Gem quotations from books or articles I’ve been reading
I’d like to acknowledge with thanks a reply received from Bible Society to my open letter posted a couple of weeks ago here. Matthew van Duyvenbode (Head of Campaigns, Advocacy and Media), gave considerable thought to my concerns, for which I am deeply grateful. An initial point of clarification was easily resolved with reference to […]
Bible Society response Read More »
Purpose and contrivance lurks behind all that realism… The key piece here, shown high up on the wall, features a man in dark glasses floating on a lilo. He’s wearing blue bermudas and his skin is shiny with suntan oil. Like the giant couple upstairs, he seems to be on holiday, and ought to be
Ron Mueck’s biblical overtones Read More »
Ash Wednesday is a day of confronting our mortality through the symbol of ashes, beginning to strip away our comforts, and embarking on the archetypal journey into the desert that is an essential part of conversion. Conversion is the process of discovering that God is always much bigger than we imagined and that our own
Ash and dust the winter burial, Lent the spring Read More »
Being in the natural world is hugely important to me, it’s vital – because I don’t get that sense of wonder and awe anywhere else, I really don’t get it inside a building or even inside a church. I get it outside. I think when you go around the world filming, you come across endless
Mary Colwell’s inspiration Read More »
The Virgin Mary is a compelling and complex character for any believer, particularly a woman of the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, she was the ideal of femininity – gentle, nurturing, compassionate. If ever there was a woman who was great through love, it is the Madonna. On the other hand, as both mother
Julia Margaret Cameron and her Marys Read More »
The most pressing issue in the photography of place is a site’s history, how it has been affected by time, by climate and by mankind. Landscape photography has become political, not necessarily in terms of environmental causes – although many photographers are directly concerned with such issues – but in terms of the meanings it
What’s in it for the landscape photographer? Read More »
The beauty of the place was infinite and heartbreaking. Emerson, in love with the landscape, overlooked nothing, from winter’s mists to summer’s fullness. Yet such opulence was beyond the scope of photography and, eventually realizing this, Emerson had to content himself with exquisite miniature pictures of frozen earth, mists and far horizons – winter landscape,
Emerson and the beauty of ‘Marsh Leaves’ Read More »
From Beate Gütschow’s ‘LS’ series, the text below is from The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago: Beate Gütschow’s exploration as an artist directly probes questions of pictorial representations of reality. As a student in Hamburg and Oslo, she explored verisimilitude initially as a painter and installation artist and eventually became attracted to photography for
Lenses and their use pre-Reformation was often considered heretical, whether in camera obscura ‘shows’ (Arnold of Villanova in 1300), Roger Bacon’s ideas, Della Porta on painters’ secret tools. How do you trust something that so distorts plain sight? Hockney says this was actually about power, as wielded by the church. The power over lens-based media
New Year musings, with David Hockney Read More »
During the ascent in the balloon at heights of 500 to 1,000 metres over the ground, we were especially enchanted by the shining, full, lush blaze of colours revealed by the earth below us. Far and wide, the forests appeared as the most gleaming, greenest moss or like glorious green velvet. … But as we
Quote collage from this week’s reading Read More »
