[Video: surrealist photographer and “photo-composite artist” Erik Johannson introduces a TED audience to his work. In this brief talk, he doesn’t address so much how his images come about, as why they do. But he’s not shy about revealing his secrets, either; he may take several, dozens of, even hundreds of carefully planned and lighted photographs, and then spend hours or even months snipping away at and reassembling them — their edges veeeery subtly removed or obscured — into landscapes which could never exist, but surely look as though they could. Coverage of his work and interviews with him are scattered here and there around the Web (e.g.), and he’s got his own YouTube channel of “behind the scenes” videos. Very clever and exhaustively but lovingly detailed work.]
From whiskey river:
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself…
There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.
(G. K. Chesterton [source])
…and:
Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live — against all evidence — as if advances in fortune were already here.
(Tom Robbins [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Time Traveler’s Halibun: 1989
In the grassy space between the wings of the elementary school and the trailers housing the fifth grade’s overflow classrooms, girls flip their hair in imitation of Cindy Crawford, sing Iko Iko. None of you know what it means or where the song comes from.
It’s honor-roll season, a time of outings to TCBY and Outback Steakhouse. Your mother warns you against filling up on bread, but it’s hard to resist the little brown loaves brought warm to the table with soft butter — a luxury that cannot be imagined at home, with its always-refrigerated margarine and Pepperidge Farm sandwich loaves.
Everyone knows what’s popular but nobody knows how to act. At ten, you lack any context. The world swims before you, and it constantly stings. Its favorite barb: “everybody knows that.”
Beyond the grassy space of girls is more grass, a quarter-mile loop of track, a church with a painfully white spire, a fence, and a neighborhood maybe a little less nice than yours, crammed between the school and busy Great Neck Road. The fence is of chain link, instead of wooden slats. That’s how you know about the niceness — that and the something hard, like a grain of sand, you feel in your mother’s voice, when she takes you to the school’s Spring Fling, where you win another goldfish. They always die, but you’re getting better. Now, it takes a while.
Loblollies shiver In May heat.
The world’s ending.
The world’s a mirage.
(Maureen Thorson [source])
…and:
Tipping Over the Actuarial Tables
(excerpt)2
True. There are degrees of isolation. Sixteen days after a shopping
center collapses like a punctured lung in Seoul, South Korea, a nine-
teen-year-old girl is found alive in an elevator shaft. Her only nour-
ishment throughout the ordeal is an apple that a monk gives her in
a dream. The doctors are skeptical and attribute her survival, instead,
to “her false perception of time.” The brain—with its network of
rivers and tributaries, the flow rigorously controlled—is taxed by a
sudden drought. Or an apple passes from one hand to another. In
both versions, extraordinary measures achieve a modicum of nor-
malcy, shaken again when a boy—age thirteen, his circadian rhythms
still fighting the syncopation of jet lag—walks out the window on
the thirtieth floor of a Swedish building. They’re calling it “a sleep-
walking accident,” as if sleep were a cognitive state. If that were the
case, our sheep and our prayers would keep us up all night, count-
ing and repenting, and there would be degrees of salvation. I can tell
you that none of this is true, but much of it is, and you will not for-
give me when you discover that I’ve led you to believe otherwise.
The truth, in one form or another, has ways of finding you. Blame
it on your false perception of the facts. Time the sniper has lapses in
which its eyes tire and its focus falters and it aims at itself. So the
window opens; the girl shakes the rubble from her dress; a monk,
gathering apples in his robe, almost catches the falling boy.
(Dionisio D. Martinez [source])
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