Andreidignart

“I always try to make the almost invisible visible.”

Name: Loek van Vliet
Hometown: The Hague, The Netherlands
Style of Photography: Documentary
Type of Camera: Medium Format (Hasselblad)
Website: www.loekvanvliet.nl

What gives you inspiration?

It is hard to single out one source of inspiration, this can be music, magazines, radio. However books are my main source of inspiration. In 2009 I heard this quote by Tod Papageorge: “ When your pictures are not good enough, you are not reading enough”  Since then I’ve taken this advice to heart. So I read books on photography, landscape, philosophy, history and literature.

What are your influences?

Since I’ve been born photography was all around me, my dad is a photographer, when I was three years old, I received my first camera. When I was five I printed my photographs in a dark room. In recent years Jan Banning has been a great influence. In 2009 I did an internship with him. He made me think about the best way to translate a story to imagery, in a conceptual documentary approach. And of course the long talks with Martin Roemers during image editing I do for him. Furthermore American photographers Alec Soth, Joel Sternfeld and Joel Meyerowitz influence the way I look at photography.

Why did you choose these photos?

For the past three years I’ve been working on a project called Sacred Grounds, silent zones in the Netherlands and Flanders. These four pictures are part of that series. They represent different type of landscapes, and different subjects that I focus on in this series.

What does photography mean to you?

It is so interwoven with who I am, that I can’t imagine a life without. The things that I read, form into imagery in my mind. I always try to make the almost invisible visible. For example In Sacred Grounds, this is silence. And in a short photographic series on a monastery, I have placed the focus on the literal space in order to gain insight into the spiritual space of the monastery. The space you don’t directly see, but experience.

Photos: © Loek van Vliet

Whtbout2ndbrkfst's comparison of the covers of Girl's Life and Boy's Life magazines is awfully trenchant and sad. It'd be interesting to do this as a monthly series, and gauge how recurrant this phenomenon is.

If you want to know why gender stereotypes exist, take a good look at the difference between Girl’s Life and Boy’s Life Magazines. While Boy’s Life pushes boys to get outside and explore nature, Girl’s Life tells girls they should be worrying about fashion. While Boy’s Life offers stories of Scouts they can model themselves after, Girl’s Life asks if Facebook is ruining their love life. And, my personal favorite, while Boy’s Life gives it’s readers jokes so they can be the center of attention Girl’s Life posits, “Do You Know When to Shut Up?”

Girl's Life vs Boy's Life (via Amanda Palmer)

Amy sez, "Every 98 minutes in the USA, a dog is shot by law enforcement. (In the past fifty years, no police officer has been killed by a dog, and yet evidence suggests the police use lethal force as their one and only response when dogs are present - even lying down, tales wagging, or running away.) This new indie documentary explores an untold story. Everyone should check it out!"

PUPPYCIDE: The Documentary (Thanks, Amy!)

Patrick Dean loves drawing monsters, & we love his drawings of monsters!

YouTube has been an existence-proof of forms of video that were lurking in potentia, unable to come into existence due to limitations of the distribution channel. The two-to-three-minute video has now been firmly established as a genre (with the six-second video hot on its heels), but there's plenty of room at the long end of the scale. Case in point: subculture of YouTubers who post full-length train journeys, hours and hours' worth -- and if that's not long-form enough, how about 134-hour sea crossings?

Given the modern vogue/panic about short-reads being mere "linkblogging" and the practice of spinning out a few hundred words into a "serious, long-form journalism" wheeze that is split across eight or more screens, this may just be the video form for our age (and please let it be a short one!).

I was thrilled to learn, via an excellent Metafilter post, about a small online subculture of resistence to the attention-frittering trend: the existence of scores of YouTube videos documenting entire train journeys, some many hours long, from the perspective of the driver in the cab. The video above is nine hours and 53 minutes long – it's available in spring, autumn and winter versions too – and while I won't claim to have watched it all, I've spent some pleasant work breaks in Brooklyn watching Scandinavian scenery go by. But perhaps you'd prefer Glasgow to Fort William and Mallaig in Scotland? It's every bit as rainswept – and bleakly beautiful, especially in its latter stages – as you'd imagine:

Life too exciting? Enter the calming world of full-length train journey videos [Oliver Burkeman/The Guardian]

Misty wood (c. 1910) by Charles Corbet.

A perfect autumnal scene from Charles Corbet, one of many woodland views at the Belgian Autochromists site. As usual with autochromes it’s hard to believe that almost all these images are over a century old, the colours are so subtle. Some of the lighting is also remarkable, especially the self-portraits by Ernest van Zuylen which are lit with a single candle. Paul Sano’s lady sitting in the garden gives a foretaste of Magritte-like Surrealism, its inset eclipse appearing at first glance to be a large black sphere hovering unnoticed or ignored beside the seated woman.

