On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Tao Lin's Taipei

 

Recently, I was inspired to revisit Tao Lin's hi-def drug-infused yet sobering novel Taipei. I first read this book when it was released to mixed reviews in 2013, for an English course on the contemporary American novel (I think?). While it was insufferable at first, its fragmented style and alienated/alienating protagonist Paul slowly grew on me and I ended up writing an essay inspired by it. 

Here's a version of the 2013 essay I submitted--hopefully this persuades you to read it, rather than the opposite:

Knowing Lots of Nothing: 

On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Taipei

It is said that we live in the so-called Information Age, a time in which conceivably, digital technologies have furnished us with the ability to send and receive all sorts of information instantaneously and across borders. This transcendence of data is further sustained by the travel technologies available to help in our physical mobilization and transition from point A to point B. While these technologies seem on the surface to enhance our ability to understand the world around us, they often undermine our ability to understand the complex dynamics involved in our social interactions, our immutable interiority, and our memory as a guide. This theme of conscious ignorance is one which has been visited in Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei. I will suggest that the protagonist Paul’s own ignorance stems precisely from the wide, unlimited, and multifaceted availability of sources of information that is within his reach. I will be exploring how Paul’s overabundant epistemological access has denied him the ability to know how to read emotions of his own and others, thus creating a sense of self-alienation, which is only remedied through a trip to Taipei.

Paul is mainly tuned out, or ignorant, to the emotional status of the individuals he is closely involved with. The reader is bombarded with this incapacity several times within the first encounters: Paul is “unsure what he felt exactly” with Michelle (Lin, 4; 9; 10; etc.). It is only through reading into text messages and checking on updated Facebook and Twitter statuses that Paul comprehends how his friends and loved ones feel towards him. In the midst of an argument with Michelle, “Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn’t seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS” (Lin, 10)— his inability to comprehend parallels his “expert” knowledge of the digital world, as evident in his lexicon. He is only able to know where his friendships with Kyle, Gabby, and the rest stand once they have “unfollowed” or “de-friended” him on the social media platforms (Lin, 30), and can only grasp his own disinterest in pursuing romance with Laura upon scrutinizing their email correspondence (Lin, 50; 53).  But such unconventional methods of reading others also provides much room for misreading. As Andrew Martin writes in The Knowledge of Ignorance, this “allows or demands a response, an interpretation, a judgment. Thus the text is not unassailable, not self-evident or self-sufficient, but just as vulnerable to attack as the author. The reader is always a latent misreader, critic, enemy; his weapons are misattribution, distortion, and misinterpretation.” (Martin, 43).

Such mediation of emotional (un)knowingness can be traced further back in Paul’s life: in 3rd grade he soon realizes that "90-95%" of people he encounters will be/are "separate and unknowable"; in middle-school his inability to interpret or know how to respond to being antagonized is then misinterpreted as feeling "too cool" to react by the other kids; and by freshman year he has resigned to remaining silent, all but losing his ability to know how to react to emotional and social stimuli (Lin, 39-40). As Audrea Lim writes, Taipei “is a depiction of the alienated subject in a personality-driven world where social signals and media messages are so complex…Again and again, Paul is driven to despair by ordinary social reality…” (Lim, 2013).  Ian Samson corroborates, comparing Tao Lin’s novel to the likes of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in its “desperate desire to connect”, that the “novel dwells on the meaning of disassociation and self-exile.” (Samson, 2013).

Confined within this digitized system of self expression through proxy, Paul is prevented from understanding in any clear or cohesive sense his own feelings and emotive responses, and increasingly goes “without knowing why” he feels depressed (Lin, 53). In one culminating instance, Paul experiences a new feeling which he struggles to describe: a “sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans…Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe, after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity.” (Lin, 56). The inability to read the emotional status of others (without literally reading it online) is inextricably linked to Paul’s ignorance about his own state, for “…one cannot know the ‘I’ except through the other, but this kind of knowledge is itself a kind of nescience…the problem  of other minds is not just the problem of other minds, but also the problem of my own mind…my mind is itself other to itself.” (Bennett, 111).

Paul’s knowledge of how to perform his individual “human” and/or social functions is therefore also heavily mediated, through the plethora of drugs that he frequently uses on the one hand, and largely through the digital media which he is perpetually involved in on the other hand. Paul is always in a state of confusion whenever he begins to interrogate his own interiority, and the thoughts he has (which are Lin highlights through the use of quotation marks) reflect this state of inner conflict; he is “completely lost” (Lin, 19), “lost in the world” (Lin, 7), “grateful to exist” (Lin, 248). On the one hand, Paul is almost vaporous: he is all interiority. At one especially alienating point, “Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return…” and “realized he was (and, for an unknown amount of time, had been) rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself…” (Lin, 202-205). This is also marked by the endless flow of inner and outer dialogue he steers. As Samson writes, Paul is “continually aroused but perpetually dulled…(a) style in which fragmented thoughts follow narcissistic flights of fancy, with an underlying tone of desperation and despair. Paul has nothing much to say, but he says it anyway…” (Samson, 2013).

            At the same time, this acute and intensely self-conscious interiority sits alongside Paul’s inability to comprehend a concrete reality and is exhausted by the digital technologies visited earlier, as well as his self-narcotization.  Referencing Michel Foucaut’s theory of “technologies of the self”, Lim writes: “Drugs can help us to adapt, to be more productive, and even to excel within our circumstances, to make our lives more bearable, and in some cases, to radically reconfigure our subjectivity, if not the world. In Taipei, drug use is less about changing the world than it is about adjusting to it.” (Lim, 2013). Paul’s most basic function of locating his spatial and temporal existence in a concrete reality is greatly hindered throughout the text, perhaps as a byproduct of his frequent trysts with opioids, stimulants, and every drug in between: “his affectless tone is especially unsettling when applied to drug experiences.” (Lim, 2013). The ‘drug fight’ episode in which he and Erin have a logic-based argument on the effects of cocaine and Paul cites literature as proof demonstrates this disaffected attitude as well as a sense of conscious, or intentional ignorance (Lin, 157-8; 219). When asked by Erin how he knows, he responds “based on what I know, from things I’ve read and experienced, about tolerance…” and when Erin suggests that past experience doesn’t necessarily correlate to future outcome, Paul says conclusively: “’I’m not trying to argue with you, based on what I know’…aware it was funny to qualify ‘I’m not trying to argue with you’ with ‘based on what I know’, but not feeling humoured.” (Lin, 219).

Paul and the others traverse all across America and beyond, and much like the Vernian technique Martin writes of, “the ubiquitous images of multiplication and division (geo)graphically narrate the fragmentation of the matter and media of science…(they) signify the fragmentation of the classical configuration of the rational, Newtonian universe, encompassed by a unifying framework of knowledge…” (Martin, 176). Though perpetually in transit, Taipei takes on an important dynamic as the realm in which the typically unknown can be made knowable to Paul, where he can locate markers that orient him towards the directions of understanding. On his final visit, Paul believes that “if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur…it would be here.” (Lin, 164). While there Paul reflects on a neon sign that “conveys “too much information”,  leading him to muse on how technology has lost its enchantment for him,  that “technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness…Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task… by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement…in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves…” (Lin, 166-7). This feeling of accessing this latent, hidden transcendental wisdom is sharpened by the fact that even Las Vegas, famed for its bright lights, neon signs and related symbols failed to speak to Paul; Taipei  is the locale in which Paul undergoes his epistemological transformation, thus leading up to that last moment of nirvana.

