Welcome to my Blog!
I hope to share here my irrepressible thoughts on news, music, books, arts and such like. In general these will be items, events and issues which I feel have no place on my website (which focusses on aviation history and my travel photography).

The item immediately below this would be the latest posting.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. - Charles Baudelaire
Esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived) ¬Bishop George Berkeley

Not even I understand everything I am ¬Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo

In 2013 I started a series of photo albums on Blurb.com, named '36Exp' (a subject adressed in 36 exposures, a reference to the exposures on most common rolls of 35 mm film: 12, 24 & 36.) back in the day.
The books can be ordered directly from the Blurb.com or Amazon.
www.blurb.com/user/ruudleeuw

CURRENT BLOG

Y'day the weather was nice, today it's raining. So y'day we went out and today it's nice to edit the photos I made at Castle Doorwerth.
The province of Gelderland boasts a wealth of castles and country houses. Seven properties are open to visitors, taking them back in time to discover the lifestyle, architecture and art of bygone days. I intend to visit them all in due time.

A keep existed in the 13th century, the lavish hall was where people lived, meetings and parties were held and people slept. Ca.1400 the castle was expanded, in fact it almost double in size!
Current presentation is based on 17th century paintings.

So nowadays, Doorwerth Castle shines in all its 17th century glory, and includes a gatehouse, coach house and stables. Don't miss the well-managed vegetable garden still supplying the castle’s kitchens with vegetables and flowers.
Inside, one can marvel at the richly decorated period rooms.

The recorded history of Doorwerth started in the early middle ages when a small castle was built in the Seelbeek valley and later the current Doorwerth Castle was founded. The old village grew around the castle near the banks of the river Rhine.
Most of the houses of the old village near the castle were damaged during World War II, all of them where abandoned and demolished after the war.

www.glk.nl/seven-castles-and-houses/doorwerth-castle
en.wikipedia.org:_Doorwerth

William Klein (b 19Apr1928 - d.10Sep2022) is an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography.

Klein trained as a painter, studying under Fernand Léger, and found early success with exhibitions of his work. He soon moved on to photography and achieved widespread fame as a fashion photographer for Vogue and for his photo essays on various cities. He directed feature-length fiction films, numerous short and feature-length documentaries and produced over 250 television commercials.

He was ranked 25th on Professional Photographer's list of 100 most influential photographers.

en.wikipedia.org:_William_Klein_(photographer)
Photos of 2014 exhibition on Flickr.com

Yesterday visited the Hoenderdaell Estate (our 2nd visit there) where there's also a zoo / sanctuary. Animals include lions, tigers, wolves, bears and all sorts of tropical birds and much more.
This visit was (also) to test a new telephoto lens on my EOS R6: the Canon RF 100-500 L lens.
Very pleased with the results, even shooting through a double fence worked fine!

More on www.flickr.com/photos/

THE TOXIC GUILT OF SENTIMENTALITY

I read it in Dutch, titled 'Door en door verwend. Kritiek op de sentimentele samenleving'. I am a big fan
of Dalrymple's books, having read several.
In this book he sees an emerging cultural phenomenon which sees emotion substituted for reason. And again I agree with him in general.

Dalrymple finds fault with society's romanticised view of childhood, modern educational theory, demands for public displays of emotion, overseas aid and the assumed moral superiority of victims, and also lays bare the connections between sentimentality and brutality.
Under the multiple guises of raising children well, caring for the underprivileged, assisting the less able and doing good generally, we are achieving quite the opposite for the single purpose of feeling good about ourselves.
In extremis this leads to irrational expressions such as 'I am angry, so I am right', 'I feel myself a victim, so I am a victim', even to the point of influencing the judiciary. Social Media and politics (vox populi) play a large part in the wrong sort of sentmentality disrupting our society.

The author uses a range of cultural, educational, political, media and literary issues mainly for British society, but I see many similarities with Dutch society.
Subjects includ falling standards in (British) education, UK aid policies for African development, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the work and life of Sylvia Plath.

Anthony Malcolm Daniels (b.11Oct1949-), also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London.
Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

www.goodreads.com
en.wikipedia.org:_Spoilt_Rotten
en.wikipedia.org:_Theodore_Dalrymple

On sunday afternoon Sep.11th, the streets of Lichtenvoorde were once again filled with 18 colorful
dahlia giants and dozens of small parade floats, plus a multitude of bands emphasizing the festive nature of this unique event.
The Lichtenvoorde corso is on the International List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.

