029-Love is Living

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.

084-Resolved for more than a year

084-Resolved for more than a year, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

To me, one day follows another, if I do not have the resolve to make changes during the year, why should it make any difference at the beginning of a new one?

I am resolved to keep on loving my wife, and to continue to search for new ways of doing things, to give society a better chance for a greater future by empowering those who could make a difference if only they knew how - and to break the power of the callous and the selfish.

072: Playing for my baby!

Playing for my baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Music and Sugar

This shot is more important for me than my other, more humorous or naughty ones, the doing of something that makes Ania happy, the continual reaffirming of our love.

I have noticed that many people producing series of what they call self-portraits are really producing self-images. What do I mean? Well, a self image uses only that person as the image, supported by a series of props - objects found or purchased with the intent on producing an image of how that person imagines him or herself.

A self portrait, on the other hand, attempts to show how that person really is, and because the emphasis is less on using props to support this vision of self, the use real objects, real dreams and real people.

Meet up with a bunch of self-imagers and you may make the mistake of believing you have joined a group of single people. meet a group of self-portraiters and you can see who is single and who is in a relationship. Reality, of course is much more complex than this, and there is nothing wrong with either form of production - but it is something worth bearing in mind when you interact with people producing what they call self-portraits.

I can see that my preference is mainly for self-portraiture, and as a consequence I aim to show my life and dreams in my images, even if any one particular image shows a situation I have never directly expereienced.

When I view work by self-imagers I am left wandering what is it that they are leaving out, what is not being shown. These images are often high-craft and popular, but they are also empty of real emotion, perhaps because they are only ghost images of a real person and their life?