Charles Bukowski about Hell

Tom Waits © G. Gorman

'Those who escape hell

 However 

 Never talk about 

 It 

And nothing much 

Bothers them 

After 

That.' 

Charles Bukowski

 pic.twitter.com/FW97kiJh9D

Dietrich, Riefenstahl, Arbus

   

Leni Riefenstahl with Nuba tribesman. After her propaganda films for the Nazis...

 

Conscientious Photo Magazine

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About Conscientious Photo Magazine

Conscientious Photography Magazine is a website dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. It offers profiles of photographers, in-depth interviews, photobook reviews, and general articles about photography and related issues.
Founder and editor Jörg M. Colberg began publishing Conscientious in 2002. American Photo included Colberg in their list of “Photography Innovators of 2006,” writing “a new generation of thought leaders has emerged to give photographers and photography fans new avenues of information.”
In addition to working on Conscientious, Colberg has contributed articles/essays to magazines and artist monographs. He is the author of Understanding Photobooks: The Form and Content of the Photographic Book (Focal Press, 2016).
Colberg is a professor of photography at Hartford Art School/University of Hartford.
Links to interesting articles appear on Colberg’s Twitter feed.
Previous complimentary content existed on Conscientious Redux, a Tumblr with all kinds of irregular content, often from the cutting-room floor, and on an Ello page.
For those looking for an RSS feed, it’s available here (atom).
To submit work for considerations, email the relevant URL(s) to jmcolberg at gmail.com. Please do not send pdfs or images. Also, please do not add me to your mailing list.

Site design and development by Tim Gasperak

http://cphmag.com/about/ 

Marlene Dietrich

Dietrich, Riefenstahl, Arbus

26 September 2016

Arbus boy with grenade

Leni Riefenstahl with Nuba tribesman. After her propaganda films for the Nazis.
 

Dorothea Lange photographed the destitute

 

 

Dorothea Lange photographed the destitute queueing for food at a soup kitchen in 1933: 

 

http://buff.ly/2fI77sB 

 

 

 

 

 Migrant Mother

 

 

  

Dorothea Lange · July 1939. Gordonton, N.C. Country store on dirt road. Coca Cola- Depression

 

On the Road --- Family walking on highway, five children. Started from Idabel, Oklahoma. 

Bound for Krebs, Oklahoma. Pittsburg County, Oklahoma.

Source: http://cphmag.com/migrant-mother/

Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen Credit Dominique Issermann

  Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise

By LEON WIESELTIER 
 NOV. 14, 2016 

The email from the boy began: “Did anything inspire you to create Hallelujah?"

Later that same winter day the reply arrived: 
“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it. You don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the challenge. But in this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply grateful.”

The question came from the author's son, who was preparing to present the hymn to his fifth-grade class. The boy required a clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the song, Leonard Cohen.

Cohen lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity.
There was always a trace of philosophy in his sensuality.
He managed to combine a sense of absurdity with a sense of significance, a genuine feat.
He was a friend of melancholy but an enemy of gloom, and a renegade enamored of tradition.

Leonard was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life, the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed.

Leonard sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin as a failure or a disqualification. Sin was a condition of life. 

“Even though it all went wrong/ I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!”

The singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence. Instead they confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise. 

He is the inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt, insisting modestly but stubbornly upon his right to a sacred exaltation.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”  

He once told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a credo.  

The teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the light.

  

Here is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the end of the 16th century:

“Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” 
he observed in an essay on frivolity.
“And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him.  In such a being, 
perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”

Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/my-friend-leonard-cohen-darkness-and-praise.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&src=trending

Living with a sense of purpose in life

Conclusion:

A sense of purpose in life also gives you this considerable advantage:

"People with a sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease."

The conclusions come from over 136,000 people who took part in 10 different studies.

Participants in the studies were mostly from the US and Japan.


The US studies asked people:

• how useful they felt to others,
• about their sense of purpose, and
• the meaning they got out of life.

The Japanese studies asked people about ‘ikigai’ or whether their life was worth living.
The participants, whose average age was 67, were tracked for around 7 years.

During that time almost 20,000 died. 
But, amongst those with a strong sense of purpose or high ‘ikigai’, the risk of death was one-fifth lower.

Despite the link between sense of purpose and health being so intuitive, scientists are not sure of the mechanism.

Sense of purpose is likely to improve health by strengthening the body against stress.

It is also likely to be linked to healthier behaviours.

Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Of note, having a strong sense of life purpose has long been postulated to be an important dimension of life, providing people with a sense of vitality motivation and resilience.

Nevertheless, the medical implications of living with a high or low sense of life purpose have only recently caught the attention of investigators.

The current findings are important because they may open up new potential interventions for helping people to promote their health and sense of well-being.”

This research on links between sense of purpose in life and longevity is getting stronger all the time:

• “A 2009 study of 1,238 elderly people found that those with a sense of purpose lived longer.
• A 2010 study of 900 older adults found that those with a greater sense of purpose were much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
• Survey data often links a sense of purpose in life with increased happiness.

No matter what your age, then, it’s worth thinking about what gives your life meaning.”



Read More:

Find out what kinds of things people say give their lives meaning.

Here’s an exercise for increasing meaningfulness

And a study finding that feeling you belong increases the sense of meaning.

The study was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (Cohen et al., 2015).




A sense of purpose in life
Link: http://www.spring.org.uk/2015/12/here-is-why-a-sense-of-purpose-in-life-is-important-for-health

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