More photos on Flickr.com

'The shop cats of China' get a starring role in this wonderful photobook by Marcel Heijnen, who launched his first photobook 'Chinese Whiskers' in 2016 with photos taken in Hong Kong's Sai Ying Pun district where he lived at the time. For the photos in this book he has travelled extensively throughout China mainland.
Forward in this book is by Catherine Nicol: 'Culture, Class & Cat Fever'.

In Marcel Heijnen’s photographs of shopkeepers and their feline companions, the viewer is given a colourful insight into China’s busy retail life. I made 3 trips to China and would love to go again but with repeated outbreaks of the Covid-19 virus to this day (and the policy to fight infections by lockdown instead of vaccinations), this revisit is probably years away.

Cats, with their majestic and stoic air, seem to be the natural choice for the role of guardian, keeping rodenst away.
This is what Marcel Heijnen’s photographs demonstrate, as he has captured China’s shop cats over a period of four years, cats acting as aloof over these small retail kingdoms, keeping mice & rats at bay and perhaps even luring customers inside.

Here, traditional retail and street life merge, providing a snapshot into Chinese culture. I love that!
The cats blend in seamlessly into their surroundings, and you'll the different ways shopkeepers organise and present their wares to customers ranging from fruits and vegetables to textiles, tea, and ornaments. And then your eyes will find the cat's eyes staring at you.. Wonderful!

To accompany Heijnen’s images there are a series of haiku and stories by author Ian Row, which "invite you into the cats’ innermost thoughts” and shop life"..
The book is a charming and warm tribute to retail life in China and of course a catching document to cate lovers such as myself!.

In this wonderfully produced book, slim & elegant, Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported.
He has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage.
He cites sobering statistics that political rights and civil liberties have been falling for the past 15 years around the world, having risen for the previous three and a half decades. We see the term 'liberal' evolving to other variants, such as neoliberalism.
Vladimir Putin, as Francis Fukuyama reminds us, has declared liberal democracy obsolete. His is not an uncommon opinion, even in liberal democracies.

As events such as 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq wars and the 2008 financial crisis took their toll on liberalism’s self-confidence.
While liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous into significant inequalities in each of those realms.

The most glaring are the economic inequalities that have grown in the west, particularly in the US and UK, over the past 40 years. Fukuyama attributes these to 'neoliberalism', the belief in unfettered markets as the means of delivering the goal of consumer welfare.
But, Fukuyama contends, this is a distortion of liberalism, which has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency.
Fukuyama argues for both regulating and limiting big business, appreciating the social capital that is
accomplished from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities.
It's a book that will be saved in my bookcase within easy reach for repeated consultation and contemplation!

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (b.27Oct1952- ) is an American political scientist, - economist, international relations scholar and writer.
Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.
He's (a.o.) a council member of the Int'l Forum for Democratic Studies founded and was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation plus he's also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.

www.theguardian.com/ - liberalism-and-its-discontents
en.wikipedia.org:_Francis_Fukuyama

During my teenage years I bought a camera to photograph military aeroplanes on a nearby military air base. This quickly was expanded by (English) photography magazines, from an interest in glamour photography and camera equipment. The magazine featured a British photographer named David Bailey, very famous and rising to a rock star status (friends with Mick Jagger a.o.). He featured in Olympus advertisement with the slogan 'Who do you think you are, David Bailey?'
I built my camera equipment around 2 Olympus bodies (starting with the OM-1, OM-2 and later OM-4Ti, plus Zuiko lenses).
The photo magazines led to other photographers of that generations, such as Bob Carlos Clarke and David Swannell, an assistent to David Bailey at the time.
I liked Bailey's book 'Trouble and Strife' with his 3rd (4th?) wife, model Marie Helvin, though he mentions in his autobiography Look Again it was a photobook he was less pleased with.
So during the 1970s, probably into the 1980s, I started collecting (glamour) photobooks (e.g. by Uwe Ommer). And I kept an interest in David Bailey's work but as I am not interested in fashion nor portraiture he did sink behind my horizon for decades.

