To command Nature we must be above Nature, by resistance of her attractions.
If your mind be perfectly free from all prejudice, superstition and incredulity, you will rule spirits. If you do not obey blind forces, they will obey you. If you be wise like Solomon, you will perform the works of Solomon; if you be holy like Christ, you will accomplish the works of Christ.

To direct the currents of the inconstant light, we must be established in the constant light. To command the elements, we must have overcome their hurricanes, their lightnings, their abysses, their tempests.

In order to Dare we must Know; in order to Will, we must Dare; we must Will to possess empire and to reign we must Be Silent. (E.L.)

List of authors:
Gabriele Rivoli
Ollie Palmer
Pavel Bienkowski
Helena Aguilar i Mayans
Joachim Robert

Germany Germany, from Canada. Reconnect, a midsummer album for sunny days. Free download on Bandcamp, donations are a must for such a fresh album with quality featurings.
You will hear from this band again, I’m following.

Have ever a political and/or financial oligarch, swimming in his thirst for uncontrolled power, consumerist creation of unnecessary needs, pursuing a divide-et-impera strategy, looked down from his throne of blood on this short film by Béla Tarr?

Every time I see it, I remember that’s impossible not to communicate, not to have a behavior. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value. We are Gods, they’re just flesh.

Japanese military photographer Yosuke Yamahata took this inedited pictures on 10 August 1945, one day after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Telephone and telegraph services were suspended; the teams could not contact the outside world for help. It was truly a hell on earth. Those who had just barely survived the intense radiation-their eyes burned and their exposed skin scalded-wandered around aimlessly with only sticks to lean on, waiting for relief.

In 1966 photographer Yamahata died from cancer caused presumably by his exposure to radiation. The shots were extrapolated from the original negatives of his defective camera.

Extended story on The Independent.

Colourwise one of my favourite photographers, she also has resourceful symbolic well framed subjects and a film grain that doesn’t feel overlayed but coming from the topic.
More pics from Alison Scarpulla on Flickr.

For the Alien Observer rubric of this month, German photographer Juliane Eirich.

The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world.
The whole concept of enclosure as a means of con- straint and as a means of classifying doesn’t work as well in our electronic world.
The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst.

In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, “How horrible it must be to feel like that,” instead of blaming some- body for having done something horrible.
This feel- ing is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into—a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with every- body else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.

Marshall McLuhan