You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Media’ category.
Cheesy photo of the day: What IS this thing? Flour grinder? Ancient Chinese clock? Torture device? hmm... The first to give the right answer will get a prize.
Isn't he so sweet? He was hard of hearing but loved to talk and shake my hand
I asked the nai nai (grandma) what her marriage was like and she said it was comfortable and satisfactory. Awwww... they have a sweet and tender love after many decades of marriage
These grandmas howled at taking these photo booth style shots and loved seeing their image on the little camera display.
- Very cool: An old fashioned stove in a Chinese village
A Shanxi museum on the Chinese military efforts during the Japanese invasion (Asia Pacific War)
The museum walls were painted with anti-Japanese slogans like this
Getting wide shots for our doc.
My lil brother (adopted him a few months ago!) Ocean (yes that's his name!) is an up & coming great film maker. He'll do great things but more importantly, he's an amazing human being
One of the many photos of the outdoor bathrooms in rural China that I took. One day I'll have to post them all. I rated this a 6 out of 10 (10 being the worst)
I believe there will be a revival of interest in spirituality and faith in Japan. Is there a God? An afterlife? People are wondering. You cannot help it in these life or death situations. Death is all around, in constant news coverage, in images of body bags and the continuing threat of a nuclear meltdown. There is a vaccum in Japanese society, enlarged even more by this epic human tragedy. And the, um, not-so charismatic Prime Minister isn’t helping – he doesn’t have the capacity to inspire and rally people like Churchill did in that era’s most perilous moments.
I do know that Christian organizations (like the Tokyo Altar House of Prayer) and churches are rallying. Church buildings are housing the homeless and offering comfort to the traumaticized. It’s in moments like these that these faith groups really shine in bringing plain old humanitarian aid and comfort to those who are seeking desperately for meaning in disaster. The people of Japan need faith to get them through the worst crisis since WWII. And if their faith or conversion is genuine, it’ll last beyond this temporary season of hardship.
Here’s the first story I’ve read so far on Religion and Japan’s quake. It’s called How Japan’s religions confront tragedy:
By Dan Gilgoff, CNN Religion Editor
Proud of their secular society, most Japanese aren’t religious in the way Americans are: They tend not to identify with a single tradition nor study religious texts.
“The average Japanese person doesn’t consciously turn to Buddhism until there’s a funeral,” says Brian Bocking, an expert in Japanese religions at Ireland’s University College Cork.
When there is a funeral, though, Japanese religious engagement tends to be pretty intense. “A very large number of Japanese people believe that what they do for their ancestors after death matters, which might not be what we expect from a secular society,” says Bocking. “There’s widespread belief in the presence of ancestors’ spirits.”
In the days and weeks ahead, huge numbers of Japanese will be turning to their country’s religious traditions as they mourn the thousands of dead and try to muster the strength and resources to rebuild amid the massive destruction wrought by last Friday’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami.
For most Japanese, religion is more complex than adhering to the country’s ancient Buddhist tradition. They blend Buddhist beliefs and customs with the country’s Shinto tradition, which dates back to the 15th century.
“Japanese are not religious in the way that people in North America are religious,” says John Nelson, chair of theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco. “They’ll move back and forth between two or more religious traditions, seeing them as tools that are appropriate for certain situations.”
“For things connected to life-affirming events, they’ll turn to Shinto-style rituals or understandings,” Nelson says. “But in connection to tragedy or suffering, it’s Buddhism.”
There are many schools of Japanese Buddhism, each with its own teachings about suffering and what happens after death. “There are many Buddhist explanations of why calamities happen: from collective karma to seeing calamities as signs of apocalypse,” says Jimmy Yu, an assistant professor of Buddhism and Chinese religions at Florida State University. “And perhaps all of them are irrelevant to what needs to be done.”
Indeed, where Christianity, Judaism or Islam are often preoccupied with causes of disaster – the questions of why God would allow an earthquake, for example – Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Shinto focus on behavior in reaction to tragedy. “It’s very important in Japanese life to react in a positive way, to be persistent and to clean up in the face of adversity, and their religions would emphasize that,” says University College Cork’s Bocking. “They’ll say we have to develop a powerful, even joyful attitude in the face of adversity.”
Japan’s major religious groups are still developing responses to the disaster, but experts say the impulse toward maintaining a positive outlook will likely translate into calls for Japanese to help friends and neighbors clean up and rebuild.
At the same time, Japan’s Buddhist priests will be preoccupied with rituals surrounding death and burial. Japanese Buddhism is often called funeral Buddhism because of its concern with such rituals.