Via Wood s Lot.

Melancholia (c. 1910) by Charles Corbet.

Sunset on the heath (c. 1910) by Paul Sano.

Lady and inset of solar eclipse (c. 1910) by Paul Sano.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Colour photography, 1908
• Fred Holland Day revisited
• Constantinople, 1900
• Albert Kahn’s Autochromes
• Gertrude Käsebier’s crystal gazer
• The Dawn of the Autochrome

Leave it to the bassist from Lightning Bolt to make the demonic/cyberpunk, rhythm/racing game of your dreams. If you haven’t heard of the band, imagine a relentless, noisy shredding of vainglorious metal riffs. If you haven’t heard of the genre, well, neither have we!

Thumper is the game in question, and judging from the “Kill CRAKHED” teaser, it’s sort of a racing game with musical elements, the likes of an Audiosurf or Dyad. 

If you’re questioning the game-making skills of a practicing metalhead, don’t, because Brian Gibson has also been a designer at Harmonix since the Amplitude days. 

As for release info: “It will be released in 2014 on whatever platforms make sense.” We know you’re psyched to jam with Baphomet, but for now you’ll just have to wait. 

Once upon a time — 20 years ago, that is — seven friends bought a cheap piece of land in western Colorado, 80 acres between the redrock deserts of the Colorado Plateau and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Like most people who do such things, they were young, idealistic, and generally overjoyed by their [...]

The post The ghost commune appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Tyler Landry serves up one new vile image every day leading up to Halloween.

- VILE 2013 END -

Gabrielle reviews horror movies in comics form. See more here, eventually.

Sergio Juárez Correa teaches at José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico -- a violent, terribly impoverished border town. His school is often referred to as "a place of punishment." But when he encountered the educational ideas of Sugata Mitra (who famously installed computers in slums for illiterate street-kids to use, and found that they'd taught themselves to use them and were educating themselves), he rebuilt his teaching around leaving his kids alone as much as possible. His classroom became one of the highest-scoring groups in the Mexican educational system.

Moreover, one of Correa's students, a young girl named Paloma Noyola Bueno, demonstrated extraordinary talent and appears to be some kind of savant with incredible potential. That's pretty amazing and heart-warming, but what gets me as the parent of a school-aged kid (and as a sometime teacher) is the demonstrated efficacy of letting kids drive their own education with their own curiosity and passion.

I hate the way schools are focused on producing high test-scores. It scares me that if my kid walks into a classroom excited about reading and it's time to do math, she'll have to do math, because no one -- not the teacher, nor the school, nor even the kid -- can afford to have her blow the standardized test. Every important thing I know, I learned because I became passionate about it and then the adults around me let me pursue it.

One day Juárez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “½ = ?” and “¼ = ?”

“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.

While the kids murmured, Juárez Correa went to the school cafeteria, where children could buy breakfast and lunch for small change. He borrowed about 10 pesos in coins, worth about 75 cents, and walked back to his classroom, where he distributed a peso’s worth of coins to each table. He noticed that Paloma had already written .50 and .25 on a piece of paper.

“One peso is one peso,” he said. “What’s one-half?”

At first a number of kids divided the coins into clearly unequal piles. It sparked a debate among the students about what one-half meant. Juárez Correa’s training told him to intervene. But now he remembered Mitra’s research and resisted the urge. Instead, he watched as Alma Delia Juárez Flores explained to her tablemates that half means equal portions. She counted out 50 centavos. “So the answer is .50,” she said. The other kids nodded. It made sense.

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses [Joshua Davis/Wired]

(Image: Peter Yang)

With more and more cinemas in Russia losing out to multiplexes, photographer Sergey Novikov sought to capture the old buildings in their new incarnations — sometimes abandoned, sometimes used for discos and fairs or taken over by Jehovah's Witnesses. Breathless was shot in Moscow and St Petersburg between 2010 and 2011 by Novikov, a graduate of the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. "I prefer an engrossing film to disgusting popcorn," he says. "I don't mind shifting about in a squeaky chair, soaking in the atmosphere of an old cinema. Unfortunately, the films have already left them."

A photographer’s ode to Russia’s dying movie theatres [Maryam Omidi and Sergey Novikov/Calvert Journal]

(via Kadrey)

The Economist details outcomes from Give Directly, an organization that analyzes satellite photos to identify the poorest places in the world and then hands over no-strings-attached cash grants to the people who live there. It's a contrast to other programs, where donations are funneled into school construction or funding planned-out businesses. Give Directly has produced remarkably good results: "In randomly selected poor households in 63 villages that have received the windfalls, they say, the number of children going without food for a day has fallen by over a third and livestock holdings have risen by half. A year after the scheme began, incomes have gone up by a quarter and recipients seem less stressed, according to tests of their cortisol levels."

