Sometimes when I look at my old photographs that I took many years ago, I feel similar to an astronaut who has returned to the earth from the lunar surface with moon rocks. What was gathered in a short time, will be analysed for many years to come, answering questions that weren’t even thought of when the mission was begun.

Like many people in the early 70s, I read quite a few of Hermann Hesse’s books and a quote from the prologue of his book Demianstruck me like a lightning bolt when I first read it at the age of 17 or 18, when I was travelling around South-East Asia.

“Every person’s life is a journey toward himself, the attempt at a journey, the intimation of a path. No person has ever been completely himself, but each one strives to become so, some gropingly, others more lucidly, according to his abilities. Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world. Many a one never becomes a human being, but remains a frog, lizard, or ant. Many a one is a human being above and a fish below. But each one is a gamble of Nature, a hopeful attempt at forming a human being. We all have a common origin, the Mothers, we all come out of the same abyss; but each of us, a trial throw of the dice from the depths, strives toward his own goal. We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.”

Ever since I read that quote I have realised that one’s life is an evolutionary journey towards understanding what it is to be a human being.  I’ll be the first one to admit that I have been a fairly appetite driven, base and hedonistic animal most of my life but every now and again, I’ve bumped into little diamonds of wisdom that helped me get back on track to some kind of understanding and enlightenment.

One of the things that I’ve really struggled with all my life is to try and determine what is important and what is not, in terms of what to do with one’s short time on this earth and how to be while we are here.

I’ve always instinctively known that it is meaningless to define one’s self in terms of a career.  Working has been a means to an end for me and if I didn’t have to pay for the basic necessities of life, I wouldn’t work at all.  Now that’s not saying I that wouldn’t want to do anything.  I’m one of those people, that is driven by the need to create, and as such I’m never truly idle.

What has always repelled me from the idea of having a career is the recognition that, for me, most jobs just turn into a pointless slow-moving river of continuous ennui.

Occasionally I think about the character (Whit I think) from Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, who when asked by the main character George, why he always blows his weekly salary at the local brothel, replies along the lines of, ” when I look back on my working life,  I can’t distinguish one day from the next, but when I go to the brothel remember every single moment”.

That’s not the kind of life I want to lead! 

If I hadn’t gone to art College at night, the 5 years I lived in Brisbane and worked selling professional photographic equipment would’ve been wasted years.  Like the character in Steinbeck’s book, I can’t remember any particular working day from that job.  It scares me to think that one’s whole life can go by so unremarkably.  I am absolutely certain life must amount to more than that.

So the gaze of my existential angst has led me to being more of a generalist than a specialist and I content myself with the thought that evolution doesn’t reward specialisation for very long.

In the comment section of a previous post, I was asked by MtBrooks “And how did you employ the “batshit crazy foreigner” tactic to get of other trouble?”

Here is the story of just one of the places where I had to employ tactics that I had learned from a Belgian guy called Beet that I met in the southern part of Thailand, on how to deal with threatening situations.

Every now and again in my life, I’ve come across people who are almost Christ-like in their beaming warm countenance, trusting nature and overwhelming desire to be martyred.

Back in 1982, when I was in Chaouen, Morocco, I met one of those “not long for this earth” saints that I was referring to.  He was a mousy blonde, shoulder-length-haired and bearded elf of a man from Montreal.  Sort of like a neo-hippy Gelfling with a French accent. 

I first came across the Gelfling in the cheap hotel that we were both staying at.  The first indication I had that the Gelfling would be seen as the new white meat in town, was as soon as we stepped out of the hotel to go to the markets together.  As is usually the case in Morocco, there were a couple of local guys hanging around the entrance ready to pounce on any hotel guests and offer their services as guides, with the ubiquitous chant of “gid! gid! gid!” 

Finding your way around in Morocco isn’t all that difficult, most of the time.  The towns are usually fairly small with the poorer neighbourhoods at the top of the hill, and the markets and commercial areas at the bottom of the hill.  I’ve never felt the need to have any guidance when I’ve travelled so I just walked right by the guys who were offering their dubious services.  I had taken about five or six paces when I realised the Gelfling was no longer with me, so I turned around, only to see him bailed up by the so-called guides. 

