"And you know what I think basically that the universe is an artpeice and an art project.
And we could become great artist contributing to the art project."- Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl
See Pinchbeck's website at http://www.realitysandwich.com/
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Retrieval Systems random snapshots
Left to right: Myself, Ranjit Hoskote & Baiju Parthan. I had the pleasure of meeting great artist like Jatin Das and Gopi Gajwani who complemented my 'Tiatriste' portraits. For information about the gallery please see http://www.artalivegallery.com/Thursday, November 12, 2009
Show 'Retrieval Systems' curated by Ranjit Hoskote
My portraits will be a part of this show. I know Delhi is a little far away for us Goans, but if you are there please pass by.
- Alex Fernandes
Please visit http://www.artalivegallery.com/artists.php?cat=artists&scat=261
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The art of photography
Photography always transforms what it describes. The art of photography is to control that transformation....
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Portraits of the Goan musician Sanya Cotta
On the 9th of Aug 2009 I had the pleasure of photographing Miss Sanya Cotta in Panjim, Goa. The daughter of the well known Goan guitarist Mr. Schubert & Mercy Cotta, Sanya is doing the pedagogic part of her music education at the ‘Junge Deutsche Philharmonie’, in Nuremberg, Germany. She also teaches music at the school there.
Sanya, will perform in Goa at the Kala Academy on the 26th of August 2009 accompanied by Romanian pianist, Delia Varga.
Try not to miss the concert. See also Sanya My la Cotta with Goa Symphony Orchestra.
Click to view musicians slide show
Monday, August 3, 2009
Fashion photography in the age of Kali
What is Fashion Photography?
The history of fashion photography is inseparable from that of fashion itself. Though it drew its visual inspiration from modern art, the fashion image was also concerned with the creation of consumer desire. Both are linked to the growth of capitalist economies and the development of mass markets. As a measure of social standing, fashion has been a part of Western culture since the Renaissance. Some historians observe the frequently changing clothing styles as a distinctively Western habit among urban populations. It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that it emerged as a widespread cultural and commercial phenomenon. Part of industrialized Europe’s new individualist mentality, mass fashion emerged into a burgeoning culture of spectacle, self-development and material enjoyment, gaining a social and cultural significance that had previously been available only to society’s elite. The modern couturier was no mere dressmaker, but was celebrated as an artist and a creative genius, despite the tacit knowledge that he or she was bound to the vagaries of consumer desire in a way that other artists were not.
Fashion photography comprises a wide array of practices (editorial and advertising, beauty, portraiture and documentary photography, to name a few) and involves a range of skilled creative and businesspeople (stylists, photographers, models, advertisers, artists, designers, hairstylists, creative and artistic directors, makeup artists, set builders and so on), brought together by shared goals and contexts. Fashion photography therefore is often seen as less free to be outspoken about the world that it represents. Critics, as well as a significant number of fashion-industry creative’s don’t believe that fashion photography is capable of saying anything of real political or social significance. The difference between the artistic and the merely decorative or commercial as Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes with critical intent –“the sleazy and decidedly uneuphoric insistence on the visibility of class, its injuries, and its violence that distinguishes art photography from other forms”. Art has always influenced fashion, and there have been instances when earlier fashion photographs have been perceived as art. Photographers like Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, could be artist and others mere commercial professionals.
The Media, social, political, and cultural influences have a significant effect on how fashion is viewed. An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, newspapers, on television, fashion websites, social networks and in fashion blogs. Using creative talent, modern fashion also depends upon image and advertising spectacles. The visual presentation of fashion quickly became as important as the production of garments itself. The fashion garment gained meaning and relevance for the consumer through its reproduction and circulation as an image. Despite television and increasing internet coverage, including fashion blogs, press coverage remains the most important form of publicity in the eyes of the industry. Fashion photography therefore becomes an important element of the fashion advertising industry.
If photography can distort reality, fashion photography is really far from the truth, its sole intent the creation of capital. In 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord anatomized that visible universe and its relation to capital; he saw it as a world colonized by false desires and illusions, epitomized by the ubiquity of the commodity form. In many respects the fashion show is the paradigm of Debord’s notion of spectacle, which he described as narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-referential. The spectacle, according to Debord is ‘capital become an image’. The sight of the journalists and photographers at work in the fashion show reveals both sides of the way in which capital is constructed as image, first in the show itself and in its dissemination by the press.
Fashion photography’s coupling with industry and commerce, its frivolous and ephemeral role in the marketing and selling of garments and the questionable part it plays in the construction of feminine identity is undeniable. Bruce Checefsky, of ‘The Cleveland Institute of Art’ writes ‘The invention of photography in the 1830s brought voyeurism to the masses. It made public what was previously only imagined and secret. The great early erotic–pornographic photographers proved that high shock value and intense sensuality compelled the reader to pay attention, willingly or otherwise. Nineteenth century fashion photographers learned this lesson quickly. Desire has always been the common objective of pornography and fashion photography’. He continues, ‘Pornography undermines the power dynamics between male and female, photographer and subject. It reinforces crude, restrictive sex-role stereotypes and standards of beauty’. Mainstream erotic–pornographic imagery is as polished as fashion photographs from publishers Condé Nast or the Hearst Corporation’.
Glamour and fashion photography generally stops short of showing explicit sex but it is intended to be erotic. According to Jennifer Craik, ‘fashion images constantly play with definitions of sexuality, their conventions neither fixed nor purposeful. Rather they are a nexus between fashion and selfhood; the desire generated for consumers is constantly being reconfirmed as natural’.
The 1960s marked a turning point in sexually explicit photography. Fashion magazines explored the sexual and social codes in clothing and gesture; style, elegance, and social status gave way to overtly sexual narratives. By the late 1960s, however, nudity in fashion magazines had lost its shock value; it had become common. Sex today is more obsessive than the liberating 1960s and our visual culture is increasingly crowded with images of it. The influence of pornography on both Glamour and fashion photography is undisputable. Fashion trends construct gender identities that reflect our sexual fantasies. Fetish subcultures and an attraction to fashion’s dark side have provided designers and photographers with a rich source of material for decades.
The anatomy of movie stars and fashion models
Models are the human subjects of fashion photography. Agents, or bookers, represent models, get work for them, and in return take a percentage of their earnings. Clients include a range of people who use a model’s services, whether or not they directly pay for it, potentially including photographers, magazine editors, stylists designers, catalogue houses, advertising agencies, hair and makeup artists, show event producers, art buyers and casting directors.
Ordinary people are largely absent from fashion photography. Historically, it is the beautiful, the wealthy or the famous who sell the designer garments promoted by fashion magazines and mass-market advertising. Movie stars are perfect as models for fashion photography. Fashion, it seems, cannot live without the movie star as its most valuable model. For the designer, it means effective advertising: ‘having the right star wear your clothes at a high-profile event is worth tens of millions of dollars in advertising’. For the movie star, a fashion photograph is a means of reinforcing and maintaining his or her stardom.
Models, in contrast, generally show no continuity at all in fashion photography (supermodels being the only exception), as they simply do their job: to present the latest fashion. For models, modelling means ‘working’. As for stars, modelling means ‘one way of displaying his or her star qualities, The fashion photograph of a movie star, then, is more complex than that of a model. In part, this is because the fashion photograph must always respect the continuity within the star’s image or persona. Movie stars, models, and the fashion photograph combine powerfully to seduce the consumer.
