Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide

Starting at the top of the world, with this individual from Tibet, a natural history in photographs, captured in its natural habitats, of the species at the top of the food chain all over the Earth.

Homo Sapiens, (Latin for "wise man" or "knowing man") are more commonly known as humans. They are the only living species in the genus Homo. They originated in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, becoming fully anatomically and behaviorally modern about 50,000 years ago.

The study of Homo sapiens is the scientific discipline of anthropology.

Homo sapiens have the most highly developed brain of all living creatures and are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the hands for manipulating objects, has allowed them to make far greater use of tools than any other living species on Earth. This tool-using individual was photographed in Afghanistan.

To be continued...

Tracking the Changes

The pace of change began to pick up after the soldiers in Little Rock, after Elvis appeared in black and white from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show, (white-bread America missing the point that the point was those thrusting hips), and those changes continued and accelerated and gathered momentum as part of the rights of cultural passage from Eisenhower through the sacrificial Kennedy to Nixon, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters displaced Dale Carnegie as the arbiters of the ethos.

We all thought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution actually had something to do with culture, and we were vaguely in favor of that. We downed quantities of peyote and mescaline and LSD and wrestled with insight while watching the dark clouds of enlightenment hanging over angry orange sunrises through bloodshot eyes. There were black and red posters of Che in his beret, and one that said Electric Circus in day-glo letters that shone in the dark.

Beatles, Doors, topless, bottomless, Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State. Coltrane died in sixty-seven. We let a wispy-haired, blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, Yankee draft-dodger sleep on our floor for a week that summer. He never once took off his leather jacket, even though it was hot. Experience was something that could be occupied, taken possession of, known in its moment-to-moment quality, its texture, its delight and its terror.

Were there any of us of that generation who were not skewed and exhilarated and disillusioned by the simple awareness of ourselves against the backdrop of 1968? Doctor King’s dream moved us deeply, and we felt an enthusiastic agreement when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, with one of those distinctively Indian waggles of his head, “If we are blessed with the ability to have desires, why should we not also have the right to try and realize them?”

But the very pretence of revolutionary solidarity itself vanished, as the Woodstock nation mutated into Altamont amid phosphorescent parodies of pop paintings inspired by the mindless minimalismof modern art. It was the end of May, 1969, when the self-consciously and perhaps arrogantly named Art Ensemble of Chicago, having come to the conclusion that the American mid-west was exhausted of creative possibilities, left for Europe.

The beliefs that we might have clung to had been cancelled by the advances of science. We were metaphysical vagabonds, lost souls in a state of confusion. God was well and truly dead. What passed for spirituality was simply an outpouring of words and style; a mixture of pop psychology, recycled hippie philosophy, scraps of Hindu claptrap,* cultural-specific nonsense and Judeo-Christian contradictions.

*Jagganath means lord of the universe. It is one of the names of Krishna in his incarnation as Vishnu. He’s a democratic socialist. All castes are equal before him. And he crushes them, every one.

Looking at Pictures

Look at this old photograph. We sense its age from the texture of the patina on the platinum. In it, a girl reclines on a divan. She is just eight years old. Her eyes are closed. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting silky satin dress or nightgown that has come off at one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest, but not quite her nipple. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.

Like the girl, the picture itself is charmingly beautiful. Its composition is informed by the trials and errors and triumphs of five centuries of European painting. Textured fabric is set off against skin. Rich sepias contrast with ivory whites. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be fully aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing for the photographer.

We stare at her uncomfortably, through the disquiet of a century of now discredited but still potent, Freudian analysis, our understanding of which has come to us through the self-effacing, sardonic wit of the early Woody Allan films. At the time of course, Freudians had a field day interpreting Wonderland’s rabbit holes and tiny keys and the bit about Alice growing and shrinking.

Here’s another photograph, contemporary, high-definition, glossy, colour. She looks fourteen or so. Aside from a long blue frond that hangs over her right eye, her hair is cut brutally short into black spiky tufts that give her an angelic, yet deviant sexuality. Lips slightly parted in flashbulb surprise, she wears multiple ear rings and a discrete tattoo.

On the edge of right now, she fills her blue-jeans-with-the-knees-ripped-out like a surgical glove. Her tiny breasts beckon for gentle caresses through the t-shirt with Just Do It! printed across the front. The intermittence of skin flashing between these two articles of clothing, between t-shirt and jeans, this is the flash that seduces. Through her eyes and in the very gesture of her stance, she implores, and this impels us to purchase.

Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes

Manipulated photographs, nothing more, nothing less... first in a series.

Photoshop 'til you drop. More to come...

The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.

Ruins of Palmyra

Palmyra, located in modern Syria, once a flourishing interface between the Silk Road and the Mediterranean, was besieged and sacked by the Romans in 272CE.

The Entry of the Anomalies

Hong Kong Silicon Orchestra

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Ruins of Persepolis

Persepolis, located in modern Iran, dates from the fifth century BCE and reached its greatest sophistication under the Persian king Xerxes the Great. It was destroyed by Alexander the Great (or, in these circumstances, perhaps slightly greater) in 330BCE.

Severe Tropical Depression

From the album

Split Every Which Way But Up

Robert Stone

The Self as a Blues Band

How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.