I came across LOOK AGAIN after seeing a tv documentary by Bailey in the same fashion as this book: recapturing memories with help from friends, former lovers and ex/ wifes and revisiting locations. The fashion photographer and documenter of 60s London looks back a raw and quite surprising memoir.
Jean Shrimpton, an aspiring model then aged 18, looks back with Bailey and co-author James Fox on his youth, parents, London's East End, friendship with Mick Jagger, early photography and Bailey's relationship with the infamous criminals, Reg & Ron Kray.

Many others have their say on Bailey's personality, also his ex-wives, Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin, current wife, Catherine Dyer. And many more friends and lovers...

He was being called stupid every day at school (he left at 14 and was diagnosed with dyslexia aged 30). He served with the Royal Air Force for some time and happened to stumble on photography.
He was, according to his oldest friend, Danny O’Connor, never without 'the Bailey stare', apparently seeing things in people – women! – that they hardly saw themselves.
The stare got him into lots of trouble, taking beatings from local thugs, 'the Barking boys', whose girlfriends he eyed up, but it was also his almost unfailing attraction. He never doubted that gift. “My mother used to say, ‘You’ll end up like all of us, driving the 101 bus,’” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I fucking won’t.’”

As Bailey’s longtime assistant John Swannell puts it: “Whatever trip he was on, he went for the model and 99% of the time he was bonking them.” There is, from the many former lovers who appear in these pages, no suggestion that any of that attention was unwanted.

www.theguardian.com/books/2020
en.wikipedia.org:_David_Bailey

A collection of witty, imaginative stories striving to be morality tales. I bought it under absolute wrong expectations, misunderstanding 'comtemporary', but the short stories are weird and wonderful!

Baker’s 2nd collection of short stories (haven't yet read the first) uses satire and elements of speculative fiction to mess with the contradictions of life in modern America.
The title story is about a small town that secedes from Texas and the United States and names itself 'America'. Along the way, the residents fall into bickering about everything from whether capital letters represent an unfair “class system” to whether setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July makes one a traitor to America.

The stories take actual social issues and amplify or distort them. E.g. in 'Rites', people are expected to choose the means of their own suicide once they are old enough to become a drain on society... The story begins with a woman dousing herself in gasoline, rowing a boat to the center of a pond, and lighting a match while her family cheers her on. Ouch!
Gender identity is mirrored in 'The Transition', which follows a mother struggling to accept her son's wish to leave his body and upload his consciousness to a computer.
In 'The Sponsor', consumerism is satirized in a couple’s desperate attempt to secure an impressive corporate sponsor for their upcoming wedding!

Other stories include 'Appearance', 'Unwanted', 'One Big Happy Family', and 'Lost Souls'.
Baker is fascinated by modern America, and each story is an attempt to explore an important issue in an 'other world' setting.

www.kirkusreviews.com/ - /matthew-baker:_why-visit-america
www.mwektaehtabr.com

'Fotomuseum aan het Vrijthof' in Maastricht presents an exhibition by the Danish photographer Søren Solkær from 19 March to 25 September 2022. I visited it on 23Aug22.
With SURFACE, the museum shows more 60+ portraits of international street artists with their colourful artworks in public space; from graffiti pioneers and emerging talent to the most influential artists in the street art scene.

Søren Solkær portrayed Dutch street artists such as DOES, Laser 3.14 and Niels Shoe Meulman. Foreign artists include Blek le Rat, DABSMYLA, D*Face, ELLE, Icy & Sot, Invader, Lady Aiko, Maya Hayuk, Seen, Shepard Fairey and The London Police.
It was a logic consequence that after visiting Glasgow for the Urban Art there that I just had to visit this exhibition by Solkær.
On request, many artists are also unrecognizable in the picture.

'SURFACE' is the result of a five-year journey through world cities such as Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Miami, New York, Paris and Sydney.
A fantastic book of the same name is available of the portrait project in which 135 street artists are included. I could not resist buying it, recommended!