There he was, patiently listening politely to the hustler’s banter.  Deciding that he probably didn’t have the assertiveness to extract himself, I walked up to him and asked him if he really wanted those two guys to be following him around all day and expecting to get some kind of kickback from whatever he buys from the shopkeepers, and then have to pay out a “tip” for the honour at the end of the day?  I could see that the Gelfling was conflicted about what kind of answer he should give me in front of the two “guides. As he dithered and struggled to come up with an answer that would please all parties without causing offence, I just said to him.  “I’ll meet you up the markets” and walked off on my own.

I didn’t see the Gelfling for the rest of the day and when I was heading back to the hotel in the afternoon, I passed by a tea shop, where the two hustlers from the morning was sitting with a few of their friends drinking mint tea.  One of them noticed me and nudged his friend who said something to his other friends (I’d bet it was something like, “watch this”)  as they both got up and made their way towards me.  One of the so-called guides stuck up his hand and barred my way, as he said to me,

“Why you say you no want gid?”

“It is our job!”

“In other country they keel you!” As he made a slashing gesture across his throat with his hand. 

He then took a step forward and stuck his face right up to mine and with as much menace as he could muster, threatened me with, “we keel you!”

Without even thinking, I stepped onto one of his feet and pushed him over with my left hand displaying as much contempt as I could.  I then spat on him and told him he was a dog in Arabic (wah-enta kelp!), and that I would kill him if I ever saw him again.  They both knew I was serious, and they couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

The next morning as I walked out of the hotel with the Gelfling in tow, the two so-called guides were outside waiting, but as soon as they saw me, they made themselves scarce, quick smart. We had decided to walk out of the town to an old ruined mosque. 

 When we got to the very outskirts of town, the juxtaposition of the whitewashed houses with their blue doors against the deep green hills in the background made for quite the picturesque scene. The Gelfling got his camera out and took a photograph.  As soon as the shot was taken and we got ready to move on, out of the blue this speck comes running to us from far off down the road.  As this speck grew larger as it neared us, we could hear that it was yelling something at us.  Within seconds, we had a Moroccan guy in our faces yelling and screaming at us.

“You take photo of my grandfather!”

To which the Gelfling, in his saint like manner, tried to explain that he was taking a photograph of the scenery and the Moroccan guy was so far away that he wasn’t even in the viewfinder when he took the photograph.  The Gelfling then held out his camera so the Moroccan guy could see through the viewfinder thereby demonstrating the truth of what the Gelfling had said.  The guy wasn’t interested in looking through the viewfinder and he just pushed it dismissively out of the way.

“You take photo of my grandfather!”

“The Koran say you not make picture of people!”

“You make picture my grandfather!”

“Give me film!”

All the hullabaloo was starting to attract a crowd, and I could see that the situation was going to get ugly very quickly so I grabbed the Gelfling by his shirt and tried to pull him away.  The Gelfling being a good ambassador of western humanitarianism and decency pulled himself free from my grip and said, “no, no, I want to explain to him”.

Again, the Gelfling lifted up his camera and offered the Moroccan a chance to look through the viewfinder.  This time, the Moroccan knocked the camera out of the way with such force that if it hadn’t been attached to the Gelfling’s neck by its strap it would have hit the ground.  Once again, I grabbed the shirt of the Gelfling said “come on, let’s go, this is going to get real bad, very quickly.”

Unfortunately, the Gelfling seemed hell-bent on martyrdom and he continued to try and get the Moroccan to see reason.  The Moroccan continued on ranting the same thing over and over again.

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

The little crowd of onlookers were starting to turn into a mob.  Some of the members of the mob started shaking their fists and yelling at us and it wasn’t very long before they started hemming us in and jostling us.  With an increasing sense of urgency, I kept on saying to the Gelfling, “COME ON, LET”S GO!” but he just persisted on trying to convince the Moroccan guy that he hadn’t taken a photograph of his grandfather.  Which was the obvious truth.

The Moroccan guy just kept on ranting his mantra of,

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “Give me film!”

By this time, the mob was about ten people deep all around us and some of them started pushing and jostling us even more.

Then all of a sudden, the Moroccan guy changed his mantra to, “you must pay money!”

“You must pay money!”

“I was only taking a picture of the mountain!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “You must pay money!”

“You take photo of my grandfather!” “The Koran say you not make picture of people!” “You make picture my grandfather!” “You must pay money!”

It was at about this time that I noticed that some of the guys in the crowd were starting to pick up large rocks and I’d heard about foreigners being stoned (in the bad way that is) by mobs in Morocco before, so I decided to take the rapidly deteriorating and very dangerous situation into my own hands.

I just grabbed the mewling Gelfling by the scruff of his shirt and shoved him behind me, as I told him to ”SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Then with as much force as I could, I pushed the Moroccan into the rest of the crowd and he fell over backwards onto the ground. I then leant forward and drew a line in the dirt after which I drew my hand across my throat in a slashing motion and said to him, “if you cross the line I’LL KILL YOU!”  I then grabbed a hold of the Gelfling and threw him into the crowd, which knocked about three or four of the guys in the mob out of the way.

The mob instinctively shrank away from us as I continued to shove the Gelfling through the crowd like a battering ram before he could regain his balance. By now, the mob had got the idea that I wasn’t going to be putting up with of any more shit from them and I was quite serious about hurting them.

Hell, I had just roughed up one of one of my own kind, what was I going to do to them?

Amazingly, we just walked away from the situation without a single rock or word being tossed in our direction.

I’ve noticed, more than several times, when I’ve been in the Third World that there seems to be the perception amongst some of the locals that people from countries with Western liberal traditions can be manipulated by their need to do the right thing and to be liked.

Unfortunately, sometimes, it’s useful to get in touch with one’s inner batshit crazy self and channel a little dormant aggression. I guess the question one has to ask oneself in such situations is, do I feel like being a victim today?

As for me,

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes I would, if I could, I surely would
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would

Except my interpretation would sound more like this.

If there is one thing that I’ve learnt from my travels, it’s to pay attention to the subconscious messages that my senses send to my brain.  Every time I’ve been really sick with diarrhoea, I can remember the moment that I decided to eat the food that my “spidey sense” tried to tell me was dodgy.  As a matter of fact, when I think about all the times in my life that I have ignored that little voice inside of my head warning me of danger, I’ve ignored myself into some real character building situations.

When I was staying in Tarrazout, the deluded thought crossed my mind that it would be a good idea to try and hook up with some Tauregs and get on one their caravans to Timbuktu.  So I decided to catch a bus from Agadir to Goulimine.  As I was waiting for my bus, I went to get something to eat at one of those suspect roadside stalls.  I can remember looking at the filthy hands (people in that part of the world wipe their backsides with their bare left hands and there is not really enough water around to wash properly) of the food vendor and being repulsed, but I thought “what the heck, I am hungry” and I ate what I was given to me anyway.

The buses in Morocco at that time, were very similar to the school buses used in North America.  Very basic affairs, with no air conditioning or on-board toilets.  The trip from Agadir to Goulimine by bus was a long one and took about 24 hours during which time my bowels reminded me that I should listen to that little voice in my head next time I buy some food.  About eight hours into the trip I got the sensation that I was about to overcome the surly bonds of gravity due to the force of an explosion that was about to happen in my pants.  I was sitting in the back of the bus and as quick as a shot, I flew over the various pieces of luggage, chickens and goats to beg the driver of the bus in my broken French to stop and let me off.

The bus driver wasn’t having any of that and he just waved me away.  I tried conveying my sense of urgency as best as I could but he just wouldn’t listen. 

It wasn’t a merely call of nature I had to answer, it was more like a subpoena from the supreme court of all creation!

I was getting insanely desperate. My shame had already gotten off and I was left with no other option than to start taking my pants down to re-decorate the stairwell with a palette of earthy tones. As soon as I started to undo my pants and pull them down the bus driver just jammed on the brakes, and we skidded to a halt as the doors were flung open.  I ran as fast as I could to behind the back of the bus.

There is nothing to compare with the relief that one has in such situations when the levee breaks and the floodwaters are free to travel their natural course.

As soon as my immediate needs were met, it suddenly occurred to me, that I was out in the open on a flat treeless plain with my pants around my ankles. About 50 yards away was a young shepherd boy with his flock, who just stood there staring at me, as disgusted motorists zoomed past me.  Then, like some cosmic joke, I realised I didn’t have any toilet paper.  You know you’ve reached rock bottom when you’re wiping your backside with a bare left hand full of roadside dust as an audience watches.

To all you mothers out there, I think that I have come into contact with the slightest inkling of what it’s like to have people looking up your clacker as you helplessly convulse, giving birth. 

As the day wore on, we occasionally stopped in small towns, and I was able to get a modicum of relief in some very disgusting Third World latrines.  Night-time seemed to amplify my discomfort as there was no scenery to distract me from thinking about my stomach pains, or by being terrorised by my now spastic peristaltic bowel movements.

Shortly after dawn, we arrived in the fog shrouded town of Tiznit.  I was feeling so exhausted, dehydrated and disorientated that when I stepped off the bus, it was like I had landed on the moon.  I felt so disassociated from everything around me, and it was as though I was seeing everything for the very first time.  In the half hour I was in Tiznit, I took some of the best photographs of ever taken in my life.  Usually when I take a roll of film I only get about one picture per roll that I’d bother keeping.  The half roll of film that I shot that morning, were all keepers.

There have been a few times in my life where bodily discomfort has led me to new heights. 

Another time was when I used to rock climb. I had been to a big and very crazy “cocktail” party. The following morning, with a killer hangover and a few friends, I went climbing.  

There was one climb in particular, a classic called “Eternity“, that I always had a bit of trouble with because it scared me a bit.  It was not uncommon for me to put in up to about 10 pieces of protection (removable devices placed into faults in the rock, to hold the rope as a safety measure) whenever I led (climbed up first trailing the rope below me) Eternity. My friends used to rag on me because it was exhausting for them to take out so much protection on the way up after me. 

On the morning of my hangover, I did the whole climb with only two pieces of protection.  My hangover was so bad that I thought my head was going to explode, and I just wanted to be sick.  I was in so much discomfort as I was climbing, that I didn’t think about the danger that much at all, and it was the best I climbing that I ever did.

Back in 1990 when I was working as a photographic assistant in a very big studio, I was invited to a fancy dress party by the woman who used to handle all the props in our shoots.  It was a really great party, and most people came in fantastic costumes. 

Back in those days, I used to go picking magic mushrooms so I went to the party with my contribution of a mushroom dip.  I told the hostess of the party what was in the dip and she just put it out on the table for everybody to help themselves.

Well, I guess that I don’t have to tell you that it was quite the party.  My girlfriend (at the time) and I, went as hippies (strangely enough) and we spent most of the night standing out in the backyard socialising. 

Also in the backyard was a young blonde woman dressed up like a cave woman (in a white fake fur bikini) accompanied by a much older man dressed up as a caveman (ala Fred Flintstones) and sporting a long, curly blond wig, and carrying a fake dinosaur bone in his hand as a club. Standing on their own, because no one was a game enough to go near them, were two huge (over six foot)  scary looking guys (the ones in the photograph below).  They both had the physiques of bodybuilders and the biggest scariest guy had a mohawk and was wearing jeans, no shirt and a cow skin vest.  He looked like he was from another age when farmers used to go Viking after they had planted their crops.

In my altered state of consciousness, I thought it would be a good idea to try and get these guys into the swing of things so I went up to the biggest scariest guy and said to him, “gees mate! I hope that’s a costume, and you can take it off later on. You don’t go around looking like that all the time do you?” 

Both of them just snorted and then smiled at me as I stuck out my hand to shake theirs. They were so bored that they were glad to have somebody who wasn’t too scared to talk to them.  It wasn’t long before I found out they were from Finland and their names were Ricky and Richard.  I also found out that their favourite type of holiday was to go from Finland to Sweden and pick fights with Swedes and beat the shit out of them, and that their favorite movie was The adventures of Ford Fairlane

Ricky cracked himself up when he did his impression of Ford Fairlane.

“Clint Eastwood?”

“Do I know heem?”

“Ya, I fokked heem!”

As other guests at the party realised that Ricky and Richard weren’t going to kill anyone, a few of them came over to join in the conversation.  The young cave woman also came over without the guy she came to the party with. 

Within about five minutes it was obvious to the five or six people in the conversational group that the cave woman was interested in Richard (the guy with the glasses).  Richard wasn’t backwards about being forward, and he said to the cave woman “zo you like me eh?” To which the cave woman smiled and blushed a little and she pointedly glanced over to her date.  Richard just said ” don vorry about him, we go fokk in zee tent over dare”. 

Surprisingly, considering the other people witnessing what was going on, the cave woman said ”no I can’t, he’ll get angry with me”, as she motioned with her head towards the older caveman. 

The caveman was no dummy. 

He knew what was going on, but he didn’t come within the conversational circle but, instead, he called to the cave woman that he wanted to go.  The cave woman called back that she wanted to stay and that he should go home without her.  To which the caveman pulled off his long curly blond wig, uncovering the grey balding pate of a man in his 60s, and threw it on the ground. The old caveman then proceeded to bang his bone (the fake plastic dinosaur one that is) on the side of the house, while pleading with the cave woman to leave with him. 

Talk about a great visual metaphor. 

The cave woman very casually turned around and said “no, no, it’s okay, you go home I want to stay.” Poor old Fred Flintstone just dropped his shoulders and bone, turned around dejectedly and made his exit.  The old lion had been cast out of the pride. 

No sooner had the old suitor left when Richard restarted his none too subtle overtures by grabbing for the cave woman’s breast in front of all of us.  The cave woman stepped out of his reach, and just smiled at him.  Richard countered “maybe you vould like it if we both fokked you?”  Ricky who had hadn’t said very much all night, just smirked.  The cave woman smiled, whilst the rest of us just didn’t know where to look. 

Richard then lunged for the cave woman’s breasts again, and once again, the woman retreated.  I then said to Richard, “look, mate, you’ve got it made, but you’re going to fuck it up.”

“Vott do you mean?”

“I mean that women don’t like to be treated like that”

“Vott do you mean?”

“Be nicer, show a little love”. 

Richard tilted back his head as he pondered that little chestnut, and then he turned to me and looked me square in the eye and said in a booming baritone voice laced with menace,

“FOKK LOV!”

Then he lunged at the cave woman’s breast again, and once again, the cave woman deftly dodged his grope.  I guess it was getting a little bit too real for the cave woman because she just turned around and walked out of the party. 

Yep Richard blew it.

Ricky wasn’t grinning any more.

Ricky didn’t say very much for the rest of the evening and consoled himself by eating most of the mushroom dip, and as a consequence, he was quite mellow by the time dawn came around.

I must have given some kind of contact details to Richard and Ricky, because a couple of months later, they turned up at the studio.  It seems that Richard and Ricky had gone up north, and had been travelling all around Queensland, during which time they won the full-contact karate championship in both their weight classes.  Which is saying something, because Queensland is full of hard men who like nothing else than a brawl.

We had been doing some high key photography in the studio and the lighting set up was still there.  So I asked the guys, if I could take some quick photographs of them.  I took mainly head shots of them, but they wanted me to take a few shots of them posing the way they wanted to (one of the shots is the picture above). 

I could see that Richard and Ricky were impressed with where I was working.  I could almost hear the gears of their minds, as I watched them try to figure out a way to insinuate themselves into such a scene.  I made it clear to them that the was no way that they could get a job working in the studio without an education in photography.  It just wasn’t going to happen.

Richard then asked me if he and Ricky could crash at my place for a little while.  I told them I’d have to check with my girlfriend, so I rang her up.

Her answer,

“NO FUCKING WAY!”

To tell the truth I was glad that I had an out.  I’ve met people like Richard and Ricky before, when I used to work in the carnival, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to control them.  I’m pretty sure they had me sized up well enough to know the truth of the situation as well. If push came to shove, there was no way I could resist them.  My girlfriend knew that and she saved me from them.

Every now and again I meet hard cases, like Richard and Ricky, who seem to be lost in this modern age.  It was almost as though two Vikings from a thousand years ago, had somehow fallen through a rift in space and time to the other side of the world. Brisbane in the early 1990s.

I don’t think the modern civilised world needs such pure expressions of testosterone like Richard and Ricky any more.  They were out of place and out of time.

As a matter of fact, I think the whole warrior ideal needs to be deleted from our culture.  Popular entertainment, likes to show the warrior as a noble hero that saves the day.  Truth be known though, warriors are the ones that we need to be saved from.

I was reading a post on Pomeroy’s blog about “no standing” signs and it reminded me of this picture I took of my friend Stefan years ago when I was living in Brisbane.

All the recent hullabaloo in the newspapers here in Sydney about child pornography issues and art, got me thinking about the subject.  I don’t intend to comment on Henson’s photography myself, as I feel I that I only have a very foggy understanding of what art actually is.  I don’t really feel capable of expressing an erudite opinion on the matter of photographing young semi-naked girls in the name of art.  What I do have some experience with, and feel I can comment on, is young girls and the way how some of them respond to being photographed.

Back in the early 1990s, I was invited by a modelling school and agency in Dunedin, New Zealand to photograph all their recent graduates for their portfolios.  My contact with the modelling school was a professional makeup artist friend, who was a graduate herself.  Over a two-week period, I photographed over 40 young girls and women.  The age of my subjects ranged from about 14 up to the mid-20s.  It was a great job and I felt that the modelling agency had trained the girls very well.

All the girls had been trained how to pose in front of the camera and most of them were very good at it but what I found very disconcerting was some of the expressions that the very young girls just “turned on”.  About a quarter of the girls (mainly quite young from about 14 to 16 years old) affected the very overt and sexual “come and get me look” that is worn by many of the models in men’s magazines.  I had to explain to quite a few of the girls that when they become professional models they will be mainly used to model clothing to other women.  Since the majority of women aren’t gay, such “come hither expressions” won’t be of much use.

Another issue I found unsettling was the eagerness with which the girls would strip off in front of me to change.  This happened once while the girl’s mother was with me and she even didn’t bat an eyelid as her child disrobed in front of me.

Somehow they got it into their heads that models will be required to take off their clothing without much privacy.  I found myself explaining to a few of the girls (and their mother in one case) that when they go out in the world to make a living at modelling, they should expect proper facilities than insure their privacy as they get changed.  It made me shudder to think how such innocence can be pounced upon, and I warned them that if they were ever working anywhere, where there weren’t adequate facilities for them to get changed they should be highly suspicious, and to be on their guard.

It was fairly obvious to me that many of these models had gone through much of their young lives being told how beautiful they were and it gave them a false sense of what attractiveness actually is.  I think that when we are young, due to our lack of experience in worldly matters, things tend to be a little more black-and-white.  Due to the youth and inexperience of many of the girls, they had no idea about the difference beauty and raw sex.

I think the word glamour is misunderstood by many people.  Glamour means a illusory sexual allure and that’s just what it is, it’s an illusion.  I think this confusion between beauty and sexual allure leads to a Frankenstein version of what an attractive self image is, in young minds.

I’m pretty sure that when parents and relatives tell children that they think those kids are beautiful, they’re not usually trying to plant overtly sexual stereotypes in those children’s heads.  What are children to think of when they see toys like Bratz dolls and the bump and grind of a Britney Spears or Shakira performance?  It would seem that kids aren’t really allowed to be kids any more.

I bet the parents of a beautiful young 15-year-old girl, who I had been photographing, would be absolutely horrified to know that their beloved and precocious little moppet followed me into the toilet, and asked me if she could help me get my equipment out (if you know what I mean).

I wonder how, many parents would react, if, when their beautiful child is asked what they wanted to become when they grew up, their child responded with “I want to be an underwear model”? I also have to ask the question, what’s with these people who put their kids in child beauty pageants? Do they really think that is harmless to make their little girls into painted up sex objects and then judge them?  What, if anything, is going through their heads?

I think that this accelerated sexual development is not only harming the children when they are young by cutting short their childhoods whilst perverting, and quite often diminishing their sense of self esteem. It’s also harming the society that we all live in as they get older. 

As I have become older, I tend to feel that women fall into two groups.  There are people with intellects who happen to be women, and then there are another group who are nothing more than painted up life-support systems for their genitalia (I guess the same can be said for men).  I remember once meeting a highly made up woman who didn’t want to shake hands when we met and when I asked her why, she said that she thought that I was just trying to make her breasts jiggle.

Most intelligent women that I have ever met don’t wear much, if any, makeup at all and they tend to dress in a comfortable and casual way.  I think that many women who spend an inordinate amount of time on their appearance don’t give themselves a chance to be treated with the respect that they crave.

Being attractive enough to create arousal in men is a biological necessity that enables the continuation of our species. Unfortunately due to heavy advertising aimed at eroding women’s self-esteem so that they will buy more beauty and fashion products, striving to be sexually alluring into old age has become something of a quest for many women. 

The seeds that we plant in young people’s minds today will shape the society of the future. 

From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow.

Over the weekend, my wife and I went down to Canberra to see an exhibition of landscapes at the National Art Gallery.  The exhibition was called “From Turner to Monet”.   I was kind of surprised to see that an exhibition of landscapes would draw such a large crowd. Not only were there tourist coaches outside the art gallery, the whole parking lot was completely full.

My wife and I made the mistake of hiring those audio commentary machines in the hope of gaining some better understanding of the historical context that the paintings were created in.  Alas, the only commentary we had was describing the bleeding obvious of what we were looking at.  As an example, the commentary for Turner’s “Crossing the Brook” expounded on such inanities as ” the girl about to cross the brook is taking off her shoes”.  A word of advice if you are going to that exhibition don’t bother with the audio commentary as it is a waste of the money that they ask.

Hermann Hesse in one of his short essays, had mentioned that once he had gone up into the mountains to paint what he thought would be the perfect landscape.  In this perfect landscape, he was going to put the perfect sky; the perfect mountains; the perfect chalet; the perfect foreground etc. The result was the sort of thing that one would see on the top of a box of cheap assorted chocolates. I’m not really a fan of romantic landscapes, as I find them overly sentimental and tacky. To my taste, landscapes from the late 1700s and early 1800s are to painting what sunsets are to photography, nowadays.

On reflection I think that many of those romantic landscapes were included in the exhibition to show what a genius Turner really was and how far ahead he was of his contemporaries.  When one looks at Turner’s work in the context of other people’s work from the same era it’s quite startling to see how different he was.  It’s almost like Turner came from another planet.  The same can be said of the Van Gogh. 

We don’t get very many significant works from the Masters here in Australia.  We just don’t have the population to support the acquisition of such great works. Van Gogh is such a giant, and his work commands such large amounts of money, that is quite rare to see one of his originals here, never mind a significant work of his.  The same could be said for this exhibition in that it had only a small minor work by Van Gogh, called “Trees in the grass“.  Although it wasn’t one of van Gogh’s most famous paintings, it shone like a jewel amongst all the other drab grey little efforts.  Even Monet’s giant picture of lilies just looked like a messy little smudge in comparison. Vincent’s colour was so vibrant and lush.  It was as though each colour was fresh from the tube and it hadn’t been mixed with another at all. It’s hard to believe that Gauguin saw himself as Van Gogh’s mentor, when it seems so obvious that Vincent was the one who had the real genius.

It was interesting to see that an Australian painter from the Heidelberg group called Arthur Streeton, stood up very well among some of the giants from the Impressionist era.  Streeton’s painting “Fires on“ yodelled in a room full of insipid whispers.  Pissarro’s bleak little daubs and Georges-Pierre Seurat’s intellectual exercises looked dry and all shrivelled up in a room with a giant Streeton, gleaming with bright Australian light.

What surprised me about some of the salon style, come ‘chocolate box top” type of landscape painting, was the fact that they were idealised notions of nature, and as such, they tended to be painted without any sign of human life.  An Arcadian vision, if you will.  There were some paintings of Yosemite that looked like they could have been painted yesterday.  When I saw the paintings of Yosemite, I found myself thinking about how there was no indicator, other than the romantic style of the painting, when it was painted.  This got me thinking about people and human artefacts within a landscape and how they can give a sense of a historical context.

As I was thinking about people within landscapes and historical contexts, I began to examine mine own tastes in regard to landscapes and I came to a couple of conclusions. 

• The first was I don’t like to see realistic landscapes painted in an almost photographic way, unless there are people in the landscape that can give me a feeling that I’m looking at a slice of life from a far gone time, such as Tom Robert’s “Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west“.  When I looked at Tom Roberts work I just loved the way how it captured a major street in Melbourne in the late 1800s. It made me feel as though I was there, observing the scene through a high hotel window. 

• The second was if a landscape doesn’t have people in it and it therefore isn’t referencing a historical time, I would much prefer that it was more expressive and abstract.

 After seeing the exhibition I felt particularly pleased with the landscape oil paintings that I have at home.

Looking at all the landscapes got me thinking about my own photography, and in particular, the shots I took in the early 70s, I was in Cambodia.  I only took about four rolls of film in the six months that I lived in Cambodia during a very significant time of that country’s history.  I could really kick myself that I didn’t take more photographs of people within the landscape.  The pictures that I took of people in Cambodia have travelled much better into the future than photographs I took without people in them.  Like many people who are just starting out in photography I was very keen to take shots of interesting textures and shapes, and as a result, half the photographs that I took in Cambodia could have been taken anywhere in the world as they give no idea of where they are from.

Now when I take photographs, I try to make a point of trying to capture some sense of time, historically, when the photograph was taken.  I’m not suggesting that all people should take photographs within some kind of historical context (we all do anyhow), but I am saying that I think that people in the future, who will inherit the images that we produce will appreciate captured slices of life from our time, more than some textural tone poem.

By the way I was at my in-law’s holiday home this weekend and saw this texture and couldn’t help myself.