Light Moments

Empire State Building From The School of Visual Arts. New York City

Rome

Seine. Paris

Roma Borough. Mexico City

Javier Marin, sculpture.

Condesa Borough. Mexico City

Self-portrait

Guanajuato

Central Park. NYC

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NYC

NYC Streets

The world around us is very mysterious.

It doesn't yield its secrets easily.

Now we are concerned with losing self-importance.

As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world,

You cannot really appreciate the world around you.

You are like a horse with blinders,

All you see is yourself apart from everything else.

Don Juan

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At The Met

It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed. 

~Sebastiao Salgado

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The Triumph of Marius

The Triumph of Marius

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo  (Italian, Venice 1696–1770 Madrid)

Date: 1729.  Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: Irregular painted surface, 220 x 128 5/8 in. (558.8 x 326.7 cm)

The subject of this triumphal procession is identified by a Latin inscription at the top of the canvas from the Roman historian Lucius Anneus Florus (Epitome of Roman History, 36:17): "The Roman people behold Jugurtha laden with chains." The African king Jugurtha is shown descending a hill before his captor, the Roman general Gaius Marius. A youth beats a tambourine while other figures carry booty, including a bust of the mother goddess Cybele. The thirty-year-old Tiepolo included his portrait among the figures at the left. The procession was held on January 1, 104 B.C.

The picture—a masterpiece of Tiepolo's early maturity—is from a series of ten canvases painted about 1725–29 to decorate the main room of the Ca' Dolfin, Venice. [The Metropolitan Museum of  Art]

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New York Light IV

Make Beautiful Manifesto

I am the creator, maker of moments,

Fighter of what I want versus what is expected of me.

I believe beauty is found in imperfections.

Every situation is an opportunity to capture beauty.

Today I open my eyes onto the world.

Embrace that it will become what I make it.

A place that has purpose.

Where stories inspire me to capture them.

It's time to share. Make the world right.

Make the world a work of art. 

Make Beautiful.

Share your photos from Hipstamatic to either Twitter or Instagram with the tag #makebeautiful to get them into the stream. To read the Make Beautiful manifesto, and for more info on posting, click here.

"A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see."

Roland Barthes

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Figure in the Garden

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

Figure in the Garden

May 20, 2011–Ongoing

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, exterior, first floor

Sculpture Garden installation brings together figurative works from the late 19th century to the present day. Making its debut in the Sculpture Garden is Figurengruppe/Group of Figures, by contemporary German artist Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956). Conceived in 2006–08, the work features nine life-size sculptures of, among other figures, St. Michael, a Madonna, a giant, and a snake, all rendered in precise detail and finished in bold colors. Religious symbolism and references to mythology abound, yet any fixed meaning remains open and elusive. Group of Figures is joined by earlier works such as Auguste Rodin’s heroic St. John the Baptist Preaching (1878–80) and Aristide Maillol’s pensive Mediterranean (1902–05). Striking a casual pose in his derby hat is Elie Nadelman’s Man in the Open Air (c. 1915), and perched atop a tall pedestal is Gaston Lachaise’s open-armed, voluptuous Floating Figure (1927). Perennial favorites like Picasso’s She-Goat (1950) and Miró’s Moonbird (1966) are on view as well, in addition to works by Renée Sintenis, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Tom Otterness.

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The Moment of Creation

From Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan

People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such

and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world

the way people have been telling us it is.

Seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds;

The world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers.

The real thing is when the body realizes that it can see.

Only then is one capable of knowing that the world we look at every day

Is only a description.

My intent has been to show you that.

Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge,

Because the art of a warrior

Is to balance, the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.

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The Cloisters III

The Unselfconscious Process

One of the most confusing and paradoxical aspects of Zen is its view of the self. Zen says we aren't who we think we are. While we are seen to exist in the relative sense, in terms of the absolute, the dance and the dancer are considered to be one. Many spiritual traditions have seen similar truths, and claim that by losing one's life, life is indeed gained. By emptying we become full. While no doubt confusing for the novice, its implication for the photographer would be to forget oneself, as much as possible, when taking pictures. This, in fact, is a very common experience among musicians and painters, who often report "losing themselves" in their art. In a sense, the picture takes itself. In the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson, "you have to blend in like a fish in water, you have to forget yourself." The artist becomes the process of creation. When something bigger than the persona takes charge, when Life itself is given free reign unhampered by our premeditated ideas of what should happen, the resultant pictures can be quite remarkable.

John Greer. Artist's Statement (Fragment)

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