Despite the Japanese penchant for blending their religious traditions – even with Western traditions like Catholicism – the overwhelming majority are buried according to Buddhist custom: cremation and interment in a family plot. With many bodies swept away in the tsunami, many Japanese will have to come to terms with having to forego that ritual. After burial, Japanese typically continue to practice rituals around caring for the spirits of the deceased. Most Japanese keep Buddhist altars in their homes, Nelson says, using them to pay tribute to dead ancestors.
“In the days ahead, you’ll see people praying, with hands folded, for the spirits of those killed,” he says. “It goes back to a really early understanding of human spirits and rituals designed to control those spirits, which can take 49 days or, depending on the type of Buddhism, could go on for up to seven years.” One popular school of Japanese Buddhism, called Amida – or Pure Land – believes in a paradise that spirits of the dead can enter with help from living relatives.
Despite what is likely to be a mass embrace of Buddhist rituals after the earthquake, there may also be some grievances expressed over those traditions. Many young Japanese have left Buddhism, accusing priests of profiting from grief because of their paid roles in burials. Critics say the priests spend money from funerals on temples without playing a broader role in society.
“The earthquake is an opportunity for Buddhist priests to step up and show they are still relevant,” says Nelson. “Young people just aren’t buying it anymore.”
Milton Rogovin, the great social documentary photog, dubbed by the NY Times as a "working class" hero
Milton, we need more photographers like you in this world!
I, for one, am deeply inspired by his passion to document the poor and forgotten for the world to see and learn. I plan to snap more photos in my travels this year. One of his most well known quotes: “The rich have their photographers, I photograph the forgotten ones.” This man was also exceptionally kind and thoughtful: he always gave a copy of the portrait to those he photographed.
You can read more about him on his website.
AP article on his passing from today:
Milton Rogovin, a social documentary photographer who built a life’s work by looking through a lens at people who were invisible to others, died Tuesday at age 101. Rogovin was in hospice care after a brief illness and died at his home in Buffalo surrounded by family, said his son, Mark.
After being blacklisted in the communist scare of the 1950s, Rogovin dedicated his life to photography. His pictures documented the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, the working class — in particular those living in a six-square-block neighborhood in Buffalo near his optometry practice.
“He referred to these people as the ‘forgotten ones,’” his son said. “These were poor and working people who were not ever in the limelight.” Rogovin found “forgotten ones” on New York Indian reservations and in far-flung corners of China, Zimbabwe, France, Scotland and Spain.
His first project was a documentary series on Buffalo’s black churches. Living on his wife’s schoolteacher salary, he traveled to Appalachia, Chile and Mexico to take portraits of working people — always using a vintage Rolleiflex, a bare bulb flash, occasionally a tripod, and black and white film.
Born in New York City in 1909, Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 to practice as an optometrist. He married Anne Setters in 1942, the same year he bought his first camera and was drafted into the U.S. Army. After returning from the war, he organized an optometrists’ union in Buffalo and served as a librarian in the city’s Communist Party. In 1957, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“Rogovin, named as top red in Buffalo, balks at nearly all queries,” read the headline the next day in the hometown Buffalo Evening News. With his optometry business sliced in half because of negative publicity, Rogovin turned to photography — although he never studied it formally.
“The rich have their photographers,” Rogovin often said. “I photograph the forgotten ones.”
In 1972, Rogovin turned his lens closer to home — the Lower West Side of Buffalo, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the state, a place where Italian-Americans had been replaced after World War II by Puerto Ricans, blacks, American Indians and poor whites.
Although he was first suspected of being a police officer or FBI agent, Rogovin eventually gained their trust, shooting 1,000 portraits over three years and always making sure to get a copy back to the subject. In 1984, he returned to the neighborhood, tracked down his original subjects and rephotographed as many as he could. He did the same in 1992 when he was 83 and recovering from heart surgery and prostate cancer. He remained working until 2002.
“Never ever once did he start a project thinking, ‘Ahh, this is historic,’” said his son, a mural painter. “It was all because he saw a face of a Native American woman with all her lines and age and white hair as a beautiful face, a face he wanted everybody to witness.
“I think the thing that he would say is, ‘I want people to use my photographs.’ He wants his work to be used in a million educational ways. His desire was that these works would be learned from and enjoyed in the communities that he photographed in. It’s beginning to happen.”
Rogovin’s wife, who taught mentally disabled children, died in 2003 at 84. Along with her husband, she protested the trial and sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “She was his PR agent,” Mark Rogovin said. “My father was really an activist since the Depression. My mother got involved in activities around the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War when, as my father says, he started to politicize my mother.”
Here’s a link to the brilliant Letter Jae’s videos. He recently bought a new camera and is experimenting:
Stay tuned for more videos. This guy is GOING places (not just saying that because I’m related to him!)
Recent Comments