I love that he quotes Douglas Adams:

“Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”
Mostly Harmless , Douglas Adams, 1992

Mais où il fait souvent, malgré tout, bon vivre. Ça doit être le rush du rush.

• 1. On fête la Saint-Jean sous un viaduc, exploitant les richesses spatiales du bâti public urbain
• 2. On fête la Saint-Jean collectivement avec des DJ comme maîtres de cérémonie, dansant énergiquement sur des mélodies et rythmes qui façonnent notre culture contemporaine électronique
• 3. On fête la Saint-Jean sans les Guy A. Lepage de ce monde

Ken: Coming up?
Ray: What’s up there?
Ken: The view.
Ray: The view of what? The view of down here? I can see that down here.
Ken: Ray, you are about the worst tourist in the whole world.
Ray: Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.

The NYT photography blog (suitably named the Lens blog) has published an initial article about the Tianamen tank man pictures, the world-famous photographs—there are four of them, all very similar—that have carried and stood for the confrontation up to this day. The article discusses mostly the differences in composition of each shot that thus convey a different angle of the event in a photojournalistic sense.

Comes along reporter Terri Jones. He was there on June 5th 1989 in Tiananmen Square and he too had shot the famous tank man, though somewhat inadvertently, in his mind a snapshot of the event among others. After developing the films, with the event then already extensively covered, he simply let it at that, filing the shot amongst the others of the day in his personal archives. It’s only when he read the blog post this week that he decided it was time to share it publicly. Of course, the Lens blog celebrates this revelation with an follow-up article, Jones recounting the story behind it.

In a time much before the prevalence and instantness of digital cameras, a different angle of such a historical scene helps contextualize and correctly recount the event. The relevance and insight of such a photograph is critical. As we can now see, Tank Man is standing there long before the tanks arrives, steady, bags in hand, waiting. In contrast, others are fleeing the scene, hurried. The confrontation is an idea that has yet happened. Tank man, like the tank driver, like the overlooking photographers at the Beijing Hotel, have to idea what is about the happen, how the scene will unfurl.

If released in 1989, I doubt this photograph would have made headlines. The others taken from the hotel balcony, are much more poignant, evocative of the clash on Tiananmen Square. A single man against a of tanks, you it can’t get better than that. Nevertheless, remembering the massacre 20 years later, when all that seems left are those same 4 pictures that we see over and over, this “new” picture feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s when I see stuff like this that I want to drop everything and become a photojournalist. Cliché but true: history is not what happened but what is remembered.

• Big picture has a larger shot of it and other shots of the day.
• Youtube: a video mere seconds later, the confrontation between Tank Man and the tanks.

The dress itself was design by fashion designer friend of hers Eliza Starbuck. It’s reversible and can open up all the way down into a kind of long jacket. She then matches it up with accessories and other pieces of clothing to reinvent her look every day. I had no idea a single dress could be so adaptable to so many styles.