The professional/amateur model is an object, human flesh turned into an image. Even when radically manipulated, the body does not stray far from the raw materials of youth, thinness and beauty that the model has always supplied and the fashion industry nearly always demanded. Agents construct different personas for the model, each of which is easily recognizable to clients as a particular type. The model’s racial background and the market that he or she is working in also play an important part in casting the particular type. (For example you cannot use Japanese, Chinese or Korean models for a market that demands ‘brown-skinned Bollywood’ or vice versa).
Susan Sontag notes on the fashion model: “Like photographs, which function as both an index and distortion of reality, models are a contradictory medium. They must simultaneously exhibit an infinite mutability while being faithfully transparent: constantly transforming, constantly themselves.”
Roland Barthes says of the fashion model (or, to use his term, ‘the cover girl’) is limited, but what little he does say challenges the notion that the essential function of the fashion model is aesthetic – rather, she is an absolute body, which signifies only as fashion. He writes, ‘it is not a question of delivering a “beautiful body”, subject to the canonic rules of plastic success, but a “deformed” body with a view to achieving a certain formal generality’ That this body belongs to an individual as well as having ‘the value of an abstract institution’ represents a rare structural paradox: between these two conditions there is no ‘drift’. That is, there can be no empirical instance of this ‘ideal, incarnate body’ – it exists only in the image.
Once a model has become successful, as is the case with super models; he or she transcends national or ethnic categories and clients begin to ask for him or her by name. Even in these situations, however, racial and national categories remain important. When a model becomes successful, the categories of identification become public and uncontrollable by the agent. As Jennifer Craik notes: around 1990s models like Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford promoted a “formulaic recipe for a ‘technical beauty’ with a Darwinian undertone: tall, thin, and rich”.
Artificial ideals in the fashion photograph.
A fashion photograph is never true to humanity, as French art historian & poet Henri Focillon, writes in the early 1930s, ‘fashion invents an artificial humanity’. ‘Such a humanity,’ he continues, ‘obeys much less the rule of rational propriety than the poetry of ornament, and what fashion calls line or style is perhaps but a subtle compromise between a certain physiological canon…and a pure fantasy of shapes’.
In speaking of ‘a subtle compromise’ he touches upon an aspect of fashion that is often underplayed – the limitations imposed on it by the body. Both in illustration and then in photography, which had to contend with the more troublesome medium of flesh and bone, the faults of nature have been modified. In many regards, digital manipulation of the image is a continuation of older techniques that airbrushed the image of a model into the state of perfection that is usually required in fashion’s world of a sleek, wrinkle free humanity. In the digitally manipulated image there is no original, using digital technology the solid elements of the conventional photograph are dissolved into a kaleidoscope of pixels that can, writes Robin Derrick, be ‘seamlessly altered, blended and mixed together’, making ‘anything possible’
Artifice lies at the very core of fashion’s existence. Fashion defies nature, constantly attempting to create and re-create its image of beauty over the human body. The fashion image advocates artifice, perfection and glamour, thereby imposing unrealistic aesthetic standards upon women and encouraging acts of imitation. The models themselves seem as artificial as their environment, beyond human in their flawless beauty and deceptive smiles. The real body approaches the ideal of airbrushed humanity in order to maintain the unattainable level of perfection. As Dutch photographer, Inez van Lamsweerde tacit has commented, “You could never find this girl once, much less twice – an artificial humanity, cloned according to the DNA of fashion.
A process of creating an artificial ideal also occurs with the body of the fashion model, which is drained of any biological realities. Professor Elizabeth Wilson from the London College of Fashion notes in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity; ‘this is the body as an idea rather than as an organism’. In other words, the fashion-model body does not introduce anything new, anything biological, into the image, but can only be a reiteration of that which is already present – ‘fashion’. Barthes makes a similar point, he writes, ‘the world, everything which is not the garment, is exorcized, rid of all naturalism: nothing plausible remains but the garment’
There can be no doubt as to the narcissism of fashion photography, having rejected the model provided by nature, it turns to itself as the ideal and creates something ‘nearer to its heart desire’, something that is beyond perfection.
Fashion photography in the Age of kali
According to Hinduism and Buddhism we are currently in the age of Kali Yuga, ruled by Kali, the dark mother, Shakti’s wrathful aspect, who liberates trough decapitating. The Kali Yuga could be looked upon as the goddess Shakti throwing a fit. When such a powerful deity (feminine Shakti energy), goes berserk the entire Earth suffers and strains from her fury.
In the modern world, we became obsessed with material goods, hypnotized by false needs, possessed by our possession. The modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unnecessarily. Kali Yuga humanity, deprived of proper nurturing, has become devious, without a soul and insatiably greedy. Electronic culture created soulless replacements for collective rituals- television supplanted tribal rituals told around a fire; fast food took place of a shared meal. We had substituted matter for mother and objects for emotional bonds.
Sexuality is shrouded in aggression and mistrust. Young women’s bodies are endlessly used as props to sell products. Fashion Photographers still exposed the body (specially the female body) with blatant sexuality; the playful and sometimes perverse eroticism between body and clothes promoted sexual liberation. David Bailey, was the prototype fashion photographer–hero of the 1960s, was a young London-based member of the “Terrible Three,” which also included Terrence Donovan and Brian Duff y. Bailey’s fashion photographs were stark, streetwise, and spontaneous beyond anything done before. His images were sexually charged by his notorious personal and professional relationships where the camera-as-penis was the only thing between the viewer and the female subject. This type of fashion imagery is still is still directed toward a male audience and generally emphasizes sexual arousal and desirability.
As a young photographer, I had idolized photographers like David Bailey; my naiveté had epitomized fashion photography to be at the vanguard of photographic art. I had been drawn towards unnatural desires and definitions of beauty while unwittingly confirming these as natural.On our deepest levels, men seem largely unchanged by history. The high incidence of rape in our society suggest that the gender bias remains unchanged at a subconscious level (probably due to the Judeo-Christian beliefs of a monotheist patriarchal God). Women on the other hand are constantly changing, and struggling against thousands of years of male domination. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich puts it, “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of patriarchy”.
It is truly difficult to envision what a sex positive culture may be like in the future. ‘Kalis’ wrath is a reaction to the denigration of nature and woman at the core of our culture, as a part of the historical movement to separate and seek transcendence from our bodily nature.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
******************************************************************
The history of fashion photography is inseparable from that of fashion itself. Though it drew its visual inspiration from modern art, the fashion image was also concerned with the creation of consumer desire. Both are linked to the growth of capitalist economies and the development of mass markets. As a measure of social standing, fashion has been a part of Western culture since the Renaissance. Some historians observe the frequently changing clothing styles as a distinctively Western habit among urban populations. It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that it emerged as a widespread cultural and commercial phenomenon. Part of industrialized Europe’s new individualist mentality, mass fashion emerged into a burgeoning culture of spectacle, self-development and material enjoyment, gaining a social and cultural significance that had previously been available only to society’s elite. The modern couturier was no mere dressmaker, but was celebrated as an artist and a creative genius, despite the tacit knowledge that he or she was bound to the vagaries of consumer desire in a way that other artists were not.
