no more doors to open

Nikon D80 | 1/640 seconds | f 6.3 | ISO 800 | 62 mm
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Today, like the other five days in the last almost twenty years, should have been about change. Or so they stated each four years. I’m talking about the election day. My disappointment isn’t new or unexpected, or as a matter of fact, even important for a large group of people. But it’s mine. Instead of a long expected generation of new politicians, we have the old school boys.. again and one of the most weak voting presence in our short democracy history.

Without any connection, at the first sight, Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, said, in another age, that “one may know the world without going out of doors”. It’s a pity that the people, in particular politicians, that have this strategy in mind omitted the fact that then the resources weren’t so poor and the power so concentrated in the hands of few nations.

Soon won’t be any other door to open. The moment to think about the consequences of our actions it’s now.

if the gramophone could play

Nikon D80 | 1/500 seconds | f 5.0 | ISO 100 | 50 mm
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Nikon D80 | 1/500 seconds | f 3.5 | ISO 100 | 18 mm
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Martin Bormann said that films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his death, whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view. For those who don’t know who he was I’ll just say that he was a notorious Nazi of his time and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. But this isn’t the point. I thought that if he could only see today how wrong it was in his view – politically and artistically. The times when things stayed for ever are long gone. Even the classics – literature, music, painting – are a click away. We are all part of the great cultural industry and popular culture.

Instead we can keep the memories, the afterglow – the feelings after reading, listening, watching. The only memories I still have with the gramophone is when I listened to records in my childhood. Oh, what happiness when listening the favorite stories.

Like it or not, the so called consumerism drives our life. Shall not drive our passions too.

Note:

Gramophone, originally known as the phonograph, electromechanical instrument for reproducing sound from a record. A record is a vinyl disc that has a spiral groove with tiny bumps on the walls of the groove; the bumps encode a musical or other type of recording. The gramophone has four principal components: the turntable, the tonearm, the stylus, and the amplifier, although an amplifier was not always incorporated into the instrument. More modern examples came to be called record players.

framed reality

Nikon D80 | 1/500 seconds | f 4.5 | ISO 1o0 | 40 mm
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just trying some Jan-Oliver Wenzel stunt. not really the same results, but at least i have tried. just a day or two ago i put my hands on his book, "Fotofix", a great collection of photographic art, with amazing photographic puzzles. some interesting things to see and learn. for those of you who are kean to see some great black and white shoots you should check also his website. it's a must :)

worlds apart

Nikon D80 | 1/250 seconds | f 5.0 | ISO 160 | 50 mm
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I like people that are open to pose for me. Me, a complete stranger. I’m not so willing to do so in return, but this is another story. Resuming… I remember the character in this shoot very well. He was standing on the gravel in the old tower square in Sighisoara. Where else if not in Sighisoara, the place most surprising in all Romania, could you find such interesting face? I’ve noticed him, the pipe and… the neatly interior of his wide-opened backpack. He was a photographer. I smiled and he smiled right back at me and what I recall most of that moment is that, even if we didn’t have a real conversation, we understood each other perfectly because we were talking the… nikon language. Worlds apart, just a detail, same passion. Isn’t it strange how just a few seconds can create such great memories?