"The Gods Must Be Crazy" Theme

Theme and meeting host: Brian McGilloway

"The Gods Must Be Crazy" could certainly be interpreted from contrasting points of view. You, the artist, can define it as you like. 

One approach would be to seek visual evidence that the gods have blessed us with something so profoundly beautiful that divine intervention must have had a hand in its creation.

“The intricate and awe-inspiring aspects of the world, from the patterns on a butterfly's wing to a sunset, are seen as constantly revealing truths about the divine.”

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“Nature can be amazing, almost to the point of incomprehensibility. The splendor of a sunset, the radiance of the stars, and the variety of animals are all evidence of a Creator and Designer”

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Or the crazy gods may have failed us humans or at least dropped the ball. As in the words of the comic prophet George Carlin:

“Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades.
 

This is not good work. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. In any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say 'this guy', because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.

No woman could or would ever screw things up like this.”

Artistically there is an inclusive perspective, the double edged sword that so few photographers have had the will to attempt and the genius to capture; finding beauty in suffering and in tragedy.

Like the haunting images by Lee Miller. Her WWII portfolios are currently being shown for the first time in London at the Tate Museum. Or James Nachtwey’s compassionate and painfully beautiful photos of genocide in Rwanda. Or Sebastiao Salgado’s incomprehensible expose of 50 thousand mud-soaked men in the Brazilian gold mines broke sales records at Sotheby’s auction.

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And I will leave you with this quote:  “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” 

Go forth and create with your little magic boxes. See you soon.

 
-Brian McG