Fashion photography comprises a wide array of practices (editorial and advertising, beauty, portraiture and documentary photography, to name a few) and involves a range of skilled creative and businesspeople (stylists, photographers, models, advertisers, artists, designers, hairstylists, creative and artistic directors, makeup artists, set builders and so on), brought together by shared goals and contexts. Fashion photography therefore is often seen as less free to be outspoken about the world that it represents. Critics, as well as a significant number of fashion-industry creative’s don’t believe that fashion photography is capable of saying anything of real political or social significance. The difference between the artistic and the merely decorative or commercial as Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes with critical intent –“the sleazy and decidedly uneuphoric insistence on the visibility of class, its injuries, and its violence that distinguishes art photography from other forms”. Art has always influenced fashion, and there have been instances when earlier fashion photographs have been perceived as art. Photographers like Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, could be artist and others mere commercial professionals.
The Media, social, political, and cultural influences have a significant effect on how fashion is viewed. An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, newspapers, on television, fashion websites, social networks and in fashion blogs. Using creative talent, modern fashion also depends upon image and advertising spectacles. The visual presentation of fashion quickly became as important as the production of garments itself. The fashion garment gained meaning and relevance for the consumer through its reproduction and circulation as an image. Despite television and increasing internet coverage, including fashion blogs, press coverage remains the most important form of publicity in the eyes of the industry. Fashion photography therefore becomes an important element of the fashion advertising industry.
If photography can distort reality, fashion photography is really far from the truth, its sole intent the creation of capital. In 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord anatomized that visible universe and its relation to capital; he saw it as a world colonized by false desires and illusions, epitomized by the ubiquity of the commodity form. In many respects the fashion show is the paradigm of Debord’s notion of spectacle, which he described as narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-referential. The spectacle, according to Debord is ‘capital become an image’. The sight of the journalists and photographers at work in the fashion show reveals both sides of the way in which capital is constructed as image, first in the show itself and in its dissemination by the press.
Fashion photography’s coupling with industry and commerce, its frivolous and ephemeral role in the marketing and selling of garments and the questionable part it plays in the construction of feminine identity is undeniable. Bruce Checefsky, of ‘The Cleveland Institute of Art’ writes ‘The invention of photography in the 1830s brought voyeurism to the masses. It made public what was previously only imagined and secret. The great early erotic–pornographic photographers proved that high shock value and intense sensuality compelled the reader to pay attention, willingly or otherwise. Nineteenth century fashion photographers learned this lesson quickly. Desire has always been the common objective of pornography and fashion photography’. He continues, ‘Pornography undermines the power dynamics between male and female, photographer and subject. It reinforces crude, restrictive sex-role stereotypes and standards of beauty’. Mainstream erotic–pornographic imagery is as polished as fashion photographs from publishers Condé Nast or the Hearst Corporation’.
Glamour and fashion photography generally stops short of showing explicit sex but it is intended to be erotic. According to Jennifer Craik, ‘fashion images constantly play with definitions of sexuality, their conventions neither fixed nor purposeful. Rather they are a nexus between fashion and selfhood; the desire generated for consumers is constantly being reconfirmed as natural’.
The 1960s marked a turning point in sexually explicit photography. Fashion magazines explored the sexual and social codes in clothing and gesture; style, elegance, and social status gave way to overtly sexual narratives. By the late 1960s, however, nudity in fashion magazines had lost its shock value; it had become common. Sex today is more obsessive than the liberating 1960s and our visual culture is increasingly crowded with images of it. The influence of pornography on both Glamour and fashion photography is undisputable. Fashion trends construct gender identities that reflect our sexual fantasies. Fetish subcultures and an attraction to fashion’s dark side have provided designers and photographers with a rich source of material for decades.
The anatomy of movie stars and fashion models
Models are the human subjects of fashion photography. Agents, or bookers, represent models, get work for them, and in return take a percentage of their earnings. Clients include a range of people who use a model’s services, whether or not they directly pay for it, potentially including photographers, magazine editors, stylists designers, catalogue houses, advertising agencies, hair and makeup artists, show event producers, art buyers and casting directors.
Ordinary people are largely absent from fashion photography. Historically, it is the beautiful, the wealthy or the famous who sell the designer garments promoted by fashion magazines and mass-market advertising. Movie stars are perfect as models for fashion photography. Fashion, it seems, cannot live without the movie star as its most valuable model. For the designer, it means effective advertising: ‘having the right star wear your clothes at a high-profile event is worth tens of millions of dollars in advertising’. For the movie star, a fashion photograph is a means of reinforcing and maintaining his or her stardom.
Models, in contrast, generally show no continuity at all in fashion photography (supermodels being the only exception), as they simply do their job: to present the latest fashion. For models, modelling means ‘working’. As for stars, modelling means ‘one way of displaying his or her star qualities, The fashion photograph of a movie star, then, is more complex than that of a model. In part, this is because the fashion photograph must always respect the continuity within the star’s image or persona. Movie stars, models, and the fashion photograph combine powerfully to seduce the consumer.
The professional/amateur model is an object, human flesh turned into an image. Even when radically manipulated, the body does not stray far from the raw materials of youth, thinness and beauty that the model has always supplied and the fashion industry nearly always demanded. Agents construct different personas for the model, each of which is easily recognizable to clients as a particular type. The model’s racial background and the market that he or she is working in also play an important part in casting the particular type. (For example you cannot use Japanese, Chinese or Korean models for a market that demands ‘brown-skinned Bollywood’ or vice versa).
Susan Sontag notes on the fashion model: “Like photographs, which function as both an index and distortion of reality, models are a contradictory medium. They must simultaneously exhibit an infinite mutability while being faithfully transparent: constantly transforming, constantly themselves.”
Roland Barthes says of the fashion model (or, to use his term, ‘the cover girl’) is limited, but what little he does say challenges the notion that the essential function of the fashion model is aesthetic – rather, she is an absolute body, which signifies only as fashion. He writes, ‘it is not a question of delivering a “beautiful body”, subject to the canonic rules of plastic success, but a “deformed” body with a view to achieving a certain formal generality’ That this body belongs to an individual as well as having ‘the value of an abstract institution’ represents a rare structural paradox: between these two conditions there is no ‘drift’. That is, there can be no empirical instance of this ‘ideal, incarnate body’ – it exists only in the image.
Once a model has become successful, as is the case with super models; he or she transcends national or ethnic categories and clients begin to ask for him or her by name. Even in these situations, however, racial and national categories remain important. When a model becomes successful, the categories of identification become public and uncontrollable by the agent. As Jennifer Craik notes: around 1990s models like Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford promoted a “formulaic recipe for a ‘technical beauty’ with a Darwinian undertone: tall, thin, and rich”.
Artificial ideals in the fashion photograph.
A fashion photograph is never true to humanity, as French art historian & poet Henri Focillon, writes in the early 1930s, ‘fashion invents an artificial humanity’. ‘Such a humanity,’ he continues, ‘obeys much less the rule of rational propriety than the poetry of ornament, and what fashion calls line or style is perhaps but a subtle compromise between a certain physiological canon…and a pure fantasy of shapes’.
In speaking of ‘a subtle compromise’ he touches upon an aspect of fashion that is often underplayed – the limitations imposed on it by the body. Both in illustration and then in photography, which had to contend with the more troublesome medium of flesh and bone, the faults of nature have been modified. In many regards, digital manipulation of the image is a continuation of older techniques that airbrushed the image of a model into the state of perfection that is usually required in fashion’s world of a sleek, wrinkle free humanity. In the digitally manipulated image there is no original, using digital technology the solid elements of the conventional photograph are dissolved into a kaleidoscope of pixels that can, writes Robin Derrick, be ‘seamlessly altered, blended and mixed together’, making ‘anything possible’
Artifice lies at the very core of fashion’s existence. Fashion defies nature, constantly attempting to create and re-create its image of beauty over the human body. The fashion image advocates artifice, perfection and glamour, thereby imposing unrealistic aesthetic standards upon women and encouraging acts of imitation. The models themselves seem as artificial as their environment, beyond human in their flawless beauty and deceptive smiles. The real body approaches the ideal of airbrushed humanity in order to maintain the unattainable level of perfection. As Dutch photographer, Inez van Lamsweerde tacit has commented, “You could never find this girl once, much less twice – an artificial humanity, cloned according to the DNA of fashion.
