Tag: nudes

Brian Andreas: “The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, (The Room Filled with the Sound of the Wind)

“The day he first told me he was starting to disappear I didn’t believe him & so he stopped & held his hand up to the sun & it was like thin paper in the light & finally I said you seem very calm for a man who is disappearing & he said it was a relief after all those years of trying to keep the pieces of his life in one place. Later on, I went to see him again & as I was leaving, he put a package in my hand. This is the last piece of my life, he said, take good care of it & then he smiled & was gone & the room filled with the sound of the wind & when I opened the package there was nothing there & I thought there must be some mistake or maybe I dropped it & I got down on my hands & knees & looked until the light began to fade & then slowly I felt the pieces of my life fall away gently & suddenly I understood what he meant & I lay there for a long time crying & laughing at the same time.
—Disappearing”

― Brian Andreas, Still Mostly True

Gerardo Vizmanos

Gerardo Vizmanos, “Matthew Gillmore”, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Colorado, Date Unknown

Born in a small town in Spain, Gerardo Vizmanos is a photographer based in London and New York. He first studied law and worked, upon graduation, for law firms and companies in Europe and the United States. His interest in photography led him to study in 2010 for his Master’s in the Photography program at Centro Univesitario de Artes TAI in Madrid. Conflicts arose between photography and work, leading to his major decision to pursue photography as a career. Upon winning the International Talent Support contest in Trieste, Italy, he took his awarded scholarship in 2012 to study at New York’s School of Visual Arts. 

An openly gay artist, Vizmanos’s work revolves around the denial of set social constructions, including those of gender, that have become part of our societal existence, and the focusing on the essence of a human being. Born into a world where gay men are typically accepted only when they hide behind socially constructed roles, Vizamonos exposes his own experiences as a gay man through his work, while also presenting an inherent study of gay sexuality through his male subjects. 

Vizamos’s first work after the School of Visual Arts was entitled “No One”, which presented the idea of living without being someone. His first solo exhibition, the “Hidden Subject” series, presented as an installation with large-format images in dialogue with each other, concentrated on the idea of latent sexuality.The “Unidentified” series, shot during a period of personal struggles, dealt with the idea that grieving can be defeated only by going through the pain. He also shot a series called “Subject Matter(s)” which also dealt with body movement, nudity and sexuality, showing that clothes are just an addition to the natural condition of the human body.

Italo Calvino: “Some Strange Animal”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: Some Strange Animal

“In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one’s habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. 

But above all I grew up tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority’s beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. 

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others.’ I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? 

And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.” 

—Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

Cormac McCarthy: “Anything is Possible”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Nineteen

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. 

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.” 

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West

Carl Gustav Jung: “It is My Mind That Gives the World Color”

Photographers Unknown, (It is My Mind that Gives the World Color)

“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.” 

― Carl Gustav Jung

Luke Austin

Luke Austin, “Self-Portrait”, 2018

Australian-born and now living in Los Angeles, Luke Austin started out as a photographer doing photo shoots of bands and musicians, later moving to portraits representing his own gay community. Working with his Instagram app, he has traveled the world and shot many photo shoots of over a hundred men in different cities. Austin has gone from a large Instagram following to becoming a published photographer with his series of “Mini Beau Books” and his latest book “LEWA”, a photographic study of race, masculinity, and sexuality.

Austin has recently shown at a solo 2018 exhibit “LEWA” at PT Gallery in Berlin, the 2018 “Queer Biennial” group show at Navel in Los Angeles, and the 2017 “Home” group show at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, in Florida.

His work can be seen at his gallery in Los Angeles and at his site: www.lukeaustinphoto.com,

Image reblogged with many thanks to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

 

 

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Desipere est jus Gentium”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve Portraits for a Midsummer’s Day

“The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his ‘Topica’: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for every one is at liberty to be a fool—desipere est jus gentium.” 

–Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Art of Controversy

 

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Like Words to Music”

A Collection: Fauna and Flora

“Now it is very striking, and well worth investigating, that such trifling, nay, apparently childish, means as meter and rhyme produce so powerful an effect. I explain it to myself in the following manner: That which is given directly to the sense of hearing, thus the mere sound of the words, receives from rhythm and rhyme a certain completeness and significance in itself for it thereby becomes a kind of music; therefore it seems now to exist for its own sake, and no longer as a mere means, mere signs of something signified, the sense of the words.

To please the ear with its sound seems to be its whole end, and therefore with this everything seems to be attained and all claims satisfied. But that it further contains a meaning, expresses a thought, presents itself now as an unexpected addition, like words to music – as an unexpected present which agreeably surprises us – and therefore, since we made no demands of this kind, very easily satisfies us; and if indeed this thought is such that, in itself, thus said in prose, it would be significant, then we are enchanted.” 

–Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Volume Two

Every Craving

Photographer Unknown, (Every Craving), Photography / Digital Art

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, every craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson

Italo Calvino: “Invisible Cities”

Photographer Unknown, (A View of the City), Photo Shoot

“What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Human Nature”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eight

“If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honorable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favor of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.

The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.” 

—Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Always Being Right

Italo Calvino: “Simultaneous and Divergent Messages”

The Black and White Collection: WP Set Ten

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?” 

—Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1978

The Stone Cat and the Man

Photographer Unknown, (The Stone Cat and the Man)

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.” —Carl Jung

Cormac McCarthy: “Blood Meridian”

Photographer Unknown, (Blood Meridian)

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West 

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