Category: Face Of The Day

People wade through floodwaters in Jakarta’s central business district on January 17, 2013 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Thousands of Indonesians were displaced and the capital was covered in many key areas in over a meter of water after days of heavy rain. By Ed Wray/Getty Images.

Tibetan Novices of Labrang Monastery during a Kora in Xiahe, Gansu, China. Via Getty Images.

A few years ago, when I spent the summers living in a 200 square foot room at the end of a wharf in Provincetown, I came across a somewhat cantankerous older lady – she was in her late 80s – who had taken up residence in an even smaller room at the other end of the wharf. I tend to be English in my neighborly interactions – a polite nod, not imposing – but something about her intrigued me and I had to walk right past her to get to solid ground, so one day, I introduced myself.

We immediately hit it off and soon enough I was corralled, along with countless others in her always expanding – and often young – entourage, into helping her out in small ways, or just chatting, but also as a daily ritual, if I couldn’t pass it off to someone else, holding her hand as she slowly made her way off the wharf onto the sand and into the water. She baptized herself daily – although she is an atheist who simply cannot fathom the kind of faith I am blessed to have – in the bay. It was always a full body dunk – however freezing the water was (you knew it was ice-cold whenever a swimming lesbian told you it was like bathwater). I don’t like cold water, but that just made Norma all the more determined to drag me in. And don’t try to resist. She will simply persist.

I came to love Norma, as did Aaron. She never lies. She never filters. She can be incredibly rude. And ornery. But she was always Norma – and she still is. We just celebrated her 94th birthday.

What you eventually found out was that she was a proud former communist in the 1920s and 1930s (I never let her forget it), sexually liberated long before the 1960s, and a brilliant photographic portraitist, with a particular gift for capturing the faces of women around the world. She just had an exhibit here. Recently, another truly gifted photographer, Jane Paradise, captured Norma’s nineties in a luminescent booklet, “When I Was Young I Was Considered Beautiful”, which you can buy here.

If you come into Provincetown Harbor, you’ll also see vast, canvas portraits of older Portuguese women who once were the backbone of this former fishing village. Norma took those photos.

Aaron turned some of her more haunting work into a slideshow above and I am proud to show it – almost as proud as I am to know this remarkable human being, and the passion and anger and boundless curiosity that make her, in her mid-90s, as alive as anyone I know. And in ways I never truly told her, as HIV haunted me, she helped me learn how to live as well.

People react in front of the local healthcare centre that closed at 8pm tonight its emergency hours along with 21 other centres in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, following budget cuts and privatisations in Spanish health services, in Tembleque, near Toledo on January 14, 2013. By Pedro Armestre/AFP/Getty Images.

Michael Zhang spotlights the portrait series, “Holy Men,” of religious ascetics from around the world, by photographer Joey L:

Joey traveled to India (for the third time) in March 2011 and spent a month creating more photos of wandering monks in Varanasi, the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and one of the oldest cities in the world.

Joey explained the project to Zhang:

I began the Holy Men collection with a photo series from the North of Ethiopia focusing on Coptic Christianity. In this new series, Sadhus and religious students are the featured subjects. Although Coptic Christian monks and Sadhus live in different corners of the world, the connection all these subjects have to each other is profound. Almost every major religion breeds ascetics; wandering monks who have renounced all earthly possessions, dedicating their lives to the pursuit of spiritual liberation. Their reality is dictated only by the mind, not material objects. Even death is not a fearsome concept, but a passing from the world of illusion.

Follow Joey's work on his blog, Twitter and Facebook or watch a documentary on his series, here.

(Vijay Nund performing morning rituals in the Ganges River, the most sacred river in Hinduism.)

Jakob Schiller unwraps a photo series:

Last Christmas, photographer Wes Naman and his assistant Joy Godfrey were wrapping presents in Naman’s photo studio when Godfrey randomly put a piece of scotch tape on her nose and pulled it into an awkward position. Naman followed suit by applying the tape to his lips. Seeing the silliness contained in a simple household item turned a light on in Naman’s head. Fast-forward one year and the idea has blossomed into a project he calls Scotch Tape, in which he uses this pliable plastic to completely cover and distort people into zombie-like caricatures of themselves.