Sebastião Salgado's "Genesis"

“In Genesis, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.”-  Sebastião Salgado

The photos you're about to see can no doubt speak for themselves, but for the sake of my not feeling like I just copied and pasted a bunch of pictures on to this blog post, I'll just say a little something. At times, in life, I think it's easy to lose track of the clear ways in which nature so beautifully displays God's handiwork simply because we've become so accustomed to a modern way of living where that stuff just doesn't make it to our conscious "things to give a f*ck" about list. We'd rather look at text messages or an email before watching a sunrise or sunset, or spend time posting pictures of our "outfit of the day" on Instagram than give the beautiful flowers on the corner of our block a chance to make an Instagram debut. Seriously though, when's the last time you sat in a park for a while and just observed, or listened to what was around you? Personally, I think the closest I get to nature is probably the mosquitoes that attack me when I open my window, or when I get caught in the rain and am left damning the weather gods simply because I didn't check the weather.

Sebastião Salgado decided to spend eight years of his life traveling to 32 countries to document amazing places that, in his words, look just as they did since the time of Genesis. His objective? To photograph locations that remain as untouched by the modern man as possible, and the animals and primitive peoples that inhabit these rarely visited places. I was sitting in Barnes and Noble flipping through the pages literally blown away that such beauty exists. Honestly, I began to feel really small and insignificant-- in the end you're just one person, in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country, in a continent, and there are people out there who don't even know what wifi is! Anyway, I hope in looking at these photos they might inspire you as much as they inspired me, feel free to read more about the project here. I also encourage you to take a trip to Barnes and Noble and look at these on a larger scale, there are hundreds of pages that will just amaze you as well as pages of Salgado's own words on what traveling to such places was like, and some of the things he learned and experienced.

MIA: Money Intellect Art

so you know how when you go into an urban outfitters the people who lay out the store have this way of just bombarding you with cool shit? (if you don't know what I'm talking about then take a trip to your local urban outfitters please) you'll just walk in thinking yeah lemme get this shirt or this new hat or something, then you end up being there for so much longer than you'd expected just looking at all this stuff? i mean this happens to me pretty much all the time cause i'm like a fucking squirrel and get distracted easily, but i'm pretty sure it also happens to normal people . not only are there all these cool clothes to look at, but all these accessories as well: nail polish, headphones, jewelry, furniture. . . and then they have these books. but not just normal books-- really cool ones, like the ones you see when you walk by, but can't help but to turn back and skim through. so last week i went into the urban on 72nd and i walked by this book with a bright ass cover that said MIA. i opened it and ended up looking through the entire thing. it's basically this really cool compilation of album artwork from her three albums, "Arular", "Kala" and "Maya". i was really impressed, her work has a reoccurring theme of patterns, bright colors, random shapes and sketches, but there's also lots of film photography and some song lyrics. i know MIA's an artist in the musical sense but i didn't know she fucked with Photoshop and printmaking too. one of the reasons i really like her is because you can see so clearly how her creativity shines through in her work . yeah she probably has a stylist and a manager or publicist that make her look good, but she still retains her own self image . this book is just very raw and makes her more than just another new age rapper but really portrays her as a super creative individual, which i personally think musicians tend to have trouble with these days. and watch the video belowwwww, it's awesome.