The Black Madonna

When I was living and studying in Poland I saw an icon of the virgin Mary . It is called The black Madonna ,and " she" is the protective saint of Warsaw.
I asked about it and never get a satisfying answer : one was " the church which the icon was there , had been burned to earth , the icon was damaged ..and that is reason of the black color.
Years after I went to Ethiopia, and toured the country , that when the military regime was still in power. Every where there were paintings of Carl Marx and Lenin. The were in black . I liked the idea of coloring them with the skin of the Ethiopians!.
In the eastern orthodox churches; Jesus and Mary are always having a fair skin . when I see eastern Jews with their brownish skins , I wonder from where the colors of the icons in our churches came?!
So the Ethiopians had ethoipnised their gods , so not to alienate from them !
Raouf

P: Walking around this captivating place, I was approached by a team of journalists from Addis who were doing a short TV segment on tourism in Ethiopia. They asked to interview me and I protested, not knowing anything about tourism in Ethiopia. My guide, Mesfin, gave me a stern look and I caved, smiling for the camera and saying all sorts of ridiculous things. "Is St. George better than Petra?" they asked. "Yes, it's better than Petra because it's completely free-standing." Mesfin nodded with approval at my fumbling speech. "Is Ethiopia better than other places you've visited?" they continued. "Well, better than many places, I suppose." Mesfin nodded again, egging me on. "Yes," I said. "It's the best."

Summary only...

PERSEPHONE!!

...And Mother
When I was introduced to "what possessed me" through Elly I liked the Blog immediately because of its obsessions… and the way its writer presents her self witty and wicked talented lost Realistic orientlists (which she hates to be!)
I like and respect people who have obsessions...And I love them when they admit it : not as a sin but a virtue.
Then she decided to show another side of her obsessions : her thinking about her seventy years old Mum, her way to tell her - in front of every body- how she wants to be like her.
We all grow up trying to ignore our parents ,believing that we had the bad luck to be borne by such people , and how it would be better , that the moment we came to life that they should disappear , and not following us around , causing shame and anger.
Or… we would be tighten tongs in expressing to them face to face our rare nice feelings about them.
But Persephone , alias, Poulakie, decided to break the eternal role between parents and children and announce her NICE FEELINGS to her mother even she is still alive!
Ya Benty you are too good to be true.
i wish i had done the same. But it is too late now
raouf

Summary only...

A white person in a black land

Photographer wants to break cliché image of Africa
by Philip Smet*
05-07-2007

A series of photographs taken in Ghana has won Viviane Sassen the Prix de Rome, a Dutch award for artists aged 35 or under. Viviane Sassen wants her pictures to break the cliché image of Africa. But even though her heart is in Africa, she does not want to leave Europe, where she works as a photographer for glossy magazines and fashion houses.
"Africa is almost a mirror to me. I encounter myself when I'm there. This is of course because of my childhood there. These were crucial years, which gave me my first memories," Viviane Sassen says. The photographer lived in Kenya until the age of five.
"It is all very familiar, being there is a bit like coming home. Even though I am also an outsider, a white person in a black land"

Staged
She first returned to the continent as an adult and travelled to South Africa, but did not recognise the sounds and the smells, the people from her earliest childhood years until she visited the townships.
"I discovered an energy there which I was unable to find in the white South Africa. I went back there every spare moment I had."
In Cape Town she simply photographed what she saw. Later, during travels to East Africa, she cautiously started staging photographs and during her latest trip to West Africa, to Ghana, she staged many more. She asks a lot from the people whose photographs she takes. "It means I have to explain why, to make sure my intentions are well understood"

Intentions
"In creating their work, every artist or photographer also partly creates a self portrait," Viviane says. But she also wants to achieve something with her African photographs. She believes that the Western image of Africa is too limited.
"It often focuses on hunger and drought, in black and white, printed on coarse-grained paper. Or on nature and primitive tribes. Their worn-out Nikes are kept out of the picture because they do not match our romantic images of 'the savage'. This is completely different from the image of Africa that I have."
Viviane Sassen hopes her pictures will make people think and help differentiate the prevailing cliché image of Africa.

Shade
A striking feature of her work is the many faces that are in shade. This is intentional. Viviane says she wants to "stand the idea on its head that you believe you know someone when you see their face."
She says that allowing a shadow to fall on the faces of Africans so often is "almost a political statement. World power is in the hands of white men. Those who are least visible, are African women. That's where my fascination began." She also refers to an archetype by Carl Jung, who said that shadow stands for that which is repressed or denied.

Grey
"I don't care about money or awards, I care about recognising beauty, to capture and record it." Viviane Sassen wants to travel and work more in Africa. In addition, she wants to continue working assignments, for instance in fashion photography.
"I want to see and experience what it is like for a Westerner to integrate on the African continent, but I don't want to miss out on Europe. It is part of my heritage. I want to combine black and white."
In photograpy, a combination of black and white always means grey, but in this case Viviane thinks differently. "No, not grey, no," she smiles.

* RNW translation (gsh)

Summary only...