I like to wash,
By way of experiment,
The dust of this world
In the droplets of the dew.
Haiku by Bashō’ translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa from BASHŌ The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches
Grafitti in Shibuya , Tokyo
Rise up this mornin’
Smiled with the risin’ sun
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin’ sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true
Saying’, “This is my message to you”
Three LIttle Birds , lyrics by Bob Marley
Grafitti (or Sign) outside a night club in Tokyo made of a photographic flyer and plastic colored letters (circa 2008)
In the late 6th century CE Daruma (Bodhidharma) brought Dhyana from India to China where it was transformed into Chan and later, on a trip to China about 1200 CE , Dōgen Eihei (永平道元) brought Chan to Japan where it transformed into Zen..The image of Daruma is creatively ubiquitious in Japan and a Yuki Daruma is a snow Daruma.
People, usually government employees, paint the streets and then nature makes its own artistic comments.
Alameda Creek
With a hat on my head
And a straw sandals in my feet,
I met on the road
The end of the year.
Haiku by Bashō’ translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa from BASHŌ The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches
Photography as a graphic art has been around since about 1825, By graphic art, I mean a technique, such as etching, lithograph or woodblock used to create art which enables multiple copies of the same image —well basically the same image, each print may have a slight difference, and each print may be numbered as an A/P (artist proof) or X/N where X is the number of the individual print and N is the number of the prints in the run.
For most of this time photography was a unique form differentiated from all the other graphic arts because the resulting image—when the camera was set correctly for focus and exposure — visually appeared to be very close to “Reality” or at least a reality like the one humans visually perceived.
Computers and digital imagery has qualitatively altered photography. Before digital, film was processed in chemicals, printed in a darkroom, and for most people both processes were not a part of their common knowledge. Most people bought a roll of film, put it into the camera, exposed the images and sent the film out for processing and printing.
Even though there was manipulation of the film during processing and often during the darkroom printing process by many artists and professionals, outside of double exposures, some dodging or burning and some artists at Bauhaus . generally people did not notice as mostly the manipulations were to make the image look “more realistic” such as in commercial food images.
With digital images and software such as Photoshop which enabled manipulation of digital pixals increasingly people have been creating “misinformation ’ photographs often with the purposeof misleading people
And scientific research has also altered the nature of images .
For me the one important thing is that the photograph has been “freed up” to become an artistic expression of whatever the artist wants to express.
Images can be created using photographic techniques to create individual artistic images with no requirement that the image be something real or some real thing, expanding the range of the expression of a photograph enabling the artist to explore human feelings which go beyond that of the traditional photograph.
EndPapers
Never speak of others nor well of yourself.
The moment you open
Your mouth to speak,
The autumn wind stirs
And chills your lips,
from a poem by Buson used as an inscription for a painting of Basho by Buson, translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa from BASHŌ The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches
One of the Guardians at the inner gate at Senso-ji , Senso Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo Japan.
I am awe-struck
to hear a cricket singing,
Underneath the dark cavity
Of an old helmet.
Haiku by Bashō translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa from BASHŌ The Narrow Road to the North and Other Travel Sketches
Somewhere around a corner between a temple and a high rise apartment building .
I will be unable to post on this blog for a few weeks, perhaps if you have a curious you can review some of the posts from over the past five years, just keep navigating down and there will be a link to previous posts, or search by categories on the right sidebar .A final image of my wife from when we were courting, over 39 years ago . . .
Who am I to stand and wonder, to wait
While the wheels of fate slowly grind my life away?
Who am I?
Who Am I lyrics by (Country) Joe Allen Mcdonald
And myself about 54 years ago—sometimes I really miss Tri-X.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha
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