Post-Taipei, Paul and Erin “start to love each other more…They find themselves doing things, rather than merely watching things…life is changing from the aesthetic to the ethical.” (Martin, 2013), or even from the digital to the actual. It is when he has returned from Taipei and is with Erin that Paul experiences his moment of heightened awareness versus hyper-awareness, enhanced on the one hand by the corporeality of laying with the character he has come closest to genuineness with and on the other a sense of metaphysical communion with beings in general. For Paul, caressing Erin’s back “gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world… Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibrium…he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information…that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn’t, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant.” (Lin, 243-4)

Memory, and more specifically the failure of memory to produce or enhance “usable” knowledge is one which figures heavily in Taipei. Memory at its most basic function is as a record of experience, a holder of the places, times, and moments one has undergone, and presumably learned from. But what happens when such memory is fragmented, lacking, or even inaccessible? Both texts confront such questions openly. In Taipei, Paul’s memory at times seeps into his perception of present reality, but for the most part, eludes him whenever he attempts to revisit it, like an unfamiliar book he is reading for the first timr (Lin, 18; 201; 228; 246-7; etc) .

Thus, as we have seen throughout Taipei, the realm of knowledge is an abstract one difficult to locate and even more difficult to adequately exist in, for it is formless and ever-evolving. The realm of ignorance, then is just as difficult to locate or perceive if one exists in it. It is a paradox of sorts, for if one knows that they do not know, is this not actually closer to knowing? Lin confronts these ideas head on by positioning Paul in between both realms, where Taipei provides the time and space for a more “enlightened” perception of Self and Other.

Consulted Works

Bennett, Andrew. Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2009. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. Print.

Lim, Audrea. "The Drugs Don’t Work: Tao Lin’s “Taipei” and the Literature of Pharmacology." LARB. Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

.

Lin, Tao. Taipei: A Novel. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2013. Print.

Martin, Andrew. The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.

Martin, Clancy. "The Agony of Ecstasy: ‘Taipei,’ a Novel by Tao Lin." The New York Times Online. The New York Times, 28 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold. Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, 1968. Print.

Sansom, Ian. "Taipei by Tao Lin – Review." The Guardian UK Online. The Guardian, 4 July 2013. Web. Nov. 2013. .

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The Airplane Boys: Born to Be VISUALS

BORN TO BE

The Airplane Boys

Director, Editor and D.O.P: Warren Credo

Produced by Stampede Management

Styling and Still Photography: Justin Create

Production Assistance: Justin Li, Kyle Credo, Kenny Enrera, Brian Nagallo, Jamie Fernandes and Chris Drakes

I was actually awed by the sheer art of this film. Amazing video for a great song off of The Airplane Boys' "Where Have You Been" tape.
Enjoy!

Download it at:
http://www.theairplaneboys.com/

The hero-villain dichotomy

The idea of the hero is one that seems to preoccupy Western culture, forming the basis for much of the literature, film, philosophy, and other popular-culture mediums that compose it. Our willingness to decorate soldiers and firefighters, play cops and robbers, obsessively consume old Western cowboy films or ancient mythology, and immortalize comic-book super-heroes all point to our eagerness to ascribe “hero” and “villain” roles. However, as one often comes to conclude, we must take a more discretional approach when examining who is a hero, and conversely, who is a villain. In fact, the issue is far more complex than a mere categorization of individuals or groups under either of these titles—most of the time, things are not always so black and white. Recently I devoured a book that reawakened these exact sentiments in me:

In her collection of poems under the title Ghettostocracy, Canadian author, poet, and spoken-word artist extraordinaire Oni the Hatian Sensation reawakens the “Black” community with a strong message: in order to understand the community’s needs and work to rebuild it, we must first work from within. An important step in this process is to reexamine the important figures that we collectively hold to be heroes. Oni invites readers to reassess our widely-accepted, if not imposed, understanding of what it means to be a hero or a villain in a number of ways. One important approach Oni takes is to present alternate perceptions of the hero and villain archetypes in our society by referencing specific individuals and general archetypes.
One of the most obvious themes in the Ghettostocracy poems is epitomized in her presentations of characters such as cops, politicians, church leaders, etc.—all who share the common denominator of being categorized as archetypal heroes in modern society. In fact, what Oni’s work suggests is that such figures are more often the “villains” than they are the “heroes”. Conversely, in her presentation of the “hood-hero” (inner-city neighbourhood “hero”), Oni shows that what mainstream society has deemed villainous may actually be held as valiant by certain members of society.

