Pencil vs. Camera

Ben Heine is a Belgian Visual Creator, was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and currently live and work in Brussels.When I first saw his pencil vs. camera creations I was amused by them. It is such a great idea that he had used and the photographs and the drawings are just amasing with such a good quality. I saw them a few days ago and after that searched around the Internet more and I found more of his photographs, which didn't stop to amuse me for a second. He has used very interesting and different ideas of drawings combined with his photographs, I have never seen something like his idea and it is great. Here are only a little part of his works, if you want to see more you can see on his Flickror  his Blog .

The camera

  ' I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. 

 Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.' 

 

 This is a quote from John Berger's book 'Ways of seeing' but it is originally from 'an article written in1923 by Dziga Vertov, the revolutionary Soviet film director'. It describes exactly what the camera was and continue to be nowadays, something very important in the humans life. The film camera changed our lifes radically and only in a good way, maybe. It says it very clearly in the quote, what the camera was and what is now even after these years. It is a 'machine', but it is made and operated by people. Without it the world will be completely different.

John Berger's 'Ways of seeing'

'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
This quote from John Berger's book 'Ways of seeing' clearly identifies the relation between  'seeing' and  'words'. We can seet things and can't describe them with words, when you see something you are thinking about it, about the subject about the person, you don't think how to describe it with the best words. This is Magritte's painting called 'The key of dreams' and shows the relation between words, seeing and memory, because like John Berger says in that book, 'The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe'. Like in this painting for example the subjects are related only by one word but you already know what is it about, of course every person has different experience and different understanding about the subjects because they are related to our memories and the way we link one subject with our knowledge or our memory. For me particulary in this painting in the first square with the hourse and the word 'the door' I understand that it is about freedom, the hourse is sign of the free soul well at least the wild ones that run around the forest with they mane waven by the wind and the door is also sign of freedom, the releasing of something. The second square with the clock gives you the idea of timeless, like the time is just passing by. The jug and the bird are related to me because the two of them use in one or another way water.The last one is different from the others because it dosen't make you think why that word is related to that subject it just gives you the name of the object, which connects with travelling.
 John Berger's 'Ways of seeing' and in particulary the first chapter of it gives some really good ideas about paintings like 'Regents of the old men's alms house' by Hals, 'Regentesses of the old men's alms house' by Hals, 'Venus and Mars' by Botticelli and talks more about how the invention of the camera and the video camera radically changed humans lives from the time it was invented by now. In the book it states that with the discovering of the camera the art were no longer the same, that the camera 'destroyed' the art as it was used to be in the past. I think that when it comes to that there are good things, too. Most of the people can't go and see the originals in the museums, maybe because they don't have the money for it, but with the pictures of them, with the reproductions of the originals now they are available to the all world and everyone can see and get touch even a liitle part from the art. In that way the art can be shown at the books and studied by the students. Of course I agree that in that way the paintings and the art are no more like the past, that now they don't tell their story the same way as before, that now the painting has million meanings and the worse part of that is that the paintings are no more valued because of their author or the quality, but because of the 'market value', on how searched is that painting. You can feel and see the quality of the painting only when you see the original, then you can feel the smell of it, you can see the colours and the canvas as when it was like thousand of years ago when the painter painted it. For good or for not the camera had been invented and the art is nothing like in the past, although like everything it has its good and bad sides.

1st March

On the first of March in Bulgaria we have a national custom, called Grandma March. In that day we give each others something called 'martenichka'(the picture on top). It is red and white threads entrapped together. We give them for health, and take them off,  when we see stork or when is the first day of the spring and put them on blossomed tree. These things are symbol of the ending of the winter and the beginning of the spring. I  and my  family does that custom every year since I was kid. This year because I am here I could not put 'martenichka' on my arm because simply they do not have here, so my mother send me a package from Bulgaria, but she sent it a little late so it was not here on the first of March, but the important thing is that I received it. The reason why I am writing all that explanation is because that custom is important to me and that is the first year that I am so away from home and can not celebrate it and it remind me of home. So I waited with impatience for that package to come and it did it was jouful for me to unpack everything and to find some suprises that I did not expect. The second picture is of all the 'martenicki' that I received. I am really happy that even away from home I can 'celebrate' it and to give 'martenicki' to the others here, too.