Søren Solkær (b. Sønderborg, 1969 -) lives and works in Copenhagen. He studied photography at the FAMU in Prague.
The photographer exhibits in museums and galleries worldwide and enjoys international fame for his iconic portraits of pop musicians such as Adele, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Björk, Pharrell Williams and U2.
His extensive oeuvre is bundled in seven inspiring photo books: Beat City, CLOSER, SOULS, SURFACE, Portraits 1993-2018, Black Sun and PASSAGE.

fotomuseumaanhetvrijthof.nl/ - /surface-soren-solkaer
sorensolkaer.com

This year, book fans and traders happily returned to the Deventer Book Market after several years of disruption due to the Covid pandemic.
For centuries, many printers and publishers were located in Deventer. The city still houses a few publishing houses and printers of national importance and offers a wide and varied range of bookshops and antiquarian booksellers.
The Deventer Book Market is the largest of such events in Europe and took place on Sunday 7th of August.
As always I came away with a good selection

deventerboekenmarkt.nl
More photos on Flickr.com

In her follow-up to The Long Call (2019; which I haven't read yet), Cleeves provides a complex mystery full of surprises.
Detective Matthew Venn’s North Devon team is stretched to the limit by a series of homicides.
An aborted conversation between police officer Jen Rafferty and Nigel Yeo, who wants to discuss a problem at a party thrown by a mutual friend, is the first hint of trouble. The next morning, Jen is called to a murder scene at an artist’s workshop on the grounds of wealthy Francis Ley's home. The dead man is Nigel, who was killed by a spear from one of his glass blower daughter Eve’s pieces.
Wes Curnow is th enext victim, with the same m.o. He's the other artist in residence at Ley's, but also has studio space at an art center run by Venn’s artistic, upbeat husband, Jonathan.
Nigel Yeo worked for a watchdog organization that’s investigating the National Health Service after several families complained that their depressed youngsters got little help and committed suicide, including the son of a local family that could be seeking revenge...
But a connection with Wes Curnow's murder is not apparent.

The homicide team, which in addition to Jen includes an ambitious detective named Ross, work in their own intuitive ways alongside Venn, a clever, soft-spoken, deeply conflicted man — after having been brought up in a cultlike religious group that doesn’t welcome gay people.
A 3rd death complicates the search for a motive even further.
Plenty of drama and well developed characters. Probably not my last book by Ann Cleeves!

www.kirkusreviews.com/- - -/ann-cleeves/herons-cry/
en.wikipedia.org:_Ann_Cleeves

For over 75 years, the photographers of Magnum Photos have not only created photographic icons on both major events and hidden stories but have simultaneously worked on commission.
The exhibition Open for Business - Magnum Photographers on Commission shows a side of Magnum that the general public is hardly aware of, and with which its photographers (Bruce Gilden, Alec Soth, Martin Parr, Steve McCurry and many others) rarely promote themselves.
In 8 chapters, the audience is taken on a variety of commercial assignments: from carte blanche group assignments for governments to the hippest fashion photography; and from chic publications for major industries to reporting in the service of NGOs.

'Open For Business' exposes the true nature of the job, which comes with assignments that highlight the qualities of Magnum’s visual storytellers in completely different ways. It shines a light on the diversity of Magnum’s commissioned work from the 1950s to 2019.
From the beginning, the balance between independent and commercial work has led to fierce discussions amongst Magnum photographers. Every member of the agency considers corporate commissions differently.
This exhibition features the outcome of these experiences, putting a sharp focus on the ethical questions that arise with them. It reveals interactions between commercial and personal photography, emphasizing the ways in which photographers have shaped or changed the visual languages of corporations by applying their personal sensitivity to assignments, with surprising, ironic and often humorous results.
(text by www.foam.org/events/magnum)

The war documentation 'Focus on Ukraine' was on exhibit in a remarkable historic building.

The Cecilia Monastery existed from 1402 to 1577.
It was also known as Cecilia Convent and is a former Roman Catholic nunnery in the center of Hoorn. The convent was founded in 1402 and after the reformation fell to the city council.
The complex was used between 1577 and 1795 as a meeting place for the Committed States of Holland and West Friesland. After the Batavian Republic, it was used until 1970, simultaneously, as a town hall, court and police station.
Before the Cecilia monastery was founded, there was a small community for brothers. This fraternity or fraternity community was founded in 1385.
The founding certificate also states that they were given a house on the corner of The Newesteg and Nieuwstraat. The 'Brothers of the Common Life' adhered to the teachings of Geert Grote and did not take monastic vows.
Remarkable historic building.