One of these perceived hero-types is characterized by “Reverend Seymour Cash”. This self-proclaimed “man of God” (who was at onetime a pimp) is still nothing more than a corrupt, greedy, evil man who exploits the community he pretends to uplift. Rev. Seymour, as Oni explains in the poem “Ghettostocracy” has “just raped the ghetto to escape into the upper class.” When he is presented again in the poem “Church” Seymour Cash is still the “sinistah ministah” he was in “Ghettostocracy”, this time explicitly partaking in deviant sexual activity with members of his clergy; one of the most revered community leaders, often looked to for moral guidance and leadership, is reduced to nothing short of a villain.

Other such embodiments of this concept are the cops and politicians found throughout Ghettostocracy. Unlike the courageous, caring, public-service-providing figures mainstream society idealizes such characters as, Oni’s references present them as detrimental, dishonest, and doing less to help the community than to exploit it. For example, she challenges the heroic legitimacy of our elected officials and politicians in “Elocution”, suggesting that the only way these people attain such sight-after positions is through a combination of sexual deviance and manipulation:

“Illiterate children in high school  

Sucking teacher’s dick to get through

Shortly, they are on their way to college-acknowledged.

Some get raped and graduate,

Then become head of state…” 

Such lines also draw attention to the tragic cycle, suggesting that had these “children” been properly guided and educated, rather than exploited by their teachers, they may have acted as positive agents within the community instead.

 Even the United Nations is not spared from this criticism. Rather than actually function effectively, if at all, Oni renders the U.N crippled, helpless, and compliant in their silence in the poem “Why Keep Score”:

“United Nations, who are we?

Invisible witnesses to world catastrophes.” 

But perhaps the most-visited hero archetypes in Ghettostocracy are the cops. We live in a society that largely idealizes the role of the cop in the personal lives of community members. But, the cop characters in the Ghettostocracy poems are instead portrayed as brutal, unjust, and racist, effectively blurring the line between cop and criminal. We are first introduced to this motif of villainous police in “New York Streets”:

“Police, cops, walking the beat,

On their feet, in the streets,

Are beating big Black boys, with their toys…” 

This scathing criticism is revisited in “I Am Not Ashamed To Say That I Am in Pain”, as she comments on what she perceives to be a lack of “morality” from our police heroes:

“Morality?

Hah! Most police aint got none:

Pulling triggers on a gun,

Aiming at the young (cause they think its fun),

Having brothers on the run until their lives are done…” 

Ghettostocracy is rife with references to popular cultural “hero-villain” figures- two of the more notable references being, first to Al Capone, then to Michael Jackson. In “What Happened to Michael Jackson?”, Oni attacks the race message she insists Michael Jackson makes through his orientation to typically “white” norms. When asked by her son whether he too will “be white when I grow up?” Oni replies that rather than naturally progressing to this, Micheal Jackon’s bleached skin and “political perm” are nothing more than sad attempts to surrender his “blackness”, playing into “hollyweird’s” obsession with trying to “make black colours nonexistent”. Oni’s critique of Michael Jackson reaches its climax when she suggests that Micheal Jackson is aware of this black demonization, but continues to sustain it: “Me thinks that Michael Jackson really knows this…”.

