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Double twosome
Double twosome After years of worship venerated objects can become pretty messy. The heads of the divine couple on the left have been smeared with coloured paste day after day till their faces got completely covered. The girls (goddesses?) on the torn and faded poster have also had their share, not on but above their…
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Alluring twosome
Alluring twosome Through their gestures these heavenly nymphs draw our attention straight away to their heavy rounded breasts. The sculptor may have exaggerated a bit in his striving to let them meet the ideal of feminine beauty, but nonetheless the nymphs seem to be content with the outcome of his work. Photo of the week:…
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Flat twosome
Flat twosome Like ancient Egyptian reliefs – see for example the reliefs inside Ramose’s tomb in Thebe – Assyrian reliefs too stand out by their flatness and beauty. They are hardly three-dimensional but the subtle curves of head and hair are delicately shaped and bring the face to life. When the relief shows two partly…
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Migrating birds
Migrating birds The play of reeds, water and light in last week’s photo pleased me because of its abstract nature. In the same way Devrim Erbil must have been pleased by the sight of a chaotic swarm of migrating birds and took it up as the subject of his painting. Abstraction inspired by nature. Photo…
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Reading reeds
Reading reeds A delightful tangle of lines, open triangles and dense clusters: broken reeds in the sunlit water at the end of the day. Nature’s playfulness verging on abstraction. Photo of the week: Manipur, India 2014
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Not to forget
Not to forget At the beginning of the 2nd World War there were 17.000 Jewish residents in the part of Amsterdam where I live. During the war 13.000 of them were deported and murdered in the concentration camps. When I walk through my neighbourhood I can ‘stumble’ sometimes upon little brass plates in the pavement.…
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Anne Frank
Anne Frank There she stands, Anne Frank, on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam where she lived 9 years of her short life till 1942. On 6 July of that year she went with her family into hiding on the Prinsengracht in what now is known as the Anne Frank House. Sculptor Jet Schepp has portrayed her all…
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Liberation Day
Liberation Day For the 75th time this year. Every year on the 5th of May we celebrate the end of the occupation by Nazi Germany. On the 7th of May 1945 the allied forces drove through this street, then called the Noorder Amstellaan, into Amsterdam, cheered and applauded by its inhabitants. A year later the…
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Oswiecim
Oswiecim Having come into being at the end of the war and been born in a Netherlands that had regained its freedom, the horrors of the Second World War have been etched into my consciousness through harrowing images and stories.One morning in 2007, on the train from Kraków to Prague, we made a stopover in…
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Auschwitz
Auschwitz (…) Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng (…) (…) he yells play sweeter for death Death is a German-born master…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