A process of creating an artificial ideal also occurs with the body of the fashion model, which is drained of any biological realities. Professor Elizabeth Wilson from the London College of Fashion notes in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity; ‘this is the body as an idea rather than as an organism’. In other words, the fashion-model body does not introduce anything new, anything biological, into the image, but can only be a reiteration of that which is already present – ‘fashion’. Barthes makes a similar point, he writes, ‘the world, everything which is not the garment, is exorcized, rid of all naturalism: nothing plausible remains but the garment’
There can be no doubt as to the narcissism of fashion photography, having rejected the model provided by nature, it turns to itself as the ideal and creates something ‘nearer to its heart desire’, something that is beyond perfection.
Fashion photography in the Age of kali
According to Hinduism and Buddhism we are currently in the age of Kali Yuga, ruled by Kali, the dark mother, Shakti’s wrathful aspect, who liberates trough decapitating. The Kali Yuga could be looked upon as the goddess Shakti throwing a fit. When such a powerful deity (feminine Shakti energy), goes berserk the entire Earth suffers and strains from her fury.
In the modern world, we became obsessed with material goods, hypnotized by false needs, possessed by our possession. The modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unnecessarily. Kali Yuga humanity, deprived of proper nurturing, has become devious, without a soul and insatiably greedy. Electronic culture created soulless replacements for collective rituals- television supplanted tribal rituals told around a fire; fast food took place of a shared meal. We had substituted matter for mother and objects for emotional bonds.
Sexuality is shrouded in aggression and mistrust. Young women’s bodies are endlessly used as props to sell products. Fashion Photographers still exposed the body (specially the female body) with blatant sexuality; the playful and sometimes perverse eroticism between body and clothes promoted sexual liberation. David Bailey, was the prototype fashion photographer–hero of the 1960s, was a young London-based member of the “Terrible Three,” which also included Terrence Donovan and Brian Duff y. Bailey’s fashion photographs were stark, streetwise, and spontaneous beyond anything done before. His images were sexually charged by his notorious personal and professional relationships where the camera-as-penis was the only thing between the viewer and the female subject. This type of fashion imagery is still is still directed toward a male audience and generally emphasizes sexual arousal and desirability.
As a young photographer, I had idolized photographers like David Bailey; my naiveté had epitomized fashion photography to be at the vanguard of photographic art. I had been drawn towards unnatural desires and definitions of beauty while unwittingly confirming these as natural.On our deepest levels, men seem largely unchanged by history. The high incidence of rape in our society suggest that the gender bias remains unchanged at a subconscious level (probably due to the Judeo-Christian beliefs of a monotheist patriarchal God). Women on the other hand are constantly changing, and struggling against thousands of years of male domination. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich puts it, “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of patriarchy”.
It is truly difficult to envision what a sex positive culture may be like in the future. ‘Kalis’ wrath is a reaction to the denigration of nature and woman at the core of our culture, as a part of the historical movement to separate and seek transcendence from our bodily nature.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
******************************************************************
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies What can we do, now that democracy and the free market are one?
A Link to Arundathi Roy's brilliant essay... (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23092.htm)
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Tiatriste and Jungian archetypes
Origins of Archetypes
The word archetype appeared in European texts as early as 1545, It derives from the Latin noun archetypum and that from the Greek noun (archetypon), meaning "first-moulded". An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior. A stereotype on the other hand is a personality type observed multiple times, especially an oversimplification of such a type
The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. ‘The Theory of Forms’ typically refers to Plato's belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only a shadow of the real world. The forms, according to Plato, are roughly speaking archetypes or abstract representations of the many types and properties of things we see all around us.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung *compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Archetypes, according to Jung were…innate universal psychic dispositions that form the ‘substrate’ from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behavior.
Jung also realized the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature; it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. Jung introduced the notion of a race mind, racial consciousness archetypes.
Archetypal psychology was developed by James Hillman in the second half of the 20th century attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives, that the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies.
Archetypes are ontological manifestations of the creative Ground of Being-itself (Paul Tillich), essentially divine thought forms. Whitehead called them “complex eternal objects.”
The archetypal forms behind all myths belong to the mystery of the creative ground of everything that is.”
Tillich clearly saw the archetypes as ontological structures. What this means in his own philosophical system is that since Being (ontos) = the Divine, the archetypes are essences or thoughts forms in the Divine Life, to put it symbolically rather than in ontological language. Put alternatively, archetypes arise from within the creative Ground of Being-itself.
Experiencing the Archetype (The Psychologist perspective)
The Value of the Archetype
Archetypes can be found in nearly all forms of literature, with their motifs being predominantly rooted in folklore. All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true not only of religious ideas; even the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
‘Tiatriste’ as the Archetypal image. Click here to view slide show
As a second generation Goan born in Dhobitalo, Mumbai, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my Grandmother and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Mumbai exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan, but living in ‘Dhobitalo’ one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatriste’, most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common sight after Sunday mass. ‘Dhobitalao’, was described by many as the “Goan enclave of Mumbai”.
The ‘Tiatriste’ portraits confirm to the Jungian perspective of archetypal images for various reasons. Susan Sontag talks about a three way relationship between the photographer, the object of the photograph and the viewer of the same. Me being a photographer of Goan origin, the “object”/ ‘Tiatriste’ in their exaggerated stage garbs, and the viewer’s involvement (particularly the Goan race mind) that create this ‘identifiable fantasy’.
Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an "archetype" is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
Somewhere in the Goan psyche we have Archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture and this is from where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognize fictional characters as entities for whom we might predict behavior and sympathize. (What makes the character of Ganesh recognizable to worshipers as a god, for instance?)Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. This imagery I believe comes from a Universal experience. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman etc are not archetypes, but archetypal images which have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
Ranjit Hoskote, poet, cultural theorist, curator, and my friend writes “Unlike the caricatures that the popular Hindi cinema employs to represent regional cultures – such figures are stereotypes, not archetypes – the ‘Tiatristes’ play out readily identifiable personae in whom the audience has strong emotional investments, at a personal as well as a collective level. Through their interpretations, they can exteriorise and provide a safety valve for the potentially disruptive energies of resentment and mutiny that every hierarchically ordered society would nourish; they also allow for the genial confrontation of problems that afflict the body collective, and for the anticipation and recognition of crisis in the public sphere”. (See Ranjit Hoskote’s essay http://www.alexfernandesportraits.com/hoskote.html also Alex Fernandes in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote)
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda in his drawings had almost identical archetypal images of Goans to my ‘Tiatrise’ portraits. Though I had been influenced by Mario’s work right from my early years, (I was particularly fond of his Goan caricatures) I had not intended to emulate Mario’s figures in any way.