In “Gangster Alliance”, Oni speaks about the rampant gang violence within inner-city communities, particularly the streak of violence in South Central L.A in 2002. Oni’s allusion to Al Capone is particularly interesting in that she seems to absolve him from wrongdoing in this specific instance, a blame that has been imposed on the notorious mobster explicitly and implicitly by those in power. Al Capone is on one hand often characterized as a ruthless, manipulative, violent man of crime, and his legacy is often that of giving birth to organized crime in America. Whether this is wholly or in part true is of little concern to Oni, and as she suggests, should not be to us. The “inner city war zones” she speaks of in “Gangster Alliance” are “not caused by Al Capone”. On the other hand, Al Capone’s services to his community cannot altogether be ignored by his participation in criminal activity, as exemplified by his common characterization as a Robin Hood in popular culture. Oni asserts this dichotomy in “Iambic Pain”:

“Moors are not bandits

Some are misunderstood.

Robin Hood was cool-

Trotting on minions rule…” 

Oni’s reference to Al Capone implies this idea of dual-identity—what some may view as hero, others view as villain, but who is right? Perhaps, as the character in “Making Scents” exclaims “And to think I once thought you were a winner!” what the community would benefit much more from is a reassessment of those people they deem “winner”- or heroes...

Canadian author, poet, and spoken-word artist extraordinaire Oni the Hatian Sensation

Jay Z: "These lyrics are a cry for help" (video)

Jay Z explains how his style went from being centred around technique (flow, etc.) to being more lyrically-focused after gaining "more life experiences":

"For people, don't just judge us as ignorant kids, or drug dealers...Its much more than that... Its layers of complex things thats going in our house, in our homes, in our hallways...

Just imagine your kid growing up in the middle of Marcy Projects when it was fiends in the hallway and shootouts  on Sundays at 12 noon... or seeing someone get killed for the first time at 9 years old.

Imagine that.

So, here's why these things are happening and heres what we're going through... and why... so understand, and 

help.

A lot of these lyrics are strong in nature because they're defiant... but at in the end of it, its all a cry for help..."

I Need a Doctor

FINALLY! Some visuals for one of my favourite songs to emerge from 2011 so far: I NEED A DOCTOR.

Obviously I love Eminem (as any hiphop fan will most likely have to admit), but I think Skylar Grey's voice is dope on this beat and super believable.

Oh hey, did I mention DRE IS ALIVE??? LOL. Not only is he alive, he seem's to be alive an healthily sporting a more muscularly defined physique. 

Not really a fan of all that futuristic, test tube, robot shit (ugh, anyone remember the video for "In Da Club"?), but I am sooo amped to see various clips from all our favourite Eminem-Dre moments. Who else walked down memory lane when all those N.W.A clips played? sigh... just a friendly reminder of where this generation's hiphop helped derive from...

ENJOY!

Ramzo:I Need a Doctor "Remix"?

For some reason, I actually don't hate it.
I love Skylar Grey's vocals on the original track- they're just so desperate and believable, even a little soothing in their gentle scratchiness.
The verses are alrightm incomparable to Eminem obviously but not terrible for someone who doesn't claim to be a rapper.
Overall, I like the reworking of the beat, Ramzo's own spin on the hook, and the choice of track.

"Against the Wall": William Parry & the Art of Resistance

"It’s a means of communicating about injustice. It’s one means of getting a message across. The more people who learn about Israel’s crimes, the more who challenge the West’s blind backing of Israel – the quicker Israel’s incredibly sophisticated military machine will be undermined. The spray can is part of the spectrum of other creative, non-violent ways being undertaken by civil society to raise awareness, challenge historical narratives and overcome injustice..."

- William Parry 

Is the spray can mightier than the sword?

British photojournalist William Parry thinks so. He's the author of Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Parry travelled extensively throughout the West Bank & Occupied Territories collecting photos of the artwork that covers the wall dividing the region from Israel.  Being careful to include a thought-provoking variety of images and graffiti, he contrasts each image with a vignette of a Palestinian community that lives with the daily reality of the ugly "security" wall and all that it represents.

The book features artwork from Banksy, Ron English, Blu and Palestinian artists and activists.

