The Marks of Man

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/21/social-commentary-through-juxtaposition-the-work-of-mark-laita/ Mark Laita social commentary through Juxtaposition

I have moved my blog to my new gallery, the Waihora gallery and studio. http://waihora-gallery.com/#filter=.blog This is my studio space and gallery, open once a week at the moment. Visitors can work with me to improve their landscape skills, take part in photographers walks, or just look and purchase my work. I will keep blogging, but this is my last post on blogger...I think.

From the BBC  http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27186709 A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk? Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon. Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think. Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts "As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, w...

Salvia divinorum is a psychoactive plant which can induce dissociative effects and is a potent producer of "visions" and other hallucinatory experiences.

2014 New Zealand Landscape Calendar out now. (7 photos) A selection of the thirteen images from the Calendar below. http://johnmaillard.com/New_Zealand_Landscapes-server/viewcategory.php?groupid=24 Only $30.00 nz $10.00pp in NZ, $30.00pp World Wide. A3 on high quality paper, with NZ dates and public holidays. Only 200 hundred printed, each one can be signed on request.  

What if I could be photographed with my father in 1979, and yet be photographed with my daughter and son at the same time. Behind us could be my grandfathers and their grandfathers, the same with my grandmothers. We could all sit together and share a meal after the photographer has photographed himself.

The transition from hunting to farming was most likely managed and executed by women, who discovered that fences protected the crops. This is a true social and cultural change of a magnitude that hasn’t occurred since. Hunting and gathering, to land ownership and crop production for survival, the intervention of spirituality and religion to help, encourage, grow food and build society. The role of magical/spiritual ceremonial landmarks, fences, causeways that would mark the growth of food and the cycle of the seasons. The birth of astrology and astronomy to catalog and understand the turn of time. The use of lines, ditches and causeways to change the fundamental understanding of the world, the ownership and delegation of land and the symbolic use of a boundary. All of these things were inhabited by spirits and gods. Our understanding of the world was profoundly different, we cannot imaging that world, as we have almost no historical context. ...