Prior to photographing the ‘Tiatriste’, I had instructed the actors to dress in the stage garbs of the characters that they best portrayed on stage. As I was shooting the portraits, I realized that I was getting images that looked very similar to Mario’s Goan characters, right down to the almost identical costumes worn by Mario’s characters and the ‘Tiatriste’. Somehow even with an exaggerated stage costume, the ‘Tiatriste’ was transformed into easily identifiable archetypal image before the camera.
I do not look on my portraits as just an illustration of ‘Tiatriste’ or ‘Tiatre’ but I always felt it has much broader implications. In a lecture entitled ‘Portraits of our people' at the Xavier’s History Research Centre in Porvorim, Goa, I had tried to explain the impact from the Archetype on my portraits. A view that both Ranjit Hoskote and myself share, but unfortunately one that somehow seems to be obscured.
The Goan portraits as a series have a temporal dimension and semiotic context. They are visual symbols that tell a story of a people in a certain time. The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to the Goan “race mind”. The various parts that represent the whole entity for example, like their stage names, body shapes, postures, clothing etc that represents the content, the collection of ideas and perceptions that we circle in a metaphysical Venn diagram to delineate exactly what constitutes a particular entity. The collective ideas that lie within within the circle as in the hand that pushes the pen to draw it (in Mario's case) or that presses the shutter release (in my case) – or rather in the mind that guides that hand.
The archetypes had synchronastically manifested themselves in Mario’s work, in ‘Tiatre’ and my portraits. Synchronicities are those moments of "meaningful coincidence" when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the process of being inwardly realized.
Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and more difficult to apprehend. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, etc. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world.
Alex A. A. Fernandes.
see related article by Cecil Pinto : http://alexfernandesphotography.blogspot.com/2011/01/stereotyping-goan-they-never-get-it.html
* Myth imparts structure to space and time; myth weaves the world into being. According to the perspective of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the structure of myth is buried deep in hidden process of the psyche, and this structure recurs universally in individuals and across all human societies. From his own dreams, cross-cultural studies, and the material provided by his patients, Jung developed the theory of “collective consciousness”, a repository of myth, symbol and archetypes that emanates from a source beyond the individual mind. Jung describes the archetypes of the collective unconscious as “spontaneous phenomenon which are not subject to our will, and we are therefore justified in ascribing to them a certain autonomy”. A mythological or archetypal complex- such as Judeo – Christian Apocalypse – is, from this Jungian perspective, ultimately a psychic event that can take material manifestation, like a collective dream coming to life. - From Daniel Pinchbeck's 'The Return of Quetzalcoatl'
The word archetype appeared in European texts as early as 1545, It derives from the Latin noun archetypum and that from the Greek noun (archetypon), meaning "first-moulded". An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior. A stereotype on the other hand is a personality type observed multiple times, especially an oversimplification of such a type
The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. ‘The Theory of Forms’ typically refers to Plato's belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only a shadow of the real world. The forms, according to Plato, are roughly speaking archetypes or abstract representations of the many types and properties of things we see all around us.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung *compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Archetypes, according to Jung were…innate universal psychic dispositions that form the ‘substrate’ from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behavior.
Jung also realized the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature; it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. Jung introduced the notion of a race mind, racial consciousness archetypes.
Archetypal psychology was developed by James Hillman in the second half of the 20th century attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives, that the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies.
Archetypes are ontological manifestations of the creative Ground of Being-itself (Paul Tillich), essentially divine thought forms. Whitehead called them “complex eternal objects.”
The archetypal forms behind all myths belong to the mystery of the creative ground of everything that is.”
Tillich clearly saw the archetypes as ontological structures. What this means in his own philosophical system is that since Being (ontos) = the Divine, the archetypes are essences or thoughts forms in the Divine Life, to put it symbolically rather than in ontological language. Put alternatively, archetypes arise from within the creative Ground of Being-itself.
Experiencing the Archetype (The Psychologist perspective)
The Value of the Archetype
Archetypes can be found in nearly all forms of literature, with their motifs being predominantly rooted in folklore. All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true not only of religious ideas; even the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
‘Tiatriste’ as the Archetypal image. Click here to view slide show
As a second generation Goan born in Dhobitalo, Mumbai, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my Grandmother and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Mumbai exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan, but living in ‘Dhobitalo’ one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatriste’, most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common sight after Sunday mass. ‘Dhobitalao’, was described by many as the “Goan enclave of Mumbai”.
The ‘Tiatriste’ portraits confirm to the Jungian perspective of archetypal images for various reasons. Susan Sontag talks about a three way relationship between the photographer, the object of the photograph and the viewer of the same. Me being a photographer of Goan origin, the “object”/ ‘Tiatriste’ in their exaggerated stage garbs, and the viewer’s involvement (particularly the Goan race mind) that create this ‘identifiable fantasy’.
Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an "archetype" is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
Somewhere in the Goan psyche we have Archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture and this is from where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognize fictional characters as entities for whom we might predict behavior and sympathize. (What makes the character of Ganesh recognizable to worshipers as a god, for instance?)Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. This imagery I believe comes from a Universal experience. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman etc are not archetypes, but archetypal images which have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
Ranjit Hoskote, poet, cultural theorist, curator, and my friend writes “Unlike the caricatures that the popular Hindi cinema employs to represent regional cultures – such figures are stereotypes, not archetypes – the ‘Tiatristes’ play out readily identifiable personae in whom the audience has strong emotional investments, at a personal as well as a collective level. Through their interpretations, they can exteriorise and provide a safety valve for the potentially disruptive energies of resentment and mutiny that every hierarchically ordered society would nourish; they also allow for the genial confrontation of problems that afflict the body collective, and for the anticipation and recognition of crisis in the public sphere”. (See Ranjit Hoskote’s essay http://www.alexfernandesportraits.com/hoskote.html also Alex Fernandes in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote)
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda in his drawings had almost identical archetypal images of Goans to my ‘Tiatrise’ portraits. Though I had been influenced by Mario’s work right from my early years, (I was particularly fond of his Goan caricatures) I had not intended to emulate Mario’s figures in any way.
Prior to photographing the ‘Tiatriste’, I had instructed the actors to dress in the stage garbs of the characters that they best portrayed on stage. As I was shooting the portraits, I realized that I was getting images that looked very similar to Mario’s Goan characters, right down to the almost identical costumes worn by Mario’s characters and the ‘Tiatriste’. Somehow even with an exaggerated stage costume, the ‘Tiatriste’ was transformed into easily identifiable archetypal image before the camera.
I do not look on my portraits as just an illustration of ‘Tiatriste’ or ‘Tiatre’ but I always felt it has much broader implications. In a lecture entitled ‘Portraits of our people' at the Xavier’s History Research Centre in Porvorim, Goa, I had tried to explain the impact from the Archetype on my portraits. A view that both Ranjit Hoskote and myself share, but unfortunately one that somehow seems to be obscured.
The Goan portraits as a series have a temporal dimension and semiotic context. They are visual symbols that tell a story of a people in a certain time. The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to the Goan “race mind”. The various parts that represent the whole entity for example, like their stage names, body shapes, postures, clothing etc that represents the content, the collection of ideas and perceptions that we circle in a metaphysical Venn diagram to delineate exactly what constitutes a particular entity. The collective ideas that lie within within the circle as in the hand that pushes the pen to draw it (in Mario's case) or that presses the shutter release (in my case) – or rather in the mind that guides that hand.
The archetypes had synchronastically manifested themselves in Mario’s work, in ‘Tiatre’ and my portraits. Synchronicities are those moments of "meaningful coincidence" when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the process of being inwardly realized.
Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and more difficult to apprehend. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, etc. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world.
Alex A. A. Fernandes.
see related article by Cecil Pinto : http://alexfernandesphotography.blogspot.com/2011/01/stereotyping-goan-they-never-get-it.html
* Myth imparts structure to space and time; myth weaves the world into being. According to the perspective of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the structure of myth is buried deep in hidden process of the psyche, and this structure recurs universally in individuals and across all human societies. From his own dreams, cross-cultural studies, and the material provided by his patients, Jung developed the theory of “collective consciousness”, a repository of myth, symbol and archetypes that emanates from a source beyond the individual mind. Jung describes the archetypes of the collective unconscious as “spontaneous phenomenon which are not subject to our will, and we are therefore justified in ascribing to them a certain autonomy”. A mythological or archetypal complex- such as Judeo – Christian Apocalypse – is, from this Jungian perspective, ultimately a psychic event that can take material manifestation, like a collective dream coming to life. - From Daniel Pinchbeck's 'The Return of Quetzalcoatl'
Monday, June 29, 2009
Alien Dream Time by Terence McKenna
For my friends...If you don't already know; I would like to introduce you to Terence McKennas, Alien Dream Time.
“History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophy approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, internal surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination - exploring creature that we are.”
“And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”
“What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means you’re getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It’s an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into
hyperspace.”
“History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophy approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, internal surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination - exploring creature that we are.”
“And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”
“What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means you’re getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It’s an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into
hyperspace.”
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monkey Mayhem and speculations based on quantum psychology…..
We as a species evolved in Africa around 150,000 years ago. The written history of humans is about 6,000 years old. ‘The tool wielding monkeys’ (as Terrence McKenna describes our species) with their technology had gone out of control. We began to mass produce, dig metals out from the earth, and drill for oil and mow down the forest. We pollute the land its rivers and seas, spew toxins into the environment and fight imperialistic wars for control of resources. With our ability for architecture, computers, nuclear and rocket sciences we think gained dominance over other species, inherited the earth and its resources. We call it civilization.
The life that we experience on earth is based on DNA. Approximately 3.9 billion years ago the earth’s surface cooled sufficiently for the first traces of life, and thus DNA, appeared.DNA contains information in its double helix, a one dimensional form that provides the information for a three dimensional form. DNA is the master of transformation that in 4 billion years had multiplied itself into an incalculable amount of species. The DNA molecule, with bases A, G, C, T (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) is incapable of building itself on its own, it does so with the help of proteins. In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly 20 amino acids. The information in DNA ends up sequencing the amino acids to make proteins which make up cells that eventually make up an organism. DNA and it duplication mechanism are the same for all living creatures and bears a striking resemblance to human coding systems or language. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters. Francis Crick the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA writes “It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exist at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant, or microbial, contains a version of it.”
The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s Natural selection (use it or lose it theory); he suggests that organism’s loose memory of genetic information as they evolved into a different species. The theory of Natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains inherited memory of all generations. DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and of various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C and T) that are meaningless individually, but form units of significance when combined, in the same way letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three letter words’ all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.
Scientist have only recently started to appreciate the wonders of the nanotechnology that exist within a cell which is essentially like a ‘nano’ factory operating by its own instructions. What baffles scientist, is the so called portions of ‘Junk DNA’ information within the chromosome that has no apparent function at this time. ‘Junk DNA’ might actually provide a reservoir of sequences from which potentially advantageous new genes can emerge. In this way, it may be an important genetic basis for evolution. This ‘extra’ information is as if it was put there in place for future transformations, guided by a super intelligent being of some sort. (Call it God? Well certainly not the almighty and insecure kind from church but rather a one of love with a highly developed intelligence and technology). Francis Crick had suggested this force behind DNA is as an alien intelligence (tough I don’t think he even meant the kind with the large heads, beady eyes, and beak like mouths). The technology of DNA certainly appears alien… so highly sophisticated that it is incomprehensible to us.
While many civilizations like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome rose and fell, nature had been around for 550 million years, when DNA based life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae, and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water but on land and air. As J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: “Until 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled alge and single celled plankton… Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within a span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialize with a suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole animal kingdom…”
The Biosphere is one large organism, and nature is this marvelous engine of procreation and creativity that is constantly changing giving us the various plants, animals, trees, water bodies etc. The earth sustains us as it does with other life forms. The fact is that we are made up of DNA and like everything else in nature. We are just souls meshed in the fabric of nature and are here for a joy ride, to feel, to think and to create. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. To think that we are separate from nature and that we dominate all other life forms is a thinking disorder. Somewhere along the way we got domesticated and lost our connection with nature. Nature was converted to a resource by us, unlike some older cultures that revered nature and were in harmony with her. They were fully aware of the fact that if they harmed nature some grievous harm would come to them in return. This accounts for our present state of affairs.
I am not suggesting that we dump everything and run off into the woods. Our technology like the art we create is only an expression of our times. We as humans progressed through many ages: “The Stone Age lasted many 1000 years, the Bronze Age a few thousand, the Industrial age took three hundred years at which time Fossil fuels made its appearance on the planet with the use of charcoal in steam engines since 1800’s and the nineteenth century, the Chemical age or plastic began a little more than a century ago, the information age 30 years ago, and Biotechnology in the last decade. The Nanotechnology age that could last all of eight minutes….” (Daniel Pinchbeck author of ‘2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl’).
What we are following now is a culture based on consumerism and greed. Market place thinking propagated by the main stream media and advertising that prevents us detaching from our current trends of science and technology and economics. Our political and corporate leaders continue to ignore the signs of change. Economists do not include what nature does for us for e.g. pollinating all of the flowering plants; an act that can be performed only by bees and the wind; or take carbon dioxide out of the air, something only trees can do.
Yes, we did create enormous amounts of waste with technology and its poisonous by-products, with our manufacturing process have added to global warming with high carbon emissions. Wars constantly threaten to obliterate us with the use of weapons of mass destruction. All of these are projections of our current psyche. Our current technology expresses not only our consciousness but also our unconsciousness. “Look at the devilish engines of destruction!” wrote Jung. “They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable and respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up, and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all manmade.” The Jungian perspective on Apocalypse considers it a psychic event now taking place within the collective and individual psyche.
The inevitable destruction of the planet of course… is myth; the Earth will rejuvenate. We humans are a species capable of communicating and thinking. We have the ability to change things. Nature did not get us to this point to destroy us; we are her (nature’s) prized children. We are capable of creating art and music, architecture and technology that no other species can. A view of separateness from nature and from each other is the most destructive view in the world. We have to tune in to nature to receive further instructions for our future as a species. This will of course require us to have a collective change in our consciousness to fulfill our destiny. A highly intelligent transformation of our species cannot be attained on an individual basis or in groups of people. A quantum change for everyone, a change based on love and respect for everyone and everything.
It is possible to collectively beat corporate greed and the economic systems currently in use, dump our dependence on fossil fuel and reduce consumerism and supermarket life styles. Real estate need not be a commodity anymore and ‘brand’ names a thing of the past. We need to have sustainable designs and technology that work in conjunction with nature not against it. The noted Physicist Amit Goswami in ‘The self aware universe’ writes. “I had been vainly seeking a description of consciousness within science: instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness.” he realized “we must develop a science compatible within our consciousness, our primary experience.”