Here are some of the images from the wall, which has been recently called "the largest protest banner in the world":

Here's William Parry in a BBC interview from a few years back speaking on the book and some of the artwork on the wall (as pictured above)...




William Parry will be in Canada next month for a serious of lectures called Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine.
go to www.cjpme.org/ for more info.

Die Hard: Lego Style

If you're like me and have the fortune of having Reading Week (a.k.a those 5 days your university gives you in February to "catch up on workload" and "study") this week, then you might be sitting at home spending unhealthy amounts of time in front of your computer/TV screen. Actually, thats exactly what I've been doing for the most part.
Anyway, I've got the perfect way to spend 3 minutes or more of your time.

Check out this video,
"Die Hard: Lego Style"
by Arash Khoshnazar

Before you watch this, keep in mind that the entire video was shot using a technique called stop-motion (or stop-action). Basically, the little Lego dudes were manipulated into poses for individual photo frames, and then the frames were edited into a sequence to make it look like fluid movement...
That's right, every movement you see is a series of frames positioned that way.



Dope, huh?
 Well the short was submitted to Edward Jameson's "Done in 60 Seconds" Competition. The film is one of 20 that made it, with over hundreds of hopefuls submitting their work.

If you thought that was as cool as I did, PLEASE VOTE BY CLICKING HERE and checking "Die Hard". You can vote as much as you want, but it ends in 2 days!!

APB @ Lambadina Lounge

SEE YA THERE!!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=151508991555154&ref=ts

Across the borders..

"You don't know where

My people comin' from,

'Cause you don't go there

We just trying to get dough here..."

Sooo, I know I'm a little late with this, but my iPod shuffled to this song this morning and I haaad to share it.

The joint is called "Don't Go There", off London hip-hop artist Giggs' album "Let 'Em 'Ave It", and it features none other than up-and-comer BoB.
Giggs is a rapper from the notoriously "ghetto" district of Peckam in South London, known for his slow rap style and street lyrics. He won the BET Award for Best UK Hip Hop Act in 2008, and has released 9 hugely successful official mixtapes. The 10th mixtape- Magical Mr. Hollowman- is due out in December of this year. Giggs' first album, "Talkin' the Hardest", which he apparently created in just under two weeks, sold out across the UK. He is widely successful in the UK- ask any Londoner to suggest some local hiphop artists and they will always name Giggs.

Let me just say, after spending some time in London this summer I have a whooole new appreciation for and curiosity in the international hiphop scene. I also noticed that this particular musical genre has an impressively large following in the UK, contrary to the images of tea-sipping, prim-and-proper, Queen-loving Brits that we often get fed out here in Canada/US.

If you haven't heard of Giggs, I suggest you broaden your horizons and check him out before dismissing him as "just some British guy"...





Also check out some of these UK artists, as suggested by a couple of London friends:
- Kano
- Klash Nic-Off
- P Money

War+Peace: A Photographer's Journey

"Sometimes, between war and peace, a brief poetic moment allows one to escape into freedom"
- Reza


The other day, I added a new book to my ever-expanding photography-book collection. I'm a closet photography junky and I think that largely stems from my obsession with expression. There is something so powerful about capturing a moment in time and immortally sharing it with the world. It's ironic for someone like me to say this, but a picture really can express a thousand words, emotions, thoughts and moments...
The book I got my hands on instantly became a favourite. I have found myself going back night after night and flipping through the photo's, pausing on some of the ones that have touched me deeper than the others. This particular book has also made me an admirer of Reza and his work. Reza, a world-renowned photojournalist, is as much a documentarian and witness to the beauty and monstrosities of the world , as he is an activist and humanitarian. He has dedicated his efforts and talents to giving a voice to the silenced and has equipped scores of people around the world with the tools and courage to make a change in their own lives. Looking at Reza's photos is like being transported to a time and place otherwise ignored and invisible to this side of the world. Not only is he an outstanding photographer, he has a way with his words that could put any modern journalist to shame. I am forever a fan of his work and I can only hope to one day use my own medium to transform the world around me the way he has, to be the change I wish to see
So, I've decided to share a few of the photo's and arousing captions from his work entitled "War+Peace: A Photographer's Journey"

(Afghanistan, 1985) "Their laughter, their warmth, and their spontaneous friendliness erased all of the discouragement and fatigue I'd felt. It reminded me of a beautiful truth I had read... 'Travelling- it offers you a hundred roads to adventure, and gives your heart wings!'"

