Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 335
Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Federico Diez de Medina, a mask collector and archaeologist, offers a view based on an analysis of many masks and other artifacts from the Tiwanaku area. He suggests that the first masks were to exorcise evil spirits. To be effective, they had to be frightening.
“On the other hand,” he imagines, “it was obligatory for the high dignitaries in the great Aymara empire – the apus, malkus and curacas – to wear masks… for pronouncing judgments and for rites associated with religious observance, death and war, as well as for the varied dances of the seasonal rituals and other festivities. They also had to preside at sports events and decide the winners of numerous open air activities.” Among these pursuits the author mentions the jaltiris (races), ch’akusiris (fist fights), khorawasiris (slingshot) and mich’isiris (shooting darts or arrows).
Masks of the Altiplano by Manuel Vargas in Masks of the Bolivian Andes, Photographs: Peter McFarren, Sixto Choque, Editorial Quipos and BancoMercantil
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Pearls from artists* # 147
Alexandria, Virginia living room
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I am working, every day… on new photographs. This body of work, family pictures, is beginning to take on a life of its own. Seldom, but memorably, there are times when my vision, even my hand, seems guided by, well, let’s say a muse. There is at that time an almost mystical rightness about the image: about the way the light is enfolding, the way the [kids’] eyes have taken on an almost frightening intensity, the way there is a sudden, almost outer-space-like, quiet.
These moments nurture me through the reemergence into the quotidian… through the bill paying and the laundry and the shopping for soccer shoes, although I am finding that I am becoming increasingly distant, like I am somehow living full time in those moments.
Sally Mann in Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
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