1) I run courses & give talks at conferences and in universities and colleges in the UK, China, USA, Canada, Scandinavia etc. -
2) I provide materials, outlines and lessons for Schools.
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3) My range of interests include personal development, learning and teaching, photography and film, the arts generally, spirituality and educational practice and theory.
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4) At the same time I continue developing the human-centred studies SunWALK PDS (People Development System) - a whole-person, high-achievement model for individuals, and for use in, NGOs, schools and other organizations.
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5) The key question that continues to animate me and my work remains, "What is it to be fully and positively human?"
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Contact me via onesummit AT gmail DOTcom (replace At with@).
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All good wishes
Roger (Dr Roger Prentice)
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For those interested;
My first degree is in English and Education.
My masters is in Adult & Community Education.
My doctorate presented a new meta-model of education called SunWALK.
This is from an article written in 1923 by Dziga Vertov, the revolutionary Soviet film director pictured in Figure 2.1:
I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.
Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.
Quoted in John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972, ISBN 978-0140135152
Photo Copyright: ‘My Neighbour’s House’ by Roger Prentice
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Breath-mantra:
in-breath: love in Out-breath:love outQ. Love – how and in what ways is it the foundation of all we are? A. God is love. and therefor love is God reflected in varying ways, depths and forms in us, our relationships and in our world.
…Love is the secret of God’s holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful, the fountain of spiritual outpourings.
Love is heaven’s kindly light, the Holy Spirit’s eternal breath that vivifieth the human soul.
Love is the cause of God’s revelation unto man, the vital bond inherent, in accordance with the divine creation, in the realities of things.
Love is the one means that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next.
Love is the light that guideth in darkness, the living link that uniteth God with man, that assureth the progress of every illumined soul.
Love is the most great law that ruleth this mighty and heavenly cycle, the unique power that bindeth together the diverse elements of this material world, the supreme magnetic force that directeth the movements of the spheres in the celestial realms.
Love revealeth with unfailing and limitless power the mysteries latent in the universe.
Love is the spirit of life unto the adorned body of mankind, the establisher of true civilization in this mortal world, and the shedder of imperishable glory upon every high-aiming race and nation.1
Selections from the Writings of `Abdu’l-Bahá (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1982), p. 27.
Clearly love here is much more than the Western romantic ideal. We are left with the suggestion that love, as magnetic force, is the ‘energy-glue’ that makes of all the universe’s parts a Whole? Love, as the old popular song says, literally as well as metaphorically, makes the world go round.
So love is not just that which binds all successful relationships or friendships or families together it is the force that binds the atoms of all forms, but it even goes beyond that, as Deepak Chopra suggests;
“The material world is full of familiar objects that we can see, feel, touch, taste and smell. As big objects become small, shrinking to the size of atoms, our senses fail us. Theoretically the shrinkage has to stop somewhere, because no atom is smaller than hydrogen, the first material particle to be born out of the Big Bang. But in fact an amazing transformation happens beyond the atom – everything solid disappears.
Atoms are composed of vibrating energy packets that have no solidity at all, no mass or size, nothing for the senses to see or touch. The Latin word for packet or package is quantum, the word chosen to describe one unit of energy inside the atom, and as it turned out, a new level of reality.”
~ Deepak Chopra, How to Know God, p. 29
Taking these two views together love is seen as the attraction between any two ‘bodies’. It is the Holy Spirit, the Word (logos) manifested in Creation – the universal ‘teaching-machine’ (or Divine extended metaphor) through which we spiritually move upwards and outwards.
2012-04-06 – Victoria Hodson & Edwin Rutsch: Dialogs on How to Build a Culture of Empathy with NVC Nonviolent Communications/ Compassionate Communications http://cultureofempathy.com
Video Transcripts and more at: http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/NVC/Victoria-Hodson.htm
The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy – A portal for empathy and compassion related resources; art, articles, definitions, conferences, experts, history, interviews, newsletter, science, videos, etc. For more on empathy visit our website. This is part of a larger documentary project by Edwin Rutsch on the nature of empathy. We hope you'll connect and get involved in Building a Culture of Empathy.
