To all my amigos in Paris

Here we are in Plano,Texas and all is well.
It is a crisp december morning and we are going to get a cup with Holly at Starbucks..
I will be posting photos of Plano soon..

STIEGLITZ

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. Many of his photographs are known for appearing like those other art forms, and he is also known for his marriage to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

Alfred Stieglitz, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935.

Stieglitz was born the eldest of six children in Hoboken, New Jersey and raised in a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side. His father moved with his family to Germany in 1881. The next year, Stieglitz began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and soon switched to photography. Traveling through the European countryside with his camera, he took many photographs of peasants working on the Dutch seacoast and undisturbed nature within Germany's Black Forest and won prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s . Throughout his life, Stieglitz was infatuated with younger women. He married Emmeline Obermeyer in 1893, after he returned to New York, and they had one child, Kitty, in 1898. Allowances from Emmeline's father and his own enabled Stieglitz to not have to work for a living. From 1893 to 1896, Stieglitz was editor of American Amateur Photographer magazine; however, his editorial style proved to be brusque, autocratic and alienating to many subscribers. After being forced to resign, Stieglitz turned to the New York Camera Club (which was later renamed The Camera Club of New York and is in existence to this day) and retooled its newsletter into a serious art periodical known as Camera works. He announced that every published image would be a picture, not a photograph - a statement that allowed Stieglitz to determine which was which.

The Steerage

Big camera clubs that were the vogue in America at the time did not satisfy him; in 1902 he organized an invitation-only group, which he dubbed the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression." Among its members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Also in 1902 he ceased being editor of Camera Notes and in 1903 started a new independent journal of his own, Camera Work. Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions and its work was published Camera Work, which became the pre-eminent quarterly photographic journal of its day, although in later years its popularity declined markedly and it ceased publication in 1917. From 1905 to 1917, Stieglitz managed the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue.. In 1910, Stieglitz was invited to organize a show at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which set attendance records. He was insistent that "photographs look like photographs," so that the medium of photography would be considered with its own aesthetic credo and so separate photography from other fine arts such as painting, thus defining photography as a fine art for the first time.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Stieglitz divorced his wife Emmeline in 1918, soon after she threw him out of their house when she came home and found him photographing Georgia O'Keeffe, with whom he moved in shortly thereafter. The two married in 1924 and were both successful, he in photography (he would take hundreds of pictures of her throughout his life), she as an artist who had received notoriety from Stieglitz at 291 in 1916 and 1917. Stieglitz began in 1916 photographing O'Keeffe and over the next two decades comprised one of his greatest works, his collective portrait of O'Keeffe (over 300 images) which was a collaborative process between both sitter and photographer. The marriage between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz was strained as she had to care more for his health due to a prevailing heart condition and his hypochondria. Following a visit to Santa Fe and Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe began to spend a portion of most summers in New Mexico. In the 1930s, Stieglitz took a series of photographs, some nude, of heiress Dorothy Norman, who became in O'Keeffe's mind a serious rival for Stieglitz's affections. Both these photographs and those of O'Keeffe are often considered the first photographs to recognize the artistic potential of isolated parts of the human body. In these years, he also presided over two non-commercial New York City galleries, The Intimate Gallery and An American Place. It was at An American Place that he formed his friendship with the great 20th century photographer Ansel Easton Adams. Adams displayed many prints in Stieglitz's gallery, corresponded with him and also photographed Stieglitz on occasion.

Stieglitz died in 1946 at 82

All men are created free and equal

"I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects---certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. " (By Lincoln in his debate with Stephen Douglas)

The Trial of Socrates

Socrates had been a well-known figure in Athens for some years by the time of his trial. Aristophanes' comedy Clouds (Nephelai), produced in 420 BC, has Socrates as a main character, portraying him as a pompous, bombastic con-artist.
No works by Socrates himself survive, but his pupil Plato recorded numerous 'Socratic dialogues', with his teacher as the main character. Socrates's elenctic examination was resented by influential figures of his day, whose reputations for wisdom and virtue were debunked by his questions. The way many people at the time viewed elenchos as annoying earned Socrates the epithet "gadfly of Athens." Elenctic method was often imitated by the young men of Athens, which greatly upset the established moral values and order. Indeed, even though Socrates himself fought for Athens and argued for obedience to law, at the same time he criticised democracy, especially, the Athenian practice of election by lot, ridiculing that in no other craft, the craftsman would be elected in such a fashion. Such a criticism gave rise to suspicion by the democrats, especially when his close associates were found to be enemies of democracy. Alcibiades betrayed Athens in favour of Sparta (although this treachery was likely more a matter of necessity than a matter of ideology), and Critias, his sometime disciple, was a leader of the Thirty Tyrants (the pro-Spartan oligarchy that ruled Athens for a few years after its defeat during the Peloponnesian War), though there is also a record of their falling out.
In addition, Socrates held unusual views on religion. He made several references to his personal spirit, or daimonion, although he explicitly claimed that it never urged him on, but only warned him against various prospective events. Many of his contemporaries were suspicious of Socrates's daimonion as a rejection of the state religion. It is generally understood that Socrates's daimonion is akin to intuition. Moreover, Socrates claimed that the concept of goodness, instead of being determined by what the gods wanted, actually precedes it.

HENRY

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon these several identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. Thoreau's work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau's philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. more

henry

the time has come...

the walrus said