Category: Face Of The Day

Face Of The Day

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An Indian artist dressed as the Hindu goddess Kali participates in a procession to celebrate the Ram Navami festival in Allahabad on April 8, 2014. Hindu devotees across India celebrate the festival of Ram Navami, the birth anniversary of Lord Rama, which also marks the end of the nine-day long fasting and Navaratri festival. By Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images.

Face Of The Day

Andy Cush captions:

The latest work in street artist JR‘s “Inside Out” series aims to remind military drone pilots that their victims are not faceless, anonymous specks, but people with lives and families. Often, they are children. This particular child, whose name was not released, lost two siblings and both of her parents in a Predator drone strike. A group of artists, using the printing technology behind JR’s work, placed a massive portrait of the girl in Pakistan’s Pukhtoonkhwa region, where drones have killed over 200 people. Now, they hope, pilots flying overhead might see her face and be reminded of their victims’ humanity.

Mike Pearl pushes back a bit:

Far be it for me to tamp down our collective moral outrage over the use of predator drones, but I also hope we won’t turn the military personnel who work as drone pilots into bogeymen.

Granted, drones are a weapon that takes the attacker even further out of harm’s way than if he or she was using a rifle and, before that, a sword. And even more than rifles, drones do seem to take down a shit ton of civilians. But the pilots with the joysticks are also people with names and faces. While I’d much rather be the pilot than the villager dodging a rain of bullets, drone pilots aren’t just playing Space Invaders. They have to monitor the comings and goings of a place for hours or even days, staring at the people they’re eventually going to target as they take smoke breaks and stand around chatting.

Nancy Cooke, cognitive science professor at Arizona State University’s College of Technology and Innovation told Livescience.com a few months ago that the emotional drain on drone pilots comes from close monitoring. The Air Force reports that PTSD in drone pilots is one-third the rate seen in those who saw actual combat overseas, but they are still getting PTSD, and it’s probably because they aren’t psychopaths.

Previous Dish on drones and PTSD here and here. A reader deepens the critique of the public art piece:

Isn’t the responsible thing to reply with an image of the thousands of faces that would be killed in the kind of massive ground invasion this country pursued before we had drone technology? Without acknowledging the results of the military alternatives to drones, the drone hysteria doesn’t translate to much more than “violence is bad”, which no one disagrees with and does not advance a useful discussion about these technologies.

Faces Of The Day

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Photographer Gonzalo Orquin captures same-sex couples in ornate church settings:

For the series “Trialogo,” the Catholic photographer Gonzalo Orquin captured images of homosexual couples kissing in centuries-old Italian churches; beneath the ornate ceilings, the lovers’ embrace harmonizes with the architecture, elevating gay love to the religious beauty and devotion normally associated only with heterosexual marriages. By locating each shot within a religious and cultural context that has opposed marriage equality, Orquin courageously asserts the sacred validity of same-sex love.

The Vatican blocked one of Orquin’s exhibitions last year:

Despite Pope Francis’ earlier remarks about opening up the Church, the Vatican has firmly shut the door on artist Gonzalo Orquin’s latest exhibit, “Trialogo,”scheduled to open at the Galleria L’Opera on Wednesday evening. The exhibit consists of photographs of same-sex couples kissing in churches mainly located in Rome, but the pictures have been covered up after the Vatican sent the gallery a notice threatening legal action and saying that “the church is against the exhibition.”

See more of Orquin’s work here.

Face Of The Day

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Susan Stellin talked to her boyfriend, Graham MacIndoe, about his struggle with heroin:

When you talk about wanting to quit, was it just a moment and then it would go away? Because I think that’s what people don’t understand: Why doesn’t this person want to quit, or if they do want to quit, why can’t they?

I wanted to quit a lot. I really wished I could’ve quit. And there’s nothing in my heart that I feel so bad about — not being able to quit when I first met you. ’Cause I would’ve saved myself and my family a lot of stress and pain and anger and money and humiliation.

But in a lot of cases with addiction you’re never ready to quit until you really hit rock bottom. They say that all the time in meetings. And it isn’t necessarily the case all the time — I see people who have quit, they’ve managed to nip it in the bud. And I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how some people manage to drag themselves away from the cusp of going into that really dark place and some people don’t. I quit a bunch of times, but I always slipped back into it because it’s not the quitting — it’s the long-term thing. You don’t know how to function, because you’ve been so dysfunctional for so long that you find yourself going back to your comfort zone, and your comfort zone is being around people who enabled you and people who are in the same boat as you. You go to somebody’s house where other people are using, and it’s like you’re with your family again. They tell you it’s going to be all right, then you take a hit, then you think, Fuck it, I feel good. Cause it’s really hard to get your shit together when you don’t feel good. And when the reality of where you’ve been and how much you’ve done and the lies you’ve told all dawns on you, it’s really hard to face. It’s a really big emotional crisis that is very hard to face up to. And that’s why people say they want to get clean but just can’t do it.

View more of MacIndoe’s work here, or visit his gallery here.

Face Of The Day

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For Cocks: The Chicken Book, Ernest Goh went to chicken beauty pageants:

[Goh], a thirty-five-year-old photographer from Singapore, first encountered these competitions when traveling across Malaysia in 2013. Goh, who is interested in how humans perceive animals, set up a photo studio on location, and began photographing the chickens with the intent of discovering, as he writes in a statement about the work, “who they were, not what they were.” Goh met with chicken enthusiasts and breeders, who, as Goh describes, “often regard the chickens as warriors ready for battle.”

He focused on one particular breed:

Goh selected the Ayam Seramas breed of chicken for his series, who are known for their beauty. He sets places each creature against a black background and allows their exquisite coloring and patterned feathers shine. These photographs highlight their outward appearance as well as their quirky personality, as the cock their heads and strut their stuff.

Goh’s books are available for sale here. More of his work here, which the Dish has featured before.

Face Of The Day

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Photographer Francis Wade spoke to Feature Shoot about his series on third-generation Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange:

Another thing I struggle to comprehend is why the US won’t apologize for the Agent Orange campaign. It’s given $43 million for a clean-up operation, but that seems very little when compared with the scale of the problem. I’ve heard people argue that we should move on and focus efforts on cleaning up, rather than assigning blame, but I think it’s important that Vietnamese understand the history and causes of this problem, and for the US, it may make them think twice about chemical warfare—bear in mind that nearly four decades on from the Vietnam War, the US in 2004 used chemical weapons on the Iraqi city of Fallujah and, like Vietnam, the population there continues to be afflicted by its legacy, in the form of abnormally high rates of cancer.

Wade wrote about his experience in Vietnam here. See more of his work here.

Face Of The Day

VA State Senator Creigh Deeds Discusses Mental Health Care Reform

Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds waits to take the podium to speak about mental health reform at The National Press Club in Washington, DC on March 31, 2014. On November 19, 2013, Deeds was stabbed multiple times in the face at his home in Bath County, Virginia by his 24-year-old son Gus Deeds, who later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. By Drew Angerer/Getty Images.