"Was 'Dexter' Here?"

Judging from the number of severed torsos here, it looks like either police

serial killer investigators would show some interest, or 'DEXTER'

(television's serial killer extraordinaire) himself has been here. Your

ratings, critiques or observations are invited and most welcome. If you

rate harshly, very critically or wish to make a remark, please submit a

helpful and constructive comment; please share your photographic

knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

A very nicely composed beautiful shot, John!

A shot like this I feel is a 'real find', but it takes persistence.

First the woman shuts down her kiosk, then she starts to undress her dummies, then at the end she begins to carry them away, shooing me away.

Not in a thousand years am I about to be shooed away from a scene with 6 naked male torsos, including two being carried away by one and!

There's just too much potential for ambiguity and symbolism as well as surrealism.

This will end up in my 'art' or 'surreal' folder for sure.

Thanks for the encouragement, Ruud.

John (Crosley)

Very interesting situation!

I think my primary goal when I first joined Photo.net was regardless of rates to provide for viewers 'interesting photos'.

I hope that over time I have not disappointed.

While I post my fair share of 'ordinary' photos, from time to time, I  see and capture something unusual such as this, and have enough of such captures to make an entire portfolio of unusual captures.

I am proud of my ability to see and capture photos such as these, and thank you for the compliment.

john

John (Crosley)

Ten, twelve, and possibly more hours a day some days, these male torso dummies have shirts on them -- right now it's summer short sleeve and sleeveless shirts.

At the end of the day, they have to be gathered from their outdoor vending place and put away, who knows where?

That means each dummy must be undressed, a quick job, given the shirt each one wears, then the dummies stacked and grabbed by the outdoor bazaar shop owner and carried away, probably to a car.

It was just my luck to be passing as the last shirt was taken off and the dummies were being stacked, so I stuck around, despite instructions from the woman, not knowing why I was waiting, camera in hand, to shoo.

I didn't shoo, suspecting an interesting photo, and there were several.

I liked this one the best; others also were interesting.

Sometimes on the street, you get shooed away, or there is an attempt, but it's hard to shoo away a photographer when you have an armload of male dummy torsos.

Not every bazaar owner is highly educated; many are country people and/or not highly educated, especially toward Kyiv's outskirts where this was taken (towards the more central areas, the education level tends to kick up quite a bit and bazaar workers often are in it for the extra money to supplement pensions, and who knows what high level occupation they held under the Soviet Union when the Soviets ran the country, so some of them can be pretty sharp -- not all, but some).

The bazaar owners/clerks/workers toward the city outskirts tend to be a little  less than 'the razor's edge' in mental acuity (in general if one is making broad generalizations), so it's anybody's guess if this woman would ever understand how surreal this photo is and why I hung around to take it (then quickly melted into the crowd after the last frame was taken).

[i didn't have any real interaction with her, so she may really have once been a theoretical physicist/professor and might be enthralled at the discovery of the Higgs Boson the other day, but the odds seem to be weighted heavily against that based on my brief experience.]

;~)))

john

John (Crosley)

It takes a great eye to recognize a great situation and opportunity revealing itself! Great cropping on this; excluding her head makes her fit right in! Well done, John! Thank you for sharing. :)

I really have a sense of humor, and when necessary it can be dark, but I'm not a 'dark' person per se. The woman's head became 'irrelevant' even 'distracting' given the subject matter, which was limbless torsos.

I very much appreciate that you trolled my portfolio (apparently) and gave me such knowing analysis and feedback. You can hardly know how much it means to me that a relatively little-recognized photo like this has been so well analyzed by you.

You know another great source for analyzing my photos? Google.

They highlight some of my top photos, often from way back, some that did not get high views or ratings, mixed in with those that did. I think someone there likes me or my work, or they have a phenomenal search engine for analyzing photography as 'fine art' that justifies in large part their total market capitalization just for their ability to choose and recognize individual photos that are representative or my Photo.net portfolio. They display these under subsidiary listings such as John Crosley Comment, and more recently under John Crosley 'Loneliness', and that may change with time.

Other 'oldies but goodies' sometimes get short-lived Google.com listings of their own.

Trisha, thanks again.

I don't know anybody at Google.com, but maybe, just maybe the person assigned to handle PN or my account in particular enjoys their job and takes pleasure in playing 'photo critic' and does a good job at it?