Still, this is not the only cash giveaway. A trial in Vietnam in 2006 gave one-off handouts to 550 households; two years later, local poverty rates had fallen by 20 percentage points. The scheme was dubbed “cash for coffins” after elderly recipients spent the money on their funeral arrangements to save their children the expense.

A different scheme has been running in northern Uganda for four years. The government gives lump sums of around $10,000 to groups of 20 or so young people who club together to apply. Chris Blattman of Columbia University, New York, who has studied the programme, calls it “wildly successful”. Recipients spent a third of the money learning a trade (such as metalworking or tailoring) and much of the rest on tools and stock. They set up enterprises and work longer hours in their new trades. Average earnings rose by almost 50% in four years.

This scheme has a condition: applicants must submit a business plan. But it highlights the virtues of no-strings grants (UCTs). They work when lack of money is the main problem. The people who do best are those with the least to start with (in Uganda, that especially means poor women). In such conditions, the schemes provide better returns than job-training programmes that mainstream aid agencies favour. Remarkably, they even do better than secondary education, which pushes up wages in poor countries by 10-15% for each extra year of schooling. This may be because recipients know what they need better than donors do—a core advantage of no-strings schemes. They also outscore conditional transfers, because some families eligible for these fail to meet the conditions through no fault of their own (if they live too far from a school, for instance).

Pennies from heaven

Isn’t it nice how people twist their religious scripture to suit their weds but when it’s used against them it’s suddenly not okay

How to Tie a Tie [lefthandedtoons]

hotbiochemist:

ive never identified with an animal so closely before

Why young punks grow to like classical and jazz in older age

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Teenagers who dispair of their parents' music tastes should beware - their own musical preferences are likely to follow the same path.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge believe they unravelled how a preference for Teenage Kicks can evolve into a love for Moonlight Sonata.

They have identified three distinct musical ages that people pass through as they mature – intense, contemporary and sophisticated.

For example, teenagers use “intense” music such as punk and metal to establish their identity, but as their lifestyles change, so do their music choices.

As they move into early adulthood, interest in intense music decreases and a preference for “contemporary” music such as pop and rap rises.

This corresponds to a shift in lifestyle to where people are socialising far more in bars, clubs and at parties where uplifting and danceable music tends to be played.

However, the preference for contemporary music plateaus in early middle age and individuals start to like sophisticated music like jazz and classical.

The scientists say this marks a shift to a more solitary expression of our intellect, status and greater emotional maturity.
They also found that tastes became less pretentious with far more older people liking country, folk and blues music.

“There is a tendency for young people to prefer music that their parents cannot stand or find obnoxious, so there must be some developmental changes that take place as we get older,” said Dr Jason Rentfrow, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Cambridge.

“Teenage years are often dominated by the need to establish identity.

“‘Intense’ music, seen as aggressive, tense and characterised by loud, distorted sounds has the rebellious connotations that allow adolescents to do this.

“While the first musical age is about asserting independence, the next appears to be more about gaining acceptance from others.

“What we took away from the results is that these forms of music reinforce the desire for intimacy and complement settings where people come together with the goal of establishing close relationships – parties, bars, clubs and so on.

“As we settle into ourselves and acquire more resources to express ourselves – career, home, family, car – music remains an extension of this.

“There are aspects of wanting to promote social status, intellect and wealth that play into the increased gravitation towards ‘sophisticated’ music.

“For many this life stage is frequently exhausted by work and family, and there is a requirement for relaxing, emotive music for those rare down times that reflects the other major ‘life challenge’ of this stage – that of nurturing a family and maintaining long-term relationships, perhaps the hardest of all.”

The research, which is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, drew on musical preference surveys that have been completed by more than 250,000 people over a ten year period.

It examined how musical preferences differed with age and compared these to “life challenges” that have been identified as playing key roles as people mature.

The findings seem to challenge the idea that our music tastes stay the same and it is just culture that overtakes us as we get older.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that people actively changed the music they liked.

“Of course there are not hard boundaries as people in later life do still enjoy listening to the rock and roll then enjoyed when they were younger,” said Dr Rentfrow.

“But the reasons for listening may change. We use music for different reasons and there may be more nostalgia involved as we get older.”

It is not just listening tastes that change, but also the tastes of those who are creating music.

The researchers point to musicians such as Sting and Paul McCartney, who personified the rebellious youth culture of their time, who are now producing classical and folk albums.

“The project started with a common conception that musical taste does not evolve after young adulthood,” said Arielle Bonneville-Roussy from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, who led the study.

“Most academic research to date supported this claim, but - based on other areas of psychological research and our own experiences - we were not convinced this was the case.

“I find it fascinating to see how seemingly trivial behaviour such as music listening relates to so many psychological aspects, such as personality and age.”