Photos of the Day: Echoes of a Modified Reality

Photography by:  Zefram Cochrane

Echoes is a selection of photographs from an ongoing project created by photographer Zefram Cochrane, which he describes as a visual representation of the song Echoes by Pink Floyd.  He explains that he visualizes the project as an audio-video performance, in which the different moods, tensions, inner visions and hallucinations coming from the music are translated into images synchronized with it.

According to Zefram, “Reality is often limited, trivial and tone-less, far from being able to directly represent what is in a creative mind.  So my major effort is both to modify reality to let the latent image impressed on the film match what it was intended to represent in my mind.  As reality modification is the basic brick of my creative process, my work can maybe viewed as photography of ‘ephemeral sculptures.’  Indeed, I feel that this broad definition could fit.”

Pink Floyd: Echoes/Live at Pompeii-Part I

Slide Show: Echoes of a Modified Reality

(Please Click Image to View Slide Show)

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Lucky: O Blest are the Survivors

Lucky is a 2-minute animated short film by Yibi Hu, who describes his main inspirational idea as an enigmatic but riveting vision of the potential warmth of humankind.  Lucky is an illustrative and evocative portrait of captivated animals, who suffer but ultimately survive in the gap between nature and humanity.

Lucky: O Blest are the Survivors

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Tattooed Under Fire: Fort Hood, War Experiences Inked on the Body

American’s are deeply saddened by the shooting tragedy at Fort Hood, an attack by Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan on Thursday that killed 13 people and wounded 30 others on the Texas base.  Fort Hood is the largest U.S. military facility in the world and a major center for soldiers being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  It also houses the Army’s Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program, which helps soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress when they return.  In both cases, upon deployment and return home, soldiers attempt to deal with serious emotional issues and many seek tattooing as a way to express them or even see the process as therapy.

Tattooed Under Fire is a documentary directed by Nancy Schiesari, a film that follows the young men and women at Fort Hood who seek solace at the tattoo studio, confessing fears, expressing anger, sharing secrets and relaying personal stories about the war.  Watching clips from the film now, seeing young, buzz-headed men and women describe their motivations for getting inked with caskets and corpses, one can’t help but to begin getting a feel for the intense experiences that become material for their body art.

The film was created long before Thursday’s mass shooting; isn’t a retroactive explanation for the shootings on Thursday.  But the film may nevertheless offer some insight into the tragedy in its depiction of the stress and anguish of military duty, of the horrors of war even in the relative comforts of home.  As one soldier explains, “The more times I go over, the more of Iraq’s going to come back with me.”

Tattooed Under Fire will begin airing on PBS stations starting November 8th.  It airs on Texas’s television station KLRU, which co-produced the documentary, at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10th.

Tattooed Under Fire: Fort Hood, War Experiences Inked on the Body

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Tattooed Under Fire: A Soldier’s Story/Jamie

Viewers can read more about this riveting documentary here.

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Times Square: The Characters, Dramas and Encounters of the Square

Photography by:  John Aron, NYC

Times Square is an ongoing project by John Aron, a photographer who lives near Times Square/Hell’s Kitchen.  Aron uses both traditional and modern techniques to achieve his goal of narrowing the focus of his black and white photographs in order to show what is most important in the scene.  Monochrome seems well-suited to the city; New York City is best described in black and white, which captures it in a way that’s simply more dramatic, perhaps romantic.

The infatuation of photographers with Times Square must be almost as old as the square itself, and no wonder.  It’s been the perfect place for the dramas and encounters that make great pictures, whether in the happy honky-tonk of the area’s glamorous days, decades ago when the neon lights really were the brightest on Broadway, or more recently when squalor and crime overtook the area and the facades of the great theaters of the 1890’s along 42nd Street disappeared behind porn parlor marquees.

Presented here are a number of John Aron’s striking photographs of people in Times Square, a slide show of his works and two short videos.

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Moving People: The Rat Race in Times Square

A Slide Show: Times Square/The Characters, Dramas and Encounters of the Square

(Please Click on the Above Image to View Slide Show)

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The Characters and Hard Times of Times Square

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