Best to you, and thanks again.

john

John (Crosley

Thank you John for letting me know that! One of these days when life isn't so hectic I will look that up and enjoy reading it. It's been a while since we last talked and I have been meaning to catch up through private means. I do hope you are doing well! Take care, enjoy your summer (and life)! All the best, Trisha :)

It's been some time since I took this photo, but I do recall that the woman with the mannequin torsos really acted as though I were some alien being from a weird planet who had just landed to weird her out, as I hovered around while she gathered the day's mannequin torsos after having undressed them, packed the clothing that adorned them at her 'stall' at the street bazaar/series of small storefront like establishments that one finds throughout Kyiv and even Ukraine set up since the fall of the Soviet Union, all by private citizens (who pay no taxes, since the sales are free and there is no tracking their income.)

I had spied this scene before, either this place or elsewhere, but it required a 'magic hour' of the day for the mannequin undressing to be finished and finally for the mannequin torsos to be gathered.  I did not suspect one person could grab so many, and when I saw that, I went into immediate action, and surely the woman thought I was crazy, but really it was a photographic dream . . . a sort of 'Dexter' driven fantasy (which I had not thought out beforehand) realized right there in front of me, and me with a chance to record it, which I did.

I took a number of photos, some good, some very bad, and the choice of the one that omitted the woman's head came through editing -- I found the woman's head and face distracting . . . . and of course we know that in photography repetition seems to have value, and what better than lots of plastic torsos and a living one holding or gathering them?

Thanks for the good wishes for the summer; Putin has suddenly made a decision it appears and no longer appears to be fence sitting, with the Russian Duma (Parliament) called in to cancel their 'authorization' to do whatever it was they 'authorized' in Ukraine.

Interestingly for all the talk of 'fascists' and the appearance in the 'Right Sector' of some who really were followers of a man who colluded with the Nazis (later assassinated by the Soviets), and  a Ukrainian nationalist, I read that fewer than two per cent of the popular vote in the May 25 nationwide Ukrainian election (which was vastly attended) voted for the 'fascist' ticket, with even the Jewish candidate polling better.

There may be more 'fascists' in Northern Idaho, I am beginning to think than in all of Ukraine . . . . despite all the fear-mongering that had those in Eastern Ukraine battening down the hatches wondering when the 'fascists' the propagandist media told them were going to eat them for dinner . . . . and utterly destroy their Russian connection, (though of course their factories, minds and other heavy industries were hugely dependent on Russia for a market, and no sound government would destroy that market if it could be avoided.  Russia and Ukraine have very much in common.

You may have heard about a 'language divide'.  

From experience, I can name more than one household where one child speaks Russian predominantly and the other Ukrainian, and without much  regard to where they live in Ukraine.  The language/nationality issue is  far more complex than those analyzing 'geography' and household origin would indicate, though Stalin shipped in millions of Russians in the '30s just before a period of mass starvation, in an attempt to 'Russify' Ukraine, and that sowed the seeds of the present conflict.

Many Ukrainian youths have one Russian parent and one Ukrainian parent, (all were at one time Soviets, so the intermixing was planned by Stalin as part of a stabilization plan for Ukraine).  These youths predominantly (the ones I have met in both Ukrainian and Russian speaking areas, as Ukrainian, not Russian . . .. though I have not been recently in the border cities taking polls, and the information spread in those cities has been skewed from the truth rather substantially.

That's my view, and I am not loyal to Ukraine or Russia, having lived in both, and loyal only to the US, (but not all its policies as I've made clear during the previous presidency and an ill-conceived war).

I live for the good photo and to keep good relations with the people I meet during my quest for the ultimate great white photo.

I got one the other day, but subject matter (not youth in case you're speculating) rules out that it can reasonably be shown to anyone . . . . alas, and there is no venue where it could reasonably be displayed.

Now, I'll take your good wishes and try to figure out how to get on an airplane without money.

Wish me luck; war's almost over, and I gotta go see my doctor.

Best wishes in return.

john

John (Crosley)

Reminds me of Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard, Meir, was in a class by herself. If she didn't 'invent' the genre of the artistic nude which she inherited from her artistic forbears, she certainly worked wonders with it.

This photo dwells on the subject of repetition - the nude torsos and the bare arm of the woman carrying them.

I wrote a rather long essay on the way people tend to view 'street photographers' -- wrongly some times, and that is a burden the 'street photographer' must bear, just as I was viewed I am certain as being 'strange' for my insistence on photographing nude torsos above, by passersby and fellow bazaar/kiosk sellers.