Terry Eagleton, John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester, delivers the third lecture in a series of lectures entitled âFaith and Fundamentalism: Is Belief in Richard Dawkins Necessary for Salvation?â In this lecture, Professor Eagleton explores faith and reason. All reason is carried on in a framework of faith even faith in reason itself.
Filmed as part of a second year course in social anthropology at Cambridge University in November 2001. For further writings on the social theorists and the background, please see www.alanmacfarlane.com
One of Nan Goldin’s best shots Photograph: Nan Goldin
I don’t photograph adults so much any more. I don’t have a child and, psychologically, my focus on them is a lot about me wishing that I did. But I am a godmother to friends’ children around the world – in Berlin, New York, Sweden and Italy. I don’t remember much ever feeling like a child, so maybe photographing them triggers memories.
one possible application is as a resolution for dissonance between two aesthetics
i) fine art photography & ii) photographic societies/RPS aesthetics
ver 1 – 5th April 2012
CLEARING THE GROUND
Which ground needs to be cleared?
WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY? Like cave painting, and other visual art forms, photography is simply a way to to make marks – ones that last reasonably well.
There are broadly two classes of photography –
record photography, objective/scientific in nature, and fine art photography, subjectively expressive in nature.
These two can very occasionally morph into the other – perhaps unmade beds are an example!
Record photographs are for example police mugshots, scientific shots of the brain or rocks or animals or flora.
After 100 years the supposition is still that they = faithfully represent objective reality.
Art photographs are subjective expressions/constructions of how the artist sees or experiences the world.
Record photographs have meaning – objectively. Its conventions are set by science & special purposes e.g scientists, police etc
Fine Art photographs have meaning – subjectively. Its conventions derive from the great ongoing (art) educational dialogue.
Some of these are meaning-full for us as individuals, some are meaning-less.
The worth or value for record photography lies in verisimilitude, faithful technique to exclude subjectivity as far as possible – the focus is the thing in and of itself – for whatever is the purpose.
The frame of reference, the evaluative model, is all other photographs of, for example, red admiral butterflies, plus red admiral butterflies seen ‘in nature’ – plus the need of the ‘uses’ – such as electron-microscopy for scientific research.
Fine art photography has as its frame of reference the perpetual ‘great conversation’ that has taken place about art.
Verisimilitude was important say in the 18thC but with the invention of photography art generally took an inward turn – ‘this is how I experienced my chair and room and sunflowers and the country around Arles’.
This turning point may well have been the (genuine?) crafts-art dividing point as well.
Going inward in photography took much longer.
Was Minor White a ‘pre-inward’ photographer of the ‘spiritual’?
See the work of this guy –
Two people who really enlarge the notion of ‘internal’ are Cindy Sherman and Calum Colvin in his Ossian project.
WHAT IS ‘NEO-HUMANISTIC PHILOSOPHY’ AS USED HERE? I distinguish between the philosophy of Humanism and the view of being human as presented by Maslow et. al. It is from within a humanistic world-view that this argument is presented.
My neo-humanistic world-view in a nutshell is as follows.
The difference between a normal healthy functioning human being and a corpse is the life-force.
I call this life-force (chi in Chinese) the human spirit.
It is useful to relate the expressions of the human spirit as ‘the 4Cs’, 3 inner Cs and 1 outer C.
These are the modes & expressions of the human spirit –
with them we ‘read the world’, intuit, come to know, exchange ideas and develop levels of consciousness. (I take Archbishop Tutu to have a higher level of consciousness than Charles Manson.)
All expression can be seen as combinations ‘inwardly’ of Caring, Criticality & Creativity & ‘outwardly’ being in and via the 4th C acting in community. INWARDLY ( intra-personally)
Caring - is the mode of our being & thinking & doing the social-moral truth sphere.
Criticality – is the mode of our being & thinking & doing in the scientific-philosophic, the objective truth sphere.
Creativity – is the mode of our being & thinking & doing in the arts, revelatory, subjective truth sphere.
OUTWARDLY (inter-personally)
All the Caring, Criticality & Creativity we express, & receive, is in various levels, ‘onion rings’, of Community/ies – from friendship to families to the global family of humankind.
Culturally these three modes of expression, & of receiving the world, are the great ‘store-houses’ of the Humanities, the Sciences & the Arts
The 3 intra-personal modes Caring, Creativity & Criticality are also called the WE, I & IT voices by Ken Wilber.
