent review by Colin Tudge

The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake

 

Colin Tudge

Friday, 6 January 2012

Science is wonderful and necessary – one of the great creations of humankind. Most importantly, it is helping us to see just how extraordinary life and the universe really are, far exceeding the unaided imagination even of the greatest poets. At its best, too, science lives up to its own mythology: a disinterested, self-effacing search after truth, carried out by people of humility in true generosity of spirit. As a fairly considerable bonus it has led us to create a wide range of “high” (science-based) technologies that have improved the lives of a great many people, and have the potential to help all humankind and our fellow creatures too.

But alas, in large measure, science and the idea of it have been seriously corrupted. That some of its high technologies are not in the general good is all too obvious – although it isn’t always obvious which ones are and which ones aren’t. Even more to the point, and in some ways more serious, is that science all too often becomes the enemy of what it should stand for. Although it must have rules and methods – in particular, the ideas of science must be testable – it should be open-minded. It should go where the data lead. That’s what the myth says it does do – but the reality is very different.

via independent.co.uk

Click here to read this review

Zen Art: Water Speaking Water, – YouTube

via youtube.com

Zen Art. Photographed by John Daido Loori Roshi among the rivers and streams of Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, NY, this video reflects on ways of seeing water, attempting to go beyond appearances to capture the direct experience of water in its myriad manifestations.

Words by Zen Master Dogen.

ZEN PHOTOGRAPHY, John Daido Loori Roshi of Zen Mt. Monastery, NY

via youtube.com

Vivian Maier, Photographer Extraordinaire – wonderful presentation of her life as a first-person narrative

via youtube.com

So beautiful – a true homage to an extraordinary woman and the story of her new beginning.

Worthy of BBC Radio 4 at its very best – I would love to hear it broadcast and/or televised in the UK.

One of the world’s great photographers, Carol Guzy – Pulitzer-Prize Winning Photographer for the Washington Post

US troops occupied Haiti to restore order after a military coup. Guzy was covering a pro-democracy march when a grade went off. “The mob was about to tear apart the man they thought had thrown the grenade,” she says. “The soldier had pulled him out and definitely saved his life. I had fallen to the ground and got this shot looking up at the action.”

Full-Screen Slideshow: Guzy’s Pictures From Haiti, Kosovo, and Colombia  

Editor’s note: This slideshow contains some graphic images.

 She had just returned from family leave to her job as a photographer for the Post. Her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Guzy had been by her side in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “I promised her I would help her through the journey,” Guzy says. “If it had been anywhere but Haiti, I could not have considered going. But I had to.”

She packed in 20 minutes, hitched a ride to New York with AP photographer Gerald Herbert and Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan, caught a flight to the Dominican Republic, and made her way to Port-au-Prince. “It was a surreal scene,” she says. “To see places I had been so many times, with people dead under schools, palaces, churches, apartments.”

via washingtonian.com

Click on link to read the article

Great (woman) photographers: Vivian Maier – a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma – what a moving story!

I guess many like me fell instantly in love with the work and story of Vivian Maier – it moved me to tears.  What a story!  

When more is known it would make a great movie – but keep Hollywood away!  I'd settle for the Cohen brothers with Roger Deakins as the cinematographer

Her official website is http://www.vivianmaier.com/

We have to thank John Maloof for creating the bridge between this extraordinary woman and ourselves.  He discovered the lost negatives & edited the book – and someone had the perspicacity to ask the brilliant Geoff Dyer to write the intro.

The blurb for the book reads;

A good street photographer must possess many talents: an eye for detail, light, and composition; impeccable timing; a populist or humanitarian outlook; and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and never miss a moment. It is hard enough to find these qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.

Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City, to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.

It wasn’t until realtor and amateur historian John Maloof stumbled upon a box of anonymous negatives in a Chicago auction house in 2007 that any of her marvelous work saw the light of day. Presented here for the first time in print,Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the first wave of the best of her incredible body of work—much of which still hasn’t been enlarged or in some case even developed into negatives. Hidden treasures like this don’t come along every day, and powerHouse is excited and honored to present this astounding body of never-before-seen work to the public at large.

There is still very little known about the life of Vivian Maier. What is known is that she was born in New York in 1926 and worked as a nanny for a family on Chicago’s North Shore during the 50s and 60s. Seemingly without a family of her own, the children she cared for eventually acted as caregivers for Maier herself in the autumn of her life. She took hundreds of thousands of photographs in her lifetime, but never shared them with anyone. Maier lost possession of her art when her storage locker was sold off for non-payment. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 83.

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NB Her book is available via Amazon 

DON"T MISS THIS  - A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

My intro was via HERE

For more just Google.

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Times Higher Education – ‘I sit in a UK library and feel so sorry for my friends in Iran’

Credit: Reuters

Not welcome: Baha’i students say that their preparation for university entrance exams is done in the knowledge that their applications to Iranian state universities will likely be turned down because of their faith

Once, during Ramadan in the mid-1990s, Erfan Sabeti was on his way to an all-day genetics class at the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education in Tehran.

He had taken to wearing a tie to show he was not a hard-liner, though the Ayatollah Khomeini had just issued a fatwa saying that ties were a symbol of westernisation. As he was about to get into a taxi, he was stopped by revolutionary guards.

via timeshighereducation.co.uk

Click on link to read the article.

UK Photographers Rights v2 – Simon Moran

via sirimo.co.uk

Click on link to read full article

Interview with Ken Rockwell – on his brilliantly down-to-earth photography website

Interview is here;

http://www.kenrockwell.com/radio/index.htm

Website is here;

http://www.kenrockwell.com/

JOYOUS GREETINGS – 106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – 2011

via streetartutopia.com

Oh joy!

Click on link to see the rest

An elegiac video presentation of ROBERT FRANK photographs

via youtube.com