It must have passed more than one mind as I took this photo that my intent was not artistic as it always is but more sinister, and my true purpose was the 'nude torso' part -- the part without limbs or heads, a la 'Dexter' the famous fictional serial killer.
How many, I wondered, in no now-gone draft, which suddenly disappeared due to some computer bug before saving or posting, supposed or wondered if I were some serial killer -- say a 'Chikatilo (infamous Soviet child sexual serial killer, the KGB and FBI teamed up after decades to capture, who was killed in Moscow's famous Lubyanka prison with a single gunshot to the back of his head, or some other social pariah.

In the eyes of some, a man with a camera is a 'social pariah' and in the eyes of others (especially in Ukraine), a camera can be an opportunity to make acquaintances, even friends, or to break others' boredom -- as so many just stand on the street for hours and days selling things, and strangers who are potential customers pass on throngs - and a break in the monotony of life gives a chance to think of something besides high inflation, a civil war that may or may not be ending this very hour from its truce, the hundred thousand Russian speaking descendant Ukrainians who fled to Russian frankly for little good reason, fearing irrationally 'fascists' who hardly really exist at all in Ukraine (some exist but few), and so forth.

A responsible man taking photos to Ukrainians who are pretty reserved people, can be a welcome break, for many, though some take offense, as in any country.

Newbies here who wrote me about trying to take street often used to express dismay at 'what others may think of me' if they tried 'street,' and the answer was that some people are 'cut out' for being 'street photographers' in their personalities and others are not, and one finds out by going out and doing.

Then one sees if one can produce one or more photos to justify the almost certain feelings of unease that a weak ego can experience when strangers look at one askance or sometimes hostilely, or at least one IMAGINES that 'askance or hostile look' from anyone looking one's way, possibly because one thinks (wrongly, usually) there are privacy rights one's invading, especially when in public -- somehow imagining that if you can 'see'it you still can't photograph it, in a public place, and that you must 'ask the subject for permission' even though the world can see it - all wrong of course (with a few exceptions).

Where IS privacy from camera intrusion?

When I started over 45 years ago, I could be reasonably assured that mine was often the only camera recording.

The point is, the newbie's camera is, as opposed to 40+ years ago, shortly after I started, often NOT the first camera on the scene. There are often several cameras recording continuously.

The newbie, unaware usually of all this recording, still feels self-conscious because he's doing something that most cameras do not do -- he/she's aiming the camera and he's potentially visible in doing so.

Some security cameras are capable of and are being aimed but when so they're being controlled from isolation.

The street photographer with the camera, especially the wider the lens, runs the risk of being seen aiming his camera at his subjects and being forced with wider lens into interacting with them. In fact, that interacting can be a skill, a craft, and hugely rewarding, but it requires practice, and its mastery is demanding.

To interact or not could be the subject of an entire book, and certainly it drives the choice sometimes between use of a tele, a wide angle, or 'normal' lens.

So the newbie feels self conscious because the newbie is 'aiming' the camera at people, and the people can often 'see' that they are being chosen, framed and 'aimed at' by the photographer, and the 'newbie' worries about the reaction more than the seasoned 'street photographer'.

The 'newbie' has little knowledge of his/her own or his/her own work's self worth and quite often a wrong or skewed view of privacy rights -- often thinking privacy rights exist where there are none.

So, the neophyte may feel like a criminal, and actually feel like he/she is 'stealing' others' images when actually he/she is engaged in socially acceptable non-criminal artistic behavior as he/she seeks to express and create with a camera.

In some parts of Africa and the Middle East (other places as well, a form of religion says takng a photo of a person 'steals their soul'.

If one believes that, then, (as one member here notes in his bio), I'm a 'thief of souls'.

It takes experience and feed back from seeing one's work to know if it's god enough to justify (for one's self) the sometimes hostile stares or peole stopping one and sometimes authoritatively and quite wrongly insisting that what you are doing as a 'street photographer' is 100$ wrong, and that you must wake up that sleeping person on the bench whose photo you are framing to ask them for permission to take their photo before you can press the shutter, even though the subject is sleeping on a public bench in the middle of the day in a park, and the person offering the advice is a stranger and not law enforcement - and that person is instructing you NOT to take the photo and doing so with great authority.

Even hostilely and threatening to call the police. What do you do?

Take the photo.

I do.

The stranger's full of him/herself.

And wrongheaded.