The 4Cs is part of the SunWALK model which is a foundation for science, the arts & humanities, for education and for social activism. Diagrammatically it is represented in this logo;
DOES PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEDIUM HAVE SOME INTRINSIC or SPECIAL IDENTITY? Seeking the intrinsic nature of photog is as blind an alley, as seeking the intrinsic nature of brushes, pigments and canvas. Art flows from the human spirit not from the camera or paint-brushes.
Always the relevant nature lies in what it means to be human, and have human experience, including aesthetic experience. The great (and infuriatingly frustrating) Camera Lucida by Barthes is ultimately about the dynamics of the human spirit not about light-tight boxes, optics etc.
This is a vital insight:
"To me photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization the forms that give that event its proper expression." -Henri Cartier-Bresson,
but this is even more vital;
Photography is an immediate action; drawing a meditation For me photography is to place head heart and eye along the same line of sight. It is a way of life. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
except I would say that the head-heart-eye flow (ideally) secures an image that both reflects a meditative state and, in the ‘reader’, induces a meditative state.
WHAT IS AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE?
Aesthetic experience is the subjective reading, or de-coding, of the event that gives us the kind of experience we call aesthetic.
My preference is to not confine the aesthetic to ‘beauty’, but to take take ‘truth, beauty & goodness’ as the three dimensions of a single reality – that reality being the three modes, or ‘primar colours’ of the human spirit.
Often, and at best, the aesthetic experience is ‘pre-conceptual’ – thinking & talking about it, if at all, is what comes afterwards
Two haiku serve as examples;
A lightning flash:
between the forest trees
I have seen water.
Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902)
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The summer river:
although there is a bridge, my horse
goes through the water.
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Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902)
‘RPS’ and Fine Art photography – a collision of two aesthetics
Unlike say the miners who were ‘primitive’ and ‘folk’ artists, i.e the Pitman Painters, the RPS (?) and Clubs have successfully avoided or prevented connection with the great art conversation.
Little bits from the great conversation occasionally leak in and fine art photographs emerge in spite of the oppression, seemingly by accident – and what’s more are often recognized by judges and by many members. So what’s lacking – knowledge, appropriate language or what?
POSSIBLE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWO AESTHETICS – mainly negative ones to start with!
Societies/RPS
Boys with toys – anti feminine Clockwork – non-holistic Bourgeois Train-spotters Nerdiness – wonderful example of Nerdiness – aircraft cockpits HERE
Aesthetic is driven as a box-ticking set of negatives. Light bits take your eye away from central subject, background of flower/butterfly insufficiently de-focussed,
Some Judges are self-indulgent, painfully ignorant, destructive in their remarks particularly toward newbies, have only vague notions of categories and appear through inconsistency to have no coherent model with which to work.
Fine art
Some say it is run by a ‘mafia’ of curators and dealers + some ‘I’ve made-it’ artists, brilliant like Hockney and less so like Tracy Emin.
Described/championed/controlled by up-their-own selves critics speaking psycho-babble – people who have no simplicity or depth.
With some their language exists to assert dominance over others and to act as privileged gate-keepers, wielding power, or as enticers of the gullible rich.
The positives
I don't doubt that the positives will come to me soon – with others help!
It causes one to wonder how many other Vivian Maiers there are out there with their negatives and prints filed in storage boxes, their canvases stacked in attics, their sculptures covered in garages. How many are there who don’t have the know-how to market themselves, or don’t have the interest. How many are there who make art only to please themselves. One wonders what other great art we are missing…
Is Photography Over?: Introduction Neal Benezra, Sandra S. Phillips, and Dominic Willsdon Running time: 6 min. 4 sec.
SFMOMA has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since the museum’s founding in 1935 and is dedicated to the examination of the medium in all its forms. A major symposium on the current state of the field, held at SFMOMA in April 2010, was the first in a series of public programs on photography.
This page archives the conversation begun in the Is Photography Over? symposium. It includes video of the entire program, complete, unedited transcripts of the proceedings, and the original position statements submitted by the participants in advance of the symposium. Additional responses and reports on the two days of the symposium can be found on our blog, Open Space.