NL.wikipedia.org:_Ceciliaklooster_@Hoorn
www.oudhoorn.nl/kerken/st_ceciliakapel/ (NL)

Hoorn is well known in the Netherlands for its rich history.
The town acquired city rights in 1357 and flourished during the Dutch Golden Age. In this period, Hoorn developed into a prosperous port city, being home to one of the six chambers of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Towards the end of the 18th century, however, it started to become increasingly more difficult for Hoorn to keep competing with nearby Amsterdam. Ultimately, it lost its function as port city and became a regional center of trade, mainly serving the smaller villages of West Friesland.
Cape Horn and the Hoorn Islands were both named after this city.

en.wikipedia.org:_Hoorn
Flickr.com

There were several exhibitions I greatly enjoyed here, photos above start with Ouders | Parents.
In this exhibition Fotomuseum Den Haag brings together works by 30+ artists who have portrayed their mothers and fathers in a remarkable fashion.
The selection of works shows that the relationship between parent and child is both universal and extremely personal and intimate. Through their work, the photographers provide an insight into their varied relationships with their parents, from loving and tender to aloof or dysfunctional.
The exhibition also demonstrates the photographers’ great variety of approaches to their subject. While Corbino has opted for a carefully posed black-and-white portrait of his naked father, Deanna Dikeman has portrayed her mother and father waving in front of the house they have lived in for more than twenty-five years.
The exhibition features works by, among others, Jan Banning, Nina Berman, Melanie Bonajo, Diana Blok, Corbino, Deanna Dikeman, Eddo Hartmann, Pieter Hugo, Erik Kessels and Erwin Olaf.
Such a pity there was no catalogue made of this superb exhibition!

The 2nd exhibition Dutch artistic duo Robert Knoth (b. 1963) and Antoinette de Jong (1964) present their work titled 'Tree and Soil'.
They made several trips to Fukushima in Japan shortly after a tsunami had caused a nuclear disaster there on 11Mar2011. They wanted to see with their own eyes what impact this event had had on the region and talk to people who lived there.
In Tree and Soil, the book they made after their visits to Japan, Knoth and De Jong combine the landscapes they photographed and filmed with objects from Naturalis Biodiversity Center’s Siebold Collection.
Physician and explorer Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) was based at the Dutch trading post on the island of Deshima, off the coast at Nagasaki. During his time there he was able to take several trips round Japan. He collected a huge quantity of plants, animals, paintings and other artefacts of great cultural and historical value.
And the Siebold Collection shows in great detail how Japanese culture emerged from and is inspired by nature. Linking the Siebold Collection with their own photography, Knoth and De Jong connect past and present. Amazing documentary in all respects.
In a tragic coincidence I read during my visit here that Shinzo Abe, former and longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, had been assissinated today, 08Jul2022, while delivering a campaign speech in Nara.

The 3rd exhibition, of only two (large) photos by Eddo Hartmann, was 'Here lives my home'. This was my 2nd photobook I purchased.

www.fotomuseumdenhaag.nl/en
www.knothdejong.com/
eddohartmann.nl
www.flickr.com/photos/

The annual World Press Photo Contest recognizes and celebrates the best photojournalism and documentary photography produced over the last year.
In 2021, only 7% of entrants came from South America, 5% from Southeast Asia and Oceania, and 3% from Africa. For 2022 a change was in order.
The WPP 2022 Photo Contest worked with a regional system that included six regions:
¬Africa
¬Asia
¬Europe
¬North and Central America
¬South America
¬Southeast Asia and Oceania
www.worldpressphoto.org/- - -/new-contest-model

From the 24 regional winners in each of the four categories, the 2022 Contest jury selected these four global winners:
World Press Photo of the Year: Kamloops Residential School by Amber Bracken, Canada, for The New York Times
World Press Photo Story of the Year: Saving Forests with Fire by Matthew Abbott, Australia, for National Geographic/Panos Pictures
World Press Photo Long-Term Project Award: Amazonian Dystopia by Lalo de Almeida, Brazil, for Folha de São Paulo/Panos Pictures
World Press Photo Open Format Award: Blood is a Seed by Isadora Romero, Ecuador

Judging of the 2022 World Press Photo Contest took place from 17Jan - 02Mar22 and involved regional juries and a global jury.
www.worldpressphoto.org/contest/2022