It's happened to me, and with great anger and vigor on the part of the complainer - who will sometimes actually dial cops when I refuse them. I just tell them to go away, they're bothering me and they have a totally wrong view of the law (I have a cum laude law degree).

Busybodies are not unheard of on the streete, and there are some very officious and very wrongheaded ones who are known by Americans as buttinskies. (people with their heads in their (rears) e.g., places they don't belong and especially with wrong and often firmly held opinions. Buttinskies come in all sizes and shapes, and some come wearing business suits with big egos - the accountrements of success, knowledge and high education, but totally wrong legal opinions.

The worst part is if the buttinsky is wearing a uniform.

Then ask for a lieutenant or captain if reason doesn't work or ask them to call the city/county attorney for advice.

You have to use best judgment.

James Nachtway said it well. It would be unthinkable to go to a funeral just to get reaction photos of mourners.

The street photographer should try to use best judgment in all cases. The corollary is that a 'street photographer must use best judgment.

I once took a good photo of a woman janitor in a California truck stop. I later was scolded by a woman newspaper photographer I met for taking that photo; her editor, she told me, forbade her from taking photos of subjects that were not flattering, and this woman was fat and a little dumpy looking.

But the subject liked both the photo and the attention of being photographed as a form of recognition.

I worked ONLY for Associated Press and making people look rosy or not definitely had no place in my work OR my job description - I never considered it, but did not gratuitously choose unflattering shots as they were unrepresentative.

You don't have to look like Julia Robers to make a good photo subject -- oe of my best subjects was a recovered addict who worked as a candy factory workers while she waited for a bus.

Ravages of her addiction made her look 20 to 30 years beyond her stated age but the photo was great, in part because of the implied story of recovery, PLUS the ravages of addiction which were obviously irrecoverable.

She did not look flattering to look at, but the story as a whole was very flattering.

One needs a pretty strong ego to photograph on the street successfully, but not so strong as those who call themselves paparazzi - their egos have gone unchecked in search of a paycheck and 'art' or 'artistic endeavour' has little to do with their photography.

And a a strong ego is self-reinforcing, if one believes in one's work and produces well.

'Street photography' with strangers is difficult and best avoided when one is feeling 'weak and vulnerable' as those who disapprove on the street and express their disapproval in various ways will seem more to stand out when the photographer's ego is weak.

That is not to say weak egos are forbidden; one car argue (it's an argument) that Woody Allen's 'ego' is 'weak' but he produces great work and performs music world wide; his film characters seem to represent the 'weaknesses he seems to feel in himself, but of course, there is much 'ego' in his portrayal of his 'weakness' as well, I suggest.

That is not to suggest he is not without great troubles.

I met a photographer at a porn convention in Las Vegas. He put his camera on a tripod, put the tripod in a busy aisle, then stood aside and remotely triggered the shutter, not focusing

I am having severe problems with the anti-spyware software on Photo.net blocking my comments to the point where I cannnot make many, even after rewriting many and resubmitting them.

I am unsure why.

It now occurs to me it is possible because the Google browser I am using has spell check or the spell checker from Microsoft on my computer may spell check and leave hidden HTML or other marks that are picked up by the anti-spyware program as indicators (wrong) that I am copying something from elsewhere on the Internet.

Of course, I don't do that.

I write everything out myself.

If I have a problem, I copy the text to Notepad, which supposedly supplies NO marks, then never do line returns except to start a new paragraph.

When I post from a Notepad copy, I am afraid of using the spellcheck feature on Photo.net (not available on Notepad because it leaves 'hidden marks' that might indicate HTML language), and thus post my copies and hope to use the 'edit' function.

Sometimes when I do that, and use the spellcheck, the spellcheck spelling checks result in my revised copy being rejected by the anti-spyware softtware, so I have to manually 'fix' spelling errors, using only the red underlining to identify spelling errors and then under a short enough time window considering my sometimes lengthy posts.

If I don't make the time limit, NONE of the changes are made and my changes are rejected in entirety.

So I do the best I can, and hope for readers' indulgences.

I'm doing the best I can to make my posts and to make them readable.

I'm open to suggestions to remedy this problem.

My e-mail's on my bio page; for members I have the 'message' system as well.

If there were NO time limit on editing posts, I could deliver a perfect post, but that battle's been fought and lost.

john

John (Crosley)

I alluded to her photos of inanimate objects, not her nudes.

Tnx, gotcha.

john

John (Crosley)