Photojournalism

The Mur made a comment once that you can tell if it is Bing's room by the fact that there are random crap on the walls. The habit started while I was in high school, when my mother had subscriptions to the New York Times and various other magazines. Plus, I didn't have a car. If anyone has ever lived in Tampa, one would know that living there without a car is like having your limbs cut off in the middle of nowhere. Being in the IB program didn't help my after school social life either. Luckily high school was only four years.

For some reason my mother never really read the stuff she subscribed, so I took over the papers and in between studying, would browse through random articles in search of interesting pictures. This past weekend, I went back to Tampa *shudders* to search for a piece of official document. I had the palmcorder with me, so I took some pictures of my infamous room so my friends will know what The Mur meant by "walls of random crap".

When I made the clippings, I was not particularly interested about the political aspect of the articles. I was more drawn to the way the photos depicts the human condition. The clippings have yellowed due to age and exposure...most of these articles are almost ten years old. My room is by far the least sterile part of the house because of these newspaper clippings.

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Haunting Faces

Mourning is one of the hardest thing to capture and even harder to revisit.

Aftermath of a war...

An adorable photo of a Buddhist child holding a cat.

Her hardship is etched in her eyes.

Unification of one Korean family separated by two governments.

Pictures by photographers during the Vietnam War who didn't make it out alive. The article mentioned "...as if they were seeing their own deaths through the photographs they have taken..."

This is one of my favorite pictures. The sadness on this armed man's eyes is indescribable.

Protests

A mother braving the soldiers to figure out the fate of her son.

My friend Fernando should be proud that I have something related to Ecuador on my walls (and the fact that I'm actually acknowledging his true nationality instead of calling him a Colombian like I normally do). The Ecuadorian farmers were protesting against then President Fabian Alarcon.

Debating gender equality regarding Jewish services in Israel.

Culture

Amish kid on rollerblades.

A familiar celebration of life, from an alien, alien world.

DJ Twisty-Tie, this is for you.

I don't think I was a Kubrik fan at the time since I didn't watch enough of his movies to make that judgment. I just liked the way he stared like a madman in that picture. Next to a famous picture of Duke Ellington and one of my military aircraft information cards on SR-71 (and you thought I only recently got into aviation).

Harlem Week. I didn't take a good picture here, but I love the look on that little girl's face sitting on the steps.

My artsy-fartsy side. Every music major must have Foss somewhere in any way shape or form. It's about as fashionable as Corigliano or Stockhausen.

Most beautiful women aren't stick thin, Andrei Sakharov was a cutie, Herbert von Karajan was an awesome conductor, and I'm a total dork.

Barefoot street soccer!!!

Random Ads

Apple embedded a chip on the base of my brain when I was an elementary student playing on an Apple IIe. Since then I'm inexplicably drawn to Apple no matter how unhappy I am with them at the moment.

An ad from Daimler Chrysler, one of the contributors for...Airbus. *ducks* The caption says: "Thanks to Nelson Mandela, future generations of South Africans will grow up unable to read this."

Ah...good ole' Dell. *insert snide comment here*

Random Comics

It never ends, does it?

The fate for all computer science majors.

A Small Tribute To Horace Bristol

If any of you have ever read Grapes of Wrath, then you might have heard of Horace Bristol, a photographer who was supposed to collaborate with John Steinbeck to produce a book describing the hard life of migrant workers. Well, Steinbeck decided to cut off the partnership and embark on his own project, and the resulting product became the bane for most high school students in the US.

I consider Margaret Bourke-White and Horace Bristol as two extraordinary photojournalists of the 20th century.

Finally...

I couldn't resist, but these are my stuffed animals that I've had since...forever. The koala bear was given to me when I was four, and the lion I've had since I was born. My mom had to cut off the whiskers on the lion so it wouldn't poke my eyes out.

Alright, I think I've bombarded you with enough pictures. Thank you for viewing the random crap on my walls.