Category: tattoo

Horus

Photographer Unknown, Horus

Horus, in the ancient Egyptian religion, was one of the most important deities. The god appeared in the form of a falcon, whose left eye was the moon, representing healing, and whose right eye was the sun, representing power and the intrinsic substance of the heavenly bodies. Falcon cults were evident in late predynastic times and became widespread throughout Egypt. 

In the beginning stages of Egypt’s ancient religion, Horus was believed to be the god of war and the sky. As the religion progressed, Horus was seen as the son of Osiris and Isis, the divine child of the holy family triad. He is depicted as a falcon wearing a crown with a cobra, and later, wearing the Double Crown of the united Upper and Lower Egypt. The hooded cobra, worn by the gods and pharaohs on their foreheads, symbolized light and royalty. 

One of the oldest cultures in human history, ancient Egyptians are well-known for pioneering the fields of art, medicine, and the documentation of discoveries as mythological tales. The Egyptians mastered the integration of anatomy and mythology into artistic symbols and figures. The Eye of Horus was used as a sign of prosperity and protection, derived from the myth of Isis and Osiris. Comprised of six different parts, each an individual symbol, the Eye of Horus has an astonishing connection between neuroanatomical structure and function.

For those interested in the possible scientific speculation of the ingenuity of ancient Egyptians’ insight into human anatomy and physiology, a treatise, entitled “The Eye of Horus” by Karim ReFaey, Gabriella C. Quinones, William Clifton, and others can be found at the Cureus site, located at:https://www.cureus.com/articles/19443-the-eye-of-horus-the-connection-between-art-medicine-and-mythology-in-ancient-egypt

Gregory Maquire: “The Edge of Things”

R Breathe Photography, Untitled, (The Edge of Things)

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.” 

—Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Gian Paolo Barbieri

 

Gian Paolo Barbieri: Tahiti Photogrpahs, Silver Gelatin Prints

Born in Milan, Italy, in 1938, Gian Paolo Barbieri is a self-taught fashion photographer, whose professional career started with a short  apprenticeship to Harper’s Bazaar photographer Tom Kublin. In 1963, Barbieri had some images published in the Italian fashion magazine Novità, which later became Vogue Italia in 1965. 

As fashion photography had not been fully created in the 1960s, Barbieri had the unique opportunity to create a new style, with its makeup, hairstyles, and jewelry. After opening his own Milan studio in 1964, working both in Milan and Paris, he began to develop creative  relationships with fashion designer Walter Albini and Valentino Garavani, who with Barbieri was responsible for innovating modern fashion advertising campaigns. In 1965, Barbieri shot his first cover for Italian Vogue. 

An analog photographer who does not retouch his images, Gian Barbieri became a travel photographer in the 1990s. When Vogue magazine sent him to Tahiti for a photographic reportage, he found  more than just an exotic island. Like other children who sailed the South Seas through film and books by Melville and James Cook, he saw a dream-like unknown world. Barbieri’s photographs of the Polynesia culture, focusing on their tattoos, became a record of the unspoken language left on the skin of the Tahitian people. These images were collected and published in the photographic hard-cover art book “Tahiti Tattoos”, by Taschen Press in 1998. 

Gina Paolo Barbieri was awarded in 1968 the Biancmano Prize as Best Italian Photographer. He was named one of the fourteen best international fashion photographers by the German magazine Stern in 1978.

China Miéville: “I Have Danced with the Spider”

Photographer Unknown, (I Have Danced with the Spider)

“Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept…

..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”

–China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Fernando Pessoa” “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part Three)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Three

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Fernando Pessoa: “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part Two)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Two

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

 

Jeanette Winterson: “Writing on the Body”

Photographers Unknown, (Writings on the Body)

“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.” 

–Jeanette Winterson, Writing on the Body

 

Fernando Pessoa: “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part One)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part One

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”

― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Man and Scorpion

Photographer Unknown, (Man and Scorpion)

“With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.”
― Herman Melville

Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Even Though the Suitcase Was Heavy”

Two Trunks and a Suitcase

“Even though the suitcase was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, shortcuts, savings, rationality, which I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight? Were we just images? And what were we actually saving energy for with these energy-saving devices?”

― Karl Ove Knausgaard

Neil Gaiman: “. . .If You Are Willing to be Jaunty”

Photographer Unknown, Title Unknown, (Black Hats and Sacred Hearts)

“Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.”

― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys