ENTRY DESCRIPTION
(Hu)Man and his/her place in nature are a great interest of mine--physically-visually as well as social-philosophically.
I took this photo of this interesting man and body in Arizona. Traveling there from NYC, it was a particularly pristine moment in nature. I took other images of this man in the cactus park close to Phoenix, under an ancient tree in Jamaica, in a cave in Puerto Rico and before a cove in Utah.
This simple image is a quest to think about ecology, our future, vulnerability, culture, beauty, the shame and nature of being naked, and so much more. Women have been visually exploited, and so I believe, a man's figure is more telling. I am glad to be able to work with this elder man with a lean body and a vulnerability on his back, resembling the hero Siegfried in the Nibelung myth and Richard Wagner opera. The body looks so much like the tree and opens the question of similarity and difference of life, essence and shape manifestation.
AUTHOR
I am an anthropologist, writer, and speaker on art and cultural matters, and amateur photographer. As the U.S. correspondent to Prague's premier art magazine, Atelier, and Euro-Journal, I have been an observer of cultural affairs and a voice to Europe from the United States since 2001. I am the author of Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya, published in March 2019 by Inner Traditions-Baer & Company.
I briefly learned photography with Hartmut Schmidt in Germany and Allan Pappe in Prague and worked as a TA at the International Center of Photography in New York--but I would not call myself a Pro. My first camera came from Josef Sudek, who randomly asked my Mom in front of a photo store in Prague, if she wanted to buy his camera. That was during communism. She later gave the camera to me. In a similar random way, many years later, I received my second camera when assaulted on the street in L.A. and forced to buy the man's camera. I paid $30 and took it with me on my first anthropologic research trip to Guatemala.
With an insight into different cultures, I acquired during years of study and travel, I made photography of countries and cultures part of my life. Politically and socially interested, I photographed the sixtieth anniversary of the French ''La Resistance," exhibited in the Imagine '04 Cultural Festival in New York, the Bush-era in the U.S., the Mayan people and the 2012 celebrations in Guatemala, and Berlin in the light of immigration and change. Since 2004, multi-exposure helped me expressing a new world complexity and creating a new language via such visual fragmentation. In all of my photography, I search for purity, and (hu)mans' place in nature.
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