Lens-Artists Challenge #131 – Emotions

[Categories: Photography, Photography 101 Forever]

Per Patti: “Show us portraits or street photography that captures people’s feelings, such as happiness, anger, sadness, curiosity, or fear. Or, choose a subject or scene that evokes an emotion in the viewer.”

I entered ’emotion’ in the search function of my Apple Photo library and came up with… NOTHING. So much for A.I. – artificial intelligence.

Patti uses a photo of Medusa, taken at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. This art, of which there are several copies by the artist Arnold Böcklin, was used on the cover of my literary passion Lapham’s Quarterly Summer 2017: Fear …

[online screenshot]

One copy of the art was sold by Sotheby’s for 252,000GBP ($342,429.95 at recent exchange rates). There is considerable information on the art at the previous link.

Speaking of Fear and First Inaugurations, I’m reminded of the FDR quote at his first inauguration, apparently paraphrasing Henry David Thoreau, “whose journal entry for September 7, 1851 included the line, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.“:

FDR: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” (Wiki.) I’m confident we will advance. But I digress.

Cheerleaders! We all need cheerleaders every once in awhile. At a small university’s football game in a very small Iowa town:

Speaking of twins (there are twins in the last photo), such was the topic on the American tv morning show ‘Today’ when we observed in New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza. They look a bit serious and business-like!

Perhaps twins can ‘Second that emotion’:

“Oh, but if you feel like lovin’ me
If you got the notion
I second that emotion” –Smoky Robinson and The Miracles

Oh well, when all else fails: ‘Dance like no one is watching!’

(I can tell you, we WERE watching, and young laddie in the middle held his own amongst the fair lassies.)

Stay safe, stay sane, be well, be kind to one another.

HAVE A GREAT 2021.

(By the way, we ARE smiling!!)