Our faith can move mountains…Being brought up in a Roman Catholic family; two stories I can relate to...
Mark 11:23-24 Jesus declares "For verily I say unto you, That whosoever
shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the
sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things
which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."
The whole of Einstien’s life work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. Nobel Prize winner, Neils Bohr in his interpretation of Quantum physics suggests that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break up small aspects of this energy into elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results. It is as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter/observer expects. According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as observer:”Participant’ is the new concept given by Quantum mechanics. The quantum world seems to disregard the rules of classical physics as probability waves (*Quantum mechanics ascribes a special significance to the wave packet: it is interpreted to be a "probability wave" describing the probability that a particle or particles in a particular state will be measured to have a given position and momentum.) spread through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place the same time, only manifesting when the observation is made. The particles would appear to the participant/experimenter in places they couldn’t possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moment, forward or backward in time and other possibilities. Physicists are also confronted with the “quantum jumps’: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between.
In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its very core, is pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation. Christ and Bohr are both suggesting a possibility of creating a very Utopian future just by wishing and dreaming for it to happen.
Remember the story of Christ walking on the water in the stormy sea: He asks St Peter to step out of the boat and join him. Peter walks a few steps towards Christ and his faith falters, he plunges into the sea below him. Peter (the experimenter or participant in this case) had ceased to have focus/faith or have an ‘expectation’ that he could walk on water. Christ on the other hand was a master of mind over matter.
The physicist Dr. Amit Goswami proposes in his 1993 book ‘The self aware universe: How consciousness creates the material world’ that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics – nonlocality, action at a distance, quantum uncertainty etc can be resolved through the hypothesis that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe and that there is no dualistic split between mind and matter, subject and object. It is the activity of consciousness in determining the “quantum collapse” of a wave form into a particle that brings the world into being. Our minds have the ability to create a universe according to our wishes.
The time is now folks especially for the Shamans, artist, writers, thinkers, poets, scientist, amongst you. We have to dream for a better scenario for our species and the monkeys must move higher and forward, that is our destiny.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support the indigenous people of Peru in your thoughts at least in their fight against large greedy multinationals. The Amazon is the lungs of the earth.A view of separateness from nature and from each other, is the most destructive view in the world.
The life that we experience on earth is based on DNA. Approximately 3.9 billion years ago the earth’s surface cooled sufficiently for the first traces of life, and thus DNA, appeared.DNA contains information in its double helix, a one dimensional form that provides the information for a three dimensional form. DNA is the master of transformation that in 4 billion years had multiplied itself into an incalculable amount of species. The DNA molecule, with bases A, G, C, T (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) is incapable of building itself on its own, it does so with the help of proteins. In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly 20 amino acids. The information in DNA ends up sequencing the amino acids to make proteins which make up cells that eventually make up an organism. DNA and it duplication mechanism are the same for all living creatures and bears a striking resemblance to human coding systems or language. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters. Francis Crick the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA writes “It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exist at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant, or microbial, contains a version of it.”
The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s Natural selection (use it or lose it theory); he suggests that organism’s loose memory of genetic information as they evolved into a different species. The theory of Natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains inherited memory of all generations. DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and of various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C and T) that are meaningless individually, but form units of significance when combined, in the same way letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three letter words’ all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.
Scientist have only recently started to appreciate the wonders of the nanotechnology that exist within a cell which is essentially like a ‘nano’ factory operating by its own instructions. What baffles scientist, is the so called portions of ‘Junk DNA’ information within the chromosome that has no apparent function at this time. ‘Junk DNA’ might actually provide a reservoir of sequences from which potentially advantageous new genes can emerge. In this way, it may be an important genetic basis for evolution. This ‘extra’ information is as if it was put there in place for future transformations, guided by a super intelligent being of some sort. (Call it God? Well certainly not the almighty and insecure kind from church but rather a one of love with a highly developed intelligence and technology). Francis Crick had suggested this force behind DNA is as an alien intelligence (tough I don’t think he even meant the kind with the large heads, beady eyes, and beak like mouths). The technology of DNA certainly appears alien… so highly sophisticated that it is incomprehensible to us.
While many civilizations like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome rose and fell, nature had been around for 550 million years, when DNA based life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae, and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water but on land and air. As J. Madeleine Nash writes in her review of recent research in paleontology: “Until 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multicelled alge and single celled plankton… Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within a span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws materialize with a suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole animal kingdom…”
The Biosphere is one large organism, and nature is this marvelous engine of procreation and creativity that is constantly changing giving us the various plants, animals, trees, water bodies etc. The earth sustains us as it does with other life forms. The fact is that we are made up of DNA and like everything else in nature. We are just souls meshed in the fabric of nature and are here for a joy ride, to feel, to think and to create. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. To think that we are separate from nature and that we dominate all other life forms is a thinking disorder. Somewhere along the way we got domesticated and lost our connection with nature. Nature was converted to a resource by us, unlike some older cultures that revered nature and were in harmony with her. They were fully aware of the fact that if they harmed nature some grievous harm would come to them in return. This accounts for our present state of affairs.
I am not suggesting that we dump everything and run off into the woods. Our technology like the art we create is only an expression of our times. We as humans progressed through many ages: “The Stone Age lasted many 1000 years, the Bronze Age a few thousand, the Industrial age took three hundred years at which time Fossil fuels made its appearance on the planet with the use of charcoal in steam engines since 1800’s and the nineteenth century, the Chemical age or plastic began a little more than a century ago, the information age 30 years ago, and Biotechnology in the last decade. The Nanotechnology age that could last all of eight minutes….” (Daniel Pinchbeck author of ‘2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl’).
What we are following now is a culture based on consumerism and greed. Market place thinking propagated by the main stream media and advertising that prevents us detaching from our current trends of science and technology and economics. Our political and corporate leaders continue to ignore the signs of change. Economists do not include what nature does for us for e.g. pollinating all of the flowering plants; an act that can be performed only by bees and the wind; or take carbon dioxide out of the air, something only trees can do.
Yes, we did create enormous amounts of waste with technology and its poisonous by-products, with our manufacturing process have added to global warming with high carbon emissions. Wars constantly threaten to obliterate us with the use of weapons of mass destruction. All of these are projections of our current psyche. Our current technology expresses not only our consciousness but also our unconsciousness. “Look at the devilish engines of destruction!” wrote Jung. “They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable and respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up, and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all manmade.” The Jungian perspective on Apocalypse considers it a psychic event now taking place within the collective and individual psyche.
The inevitable destruction of the planet of course… is myth; the Earth will rejuvenate. We humans are a species capable of communicating and thinking. We have the ability to change things. Nature did not get us to this point to destroy us; we are her (nature’s) prized children. We are capable of creating art and music, architecture and technology that no other species can. A view of separateness from nature and from each other is the most destructive view in the world. We have to tune in to nature to receive further instructions for our future as a species. This will of course require us to have a collective change in our consciousness to fulfill our destiny. A highly intelligent transformation of our species cannot be attained on an individual basis or in groups of people. A quantum change for everyone, a change based on love and respect for everyone and everything.
It is possible to collectively beat corporate greed and the economic systems currently in use, dump our dependence on fossil fuel and reduce consumerism and supermarket life styles. Real estate need not be a commodity anymore and ‘brand’ names a thing of the past. We need to have sustainable designs and technology that work in conjunction with nature not against it. The noted Physicist Amit Goswami in ‘The self aware universe’ writes. “I had been vainly seeking a description of consciousness within science: instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness.” he realized “we must develop a science compatible within our consciousness, our primary experience.”
