Category: Europe
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Waterland
Waterland I took these pictures in the summer of 2017, but 50 years ago I already cycled on nice summer days to Waterland, this low lying country of meadows, brooks and tiny villages just outside the centre of Amsterdam. Then and now, it cannot be much different from how it was hundred years ago when…
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Camera in love
That was the title given to the exhibition of the work of Ed van der Elsken at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2017. The woman with the cigarette on the photo is Vali Myers, a bohemian artist who was Van de Elsken’s muse during his stay in Paris in the early 1950s. She figures…
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Japan unbound
Between 1959 and 1988, photographer Ed van der Elsken visited Japan many times. He once calculated that, taken together, he must have walked the streets of Tokyo and other places with his camera every day for more than two years. And, to his own surprise, during those 750 days of roaming around the streets of…
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Twins of an era
Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) was a street photographer. Wherever he was, in Amsterdam, Paris or Tokyo, he roamed the streets with his camera for days on end and took pictures of … people. Looking at his pictures at an exhibition of his work in 2017, the atmosphere of the 50s, 60s, 70s of the…
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Béla Tarr and the seventh art
His last and maybe final film: The Turin Horse (black and white, 146′, 2011). There is inside and outside. Outside: a deafening storm rages over the barren land. The gale blows clouds of sand and dead leaves in the air. A desolate bare tree stands on the hill in front of the farm. Inside: the…
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Art with a wink
The one girl looks intently at the other, and vice versa. Each one utterly intrigued by the sight of the other. I remember I had a funnily-meant little book long ago, called ‘Kunst met een knipoog’ (‘Art with a wink’), with a winking Mona Lisa on the cover. Here it is not the girls that…
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Model backs
Lovely loose hanging hair. An equally lovely loose hanging little dress, revealing a beautiful, delicate back. Don’t turn round angels, you may break the enchantment! A village woman from the hills. Her bare lower back betrays a slender waist and sinuous, strong body. As an animal in the wild. And then, a woman’s back and…
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Tamata
τάματα is the Greek word for vows and votive offerings, referring to a popular practice among the faithful of most if not all religions. I have shown and written about this fascinating phenomenon earlier on this blog in a series of posts dedicated to the local Hindu god Golu Devta in Kumaon, India, and the vows…
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Ossuarium
In one of the orthodox churches of Paleochora I saw to my surprise a big open stone reservoir filled with human bones: an ossuary inside the church in full view! I have understood that ossuaries came into use in places where graveyard space is scarce. After a few years in the ground the remains of…
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Aegina – Paleochora
The old town of Aegina had always been at the coast of the island, next to the harbour where it is situated now again. But in the 9th century the town was shifted inland where it could be defended better against the attacks of the Saracens. In the 18th century there were still 400 houses…
καιρός remembered 