Photographer is Modern-day Hopper

It's not that Hopper painted poverty and desolate Americana. We all know (and some of us love) his play with light, his choice of subject, his point of view. Personally I also like Sheeler, exponent of what they call the Precisionist Movement: cities, machines.

But look at these incredible pictures, on exhibition (alas) @ the MOMA. In A New American Picture, photographer Doug Rickard takes viewers on a tour of the run-down, the derelict, and the economically depressed using ... Google. Rickard scouted out specific locations on Google Maps that show crippling economic devastation—boarded-up buildings in Camden, N.J., overgrown sidewalks in Detroit, and neglected lots in New Orleans. He snapped digital photographs of the scene playing out on his computer monitor. The effect is impressive and not just for the use of light and colour. The anonymity of the people in these pictures is a harsh metaphor for the anonymity of poverty.

With thanks to www.thedailybeast.com.

Invisible Art?

Walking regularly through the Brussels Wetstraat, heading for the centre, I pass an open air exhibition set up by the www.thehumanrightsproject.org. Kinda hard finding them online, if you Google stuff like human rights project.org ... but found them anyway. The frustrating thing is that so far, no one ever bothers to stop, look and digest what they are seeing here. Let me quote from the site as to what the aim of the project is: 


"The Declaration of Human Rights is a manifest that evolved from the founding of the United Nations in 1948. Whether or not it was meant by all UN participants as an achievable maxim for the post war world, it does remain a vital testimonial to the assumption that the people of the entire world should have access to the dignity of their species. However, a cursory glance around the world today makes clear that the 30 articles contained within the declaration of Human Rights have, for the most part, been ignored, and are likely to remain ignored (...) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated into 360 languages, there has never been a visual interpretation of this kind of the complete Declaration of Human Rights." Which means it's picture stories we get to see here, powerful images.

This one illustrates the fact that everyone has a right to education (article 26).


Please take a moment to look at them, when you pass them by?