Our faith can move mountains…Being brought up in a Roman Catholic family; two stories I can relate to...
Mark 11:23-24 Jesus declares "For verily I say unto you, That whosoever
shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the
sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things
which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."
The whole of Einstien’s life work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. Nobel Prize winner, Neils Bohr in his interpretation of Quantum physics suggests that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break up small aspects of this energy into elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results. It is as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter/observer expects. According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as observer:”Participant’ is the new concept given by Quantum mechanics. The quantum world seems to disregard the rules of classical physics as probability waves (*Quantum mechanics ascribes a special significance to the wave packet: it is interpreted to be a "probability wave" describing the probability that a particle or particles in a particular state will be measured to have a given position and momentum.) spread through space, photon and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place the same time, only manifesting when the observation is made. The particles would appear to the participant/experimenter in places they couldn’t possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moment, forward or backward in time and other possibilities. Physicists are also confronted with the “quantum jumps’: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between.
In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its very core, is pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation. Christ and Bohr are both suggesting a possibility of creating a very Utopian future just by wishing and dreaming for it to happen.
Remember the story of Christ walking on the water in the stormy sea: He asks St Peter to step out of the boat and join him. Peter walks a few steps towards Christ and his faith falters, he plunges into the sea below him. Peter (the experimenter or participant in this case) had ceased to have focus/faith or have an ‘expectation’ that he could walk on water. Christ on the other hand was a master of mind over matter.
The physicist Dr. Amit Goswami proposes in his 1993 book ‘The self aware universe: How consciousness creates the material world’ that the paradoxes of quantum mechanics – nonlocality, action at a distance, quantum uncertainty etc can be resolved through the hypothesis that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe and that there is no dualistic split between mind and matter, subject and object. It is the activity of consciousness in determining the “quantum collapse” of a wave form into a particle that brings the world into being. Our minds have the ability to create a universe according to our wishes.
The time is now folks especially for the Shamans, artist, writers, thinkers, poets, scientist, amongst you. We have to dream for a better scenario for our species and the monkeys must move higher and forward, that is our destiny.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support the indigenous people of Peru in your thoughts at least in their fight against large greedy multinationals. The Amazon is the lungs of the earth.A view of separateness from nature and from each other, is the most destructive view in the world.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Goa Gil and Ariane
Musician Goa Gil is an icon in Anjuna & Vagator , north Goa. He played rock and roll with the ‘Big dipper band’ & the ‘Anjuna Jam Band’ at the early beach parties in the 70’s (In my B&W portrait of Gil, he holds a calendar from new year’s 1978 party showing the ‘Big dipper band’ in a group photo). Gil had jammed with Goan musicians like his friend the late August Braganza and drummer William D’souza from Mapuca.
The introduction of techno and its techniques to Goa led to what eventually became the Goa Trance style; early pioneers included DJ’s Laurent, Fred Disco, Swiss Rudi, and Goa Gil. Many "parties" (generally similar to raves but with a more mystic flavor, at least in early 1990s) in Goa revolve entirely around this genre of music. In other countries, Goa Trance is also often played at raves, festivals and parties in conjunction with other styles of trance and techno.
Goa parties have a definitive visual aspect - the use of "fluoro" (fluorescent paint) is common on clothing and on decorations such as tapestries. The graphics on these decorations are usually associated with topics such as aliens, Hinduism, other religious (especially eastern) images, mushrooms, shamanistic technology and other psychedelic art. Shrines in front of the DJ stands featuring religious items are also common decorations. Dreadlocked Goa freaks adorned with tattoos, body piercings and freaky party costumes kicked up huge clouds of red dust whilst dancing to psychedelic Goa trance music. Their fashion sense expressed the counterculture that they belonged to.
It was like being ‘Alex in wonderland’, I can still reminisce the trance parties at ‘Disco valley’ in Vagator in the early 90’s with Gil playing his very special Goa psychedelic music.He still continues to play and make music in Goa and all over the world.
After a long wait I finally managed to do the portrait with Gil and Ariane at their house in Anjuna (1st March 2009).
-Alex Fernandes (Goa, 2009) Click to view musicians slide show
(In the photo: Ariane, Dr Albert Hoffman and Gill at a party in Basel next to Dr Hoffmans house. Photo courtesy Goa Gil)
Goa Gil: A Short Biography
Goa Gil is an American-born musician, DJ and ex-party organizer. He is one of the founders of the Goa trance and psytrance movement in electronic dance music.
Gil was born in 1951 and grew up in San Francisco, California. He witnessed the birth of the hippie movement and acid rock, and was involved with ‘The freak collective family Dog’ and the 60’s rock group ‘The Son’s of Champlin’. Feeling that the San Francisco musical scene was falling apart, he left in 1969, going first to Amsterdam and then to India, settling in the hippie Mecca of Goa. On his extensive travels in India he met the ‘Sadhus’ (wandering holy men of India). Gil became himself a Sadhu, Baba Mangalanand, in the order of the Juna Akhara, under the Guru, Mahant Prem Giri Ji Maharaj.
In the mid 70’s, Gil and his friends soon gathered some equipment (at first some of which was rented from August Braganza) and started playing live music all night long on the Goa beaches. During the early 1980s, many Goa hippies were becoming increasingly fascinated with early electronic music groups such as ‘Kraftwerk’ and ‘Front 242’. The mix of outdoor dance parties with Eastern mystical and spiritual overtones came to define the aesthetic of the Goa party movement. For Gil, dance is an active form of meditation and the use of trance music is a way to "redefine the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century". During the 1990s, the Goa trance movement spread by way of foreign backpackers of various nationalities who attended parties in India. Nowadays, Gil is still based in Goa for several months of the year, and spends the rest of his time travelling and on tour playing at parties all over the world.
Gil’s partner Ariane MacAvoy is herself a child of french goan "hippes". Ariane, who is an excellent djembe player and african dance instructor makes music as “Nimba”. Together Gil and Ariane make music as “The Nommos”.
Goa Gil and Arianes’ CDs are avaliable in India and worldwide on Avatar Records
(http://www.avatar-music.com/artists/artists01.htm)
Visit (http://www.goagil.com) for more information on Gil and Ariane.
The site has a lot of interesting pictures from the 70’s.
Portrait Atelier has changed to...
Portrait Atelier’ has changed to (http://www.alexfernandesportraits.com). The’ Portrait Atelier’ web site is no more operational and in the future my work on the web may be viewed will be at the above site (I will still offer you my portrait services).
The new web site is a compilation of my work done exclusively in Goa during the last 5 years (2004- 2008). The portrait sitters are mainly Goan’s, which makes these portraits unique (you will see faces you may know) and reflects the photographic style and technique that I developed here in Goa. The result is a combination of classic photographic techniques with the latest digital technology.
Kindly pass on the information and I would love to hear your comments at alexfernandesportraits@gmail.com .
My warmest wishes,
Alex
The new web site is a compilation of my work done exclusively in Goa during the last 5 years (2004- 2008). The portrait sitters are mainly Goan’s, which makes these portraits unique (you will see faces you may know) and reflects the photographic style and technique that I developed here in Goa. The result is a combination of classic photographic techniques with the latest digital technology.
Kindly pass on the information and I would love to hear your comments at alexfernandesportraits@gmail.com .
My warmest wishes,
Alex
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