Slowly I’m working toward my goal. This is difficult this year with film projects moving and finishing up my book. I also have other writing to do and lots of reading. Of course there are other secret projects in the works. I hope you understand. When you are a one man shop a lot falls on your shoulders until funding is in place and a team can be constructed.

A lot of what I’m researching now is the impact of cell phones (texting), Facebook, twitter et. al.  (and company for the non latin speakers.  There is so little work done in this area but the need to understand the impact is great. Also propaganda is exploding in this country at a rate I never believed I see. Fact check EVERYTHING. I will continue to cover the art of propaganda.

I had a caught ask me how the Nazi’s controlled the German people. Good question. I explained there was a minister of propaganda to start with. Follow that with Gestapo enforcement, a level of fear was maintained. Kids enrolled in the Hitler Youth Movement and indoctrination was in place. Eugenics was unpopular so Hitler moved the clinic out into the country and they became the basis for the death camp. Seems Jews and some Gypsies and Catholics among others comprised the people Hitler felt were inferior. The scary part is Eugenics was born here in the USA and practiced for a limited time. Hitler made sure the US program would never get off the ground. Thanks God.

Here I go off topic. This photo is of an abandoned farm-house I stopped at on one of my many country drives. I shot these two years ago and I’m just now working with the images. More to come.

Related articles

• The Coming of Nazism. (irishmediaman.wordpress.com)

Some photographs are the same. There are those that I know exactly what I want to see when it’s done then there are those that just keep praying on your mind so you go back to it over and over trying different things until the picture revels itself. I find that this happens most on photographs that I passed over the first time I sorted shots. I’m just not in tune with it at the sorting time but later I see it and all of a sudden something popes out. The mystery of art or maybe better, the mystery of the mind.

Here is a sample of a poem that isn’t cooked yet. I keep them in the “not finished” folder on my computer.

I see blue sky

Finally;

The cold sets in.

But today the sky is blue.

I live for blue.

My chest. A thousand pounds

Pressing down.

What useless emotions.

Wasted and wasting me.

Where is peace?

Under the rubble of broken buildings in Haiti,

Shaken by God’s hand?  Maybe.

The year ends. I look for that strand to pull myself into the next.

Here is my statement:

“The main force that drives my photography is my desire to see things as they truly are and not through the metaphor of language.  I feel language takes away our ability to see the uniqueness of the people and things that surround us every day.

I subscribe to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real.  Lacan argues inThe Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that we must usethe Symbolic and the Imaginary to connect to the world around us and the primary tool is linguistics.  The Real is not the same thing as reality because our reality is composed of both the Imaginary and the Symbolic.  The Real is opposed to the Imaginary and stands outside the Symbolic.  In Lacan’s book, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991) Lacan makes it clear that “there is no absence in the Real.”  To see the Real is to experience a thing for the first time.

Click to view slideshow.To me this says what constitutes the Real is something observed in total.  No filters blocking the view or imaginary ideas polluting the observation.  In Lacan’s Seminar XI he defines the Real as “the impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to obtain.”

I strongly feel it is the job of the artist to reach past the obstacles and capture an image as close to the state of the Real as we can.  We bring it back and by showing it to others we give people the opportunity to encounter the Real even though it is shown through the interpretation of the artist.”

Visit the site: http://www.100in365.com/

Trilobite

I have started my 100 photos in 365 website. It is HERE. Please visit often. This image is TRILOBITE.

Today, even with the glut of drug ads for depression medication, we don’t except people with mental illness like we would any other sick person. We still want to shut the insane away or just abandoned them to a life of homelessness.

Asylum Door

Now the ones that haven’t been torn down lie shattered like many of the lives of the residence who once lived there.  A stark reminder that as a society we have yet come to grips with mental illness or its treatment.

Asylum 1