(Iran, Kurdistan-1980) "A boy named Peyman told me...'I do take refuge in silence, that is true, and whatever peace I find is solitary. I think about the future. Will I be forced to take up arms and fight out of hatred, in order to free my people?...My friends have become hardened. The streets are overrun with the enemy, but my friends are roaming the streets, acting rebellious and unconcerned..."

(Egypt, 1991) "Now a lonely little boy, he'd had to go out on his own after the accident and had joined a team of beggars, a small group of boys ruled by a teenager...whose shadow looms over Saed, coming to whip Saed with his belt- accusing him of not working hard enough"

(Somalia, 1989) "Wrapped in her shawl, she looked like a queen. Everything around her was somber and mournful. With a proud bearing, she walked... I read, in her beautiful, emaciated face, Africa's wounded history....
Starvation is still prevalent in many parts of Africa. It is the silent appeal of these images of starving children that must resonate within us, drawing our empathy, an understanding for their plight that goes beyond pity & efforts at assistance..."

(Sudan, 1989) "I saw his feet, scarred by chains that also bound his hands. His eyes were resigned, his voice contained. He evoked the image of another time, the days when his ancestors were seen by white people as nothing but a kind of currency to be traded."

(Cambodia, 1996) "His rifle is heavy and cumbersome, but it reassures him. The weapon has become his accomplice, as well as his guardian. He feels strong when he holds it...It is his confidant, and his guarantee that he will be able to carry out his revenge someday... He has the face of an angel. But his expression is harsh and sad..."

(Cambodia, 1996) "I met this man, who had lost his leg in a mine. He and his family had become separated because of the warfare in the country... he learned that his family had settled in a hammock, setting up camp right on the sidewalk. This was the day of their reunion."

(Russia, 1999) "I asked his name, and he began to weep. He said no one had asked his name in ten years... Through his half-open shirt, I glimpsed the portraits, symbols of a bygone ideology... In Siberia, prisoners in the gulags had those 4 faces tattooed on their chests to avoid the firing squad. What soviet would have dared shoot at his heroes?
After the fall of socialism, and with the subsequent revival of the right to express religious feeling, he had added a new icon to protect him- a cross"

(Afghanistan, 2000) "The noises of war overpower memory. If you try to black out your visual memory, just for a moment, so you concentrate on what you remember hearing during battle, then you become overwhelmed by a completely different perception of war, as well as by different emotions...
A woman sat next to a young man, holding him in her arms, touching him tenderly. Her only son had been hit by a bullet during the battle. Twenty years old, he had just taken his last breath..."

(Pakistan, 2007) "Before, life was simple and attuned to the seasons. The rhythm and continuity of the seasons allow fertile soil to flourish, sustaining the people who honor it...
But then came the soldiers...One man held a gun to her mother. Another pinned her young brother to the floor. One of the men raped her, while 2 men held her down...
Now, each day is a painful struggle as she and her family try to recover a little of their lost honor..."

(Afghanistan, 1990) "In the short scale of human life, the erring ways of man, the jolts of historical events, and the violence perpetrated in the name of power have a profound effect and seem inordinately important. But in comparison with the long road humanity is pursuing as it marches toward peace and perfection, they account for little..."

(P.S it was EXTREMELY difficult to narrow it down to this selection, and you can bet I will do a continuation piece)