Zaar Riisberg (Zaarchasm) // Puddles

I had been dumb enough to register a desk at this place called ‘Grisk’ to be in an environment with other creatives. Trouble with modern creatives is their greed and willingness to exploit others, even harvest them, for their own gain. Grisk was just another place with people that were less than genuine - and in the end, not very creative.

But this story is not about them. Grisk was close to where the homeless hung out, and in the months I was there, I saw things get progressively worse - and now we are even passing a law, so they can be removed from places so ‘good people’ do not have to look at them. This law would serve better if it stopped ‘event marketing’ in the streets - you know the assholes who stop you and want money for a cause or indeed wants you to change phone company or some other trivial crap, so a CEO somewhere can make more. Those, apparently, need to be here, as they are important to society.

One day when leaving Grisk, I checked out a reflection as I sometimes do. This time a fresh puddle of rain. As I experimented shortly with perspective and distance, I started getting looks - anyone that shoots street and abstract know what I am talking about. You will get people trying to see what you are seeing, looking at the same place or in the same direction - and they see nothing. Which always makes me chuckle. This is what I saw:

I hear a voice behind me ‘you should take a picture of me’ - I go ‘sure’ and turn around and click to see a rather surprised man. He was clearly homeless. He could not grasp why I was pointing the lens toward a puddle. I asked if all he saw was the puddle and not the reflections in it. He looked a bit befuddled, then smiled - I am sure he was not used to people reacting to him this way, which is just heartbreaking. Sometimes it is the simplest things that opens a whole new world for someone - and we need reflection - we need to reflect on why some people end up on the streets, why a lot are poor, why we let fat cat CEOs run away with it all and why we elect the people we do. Now, I, in all fairness, did not open a new world to this guy - but I interacted with him, I ‘saw’ and ‘heard’ him and I gave him a little bit of myself. I hope he gets off the streets.

…well, you kind of asked for it ;)

Both shots are unedited if memory serves. I normally have qualms about shooting the homeless or destitute. It seems invasive to me and as an empath, I do not find it very easy to depict people in squalor - because my brain screams ‘why’ at me. If you are not an empath, I do not know how to describe it to you.

Zaar Riisberg (Zaarchasm) // A Touch of Comfort

I took this shot on a whim - and it was taken at least 2 years ago. Still, I remember a certain feeling of endearment which was possibly why I took it. And I was right. As I edited it, I see the woman on the right had put her hand in a classical position, trying to signal comfort. A lot of people would not see that detail, evident as it is, because they would be focussing on their clothes and the horrible notion, that islam is the biggest threat against Western society. It is not. Stupidity is.

It is a shot I am very proud of, as it is one of my signatures to capture emotion. Here, I must have sensed it, as I was passing, because the hand was initially obscured. I will be putting more up of my earlier high end stuff, and pouring my mind into it. People scream at me to be an author or a writer full time. I will do both then.

Lasse Fischer // Shades of Armenian Grey // Part III

Day two
They had trapped us in a room with soft zigzag carpets and a ceiling impossible far away from the floor. They made us stand in a circle - Wait; there was something before the carpets and circles. Outside the snow made its way from the heavens down onto the mountainside, layering the black rock with a soft white powder. Being surrounded by walls surrounded by mountains made a nice frame for the hangovers I had to endure.

I woke up dizzy and crawled down the polished marble steps, down to the pool were an elderly Armenian gentleman opened the locked door leading into the pool area despite him not understanding a word I was saying. We shook hands and nodded. The pool was empty, and after gasping my way through a few lanes of angst provoking lack of oxygen I laid on my back floating in the water, staring at the ceiling. My brain gently bobbing up and down within its cranial juice, following the rhythm of the blue liquid in the pool, as it recovered from the pomegranate marinade. Something loosened up inside of me and my body rose an inch in the water. Was one of the components of freedom distance? The water carried me and my thought to the edge of the pool. I stayed there floating long after I had a shower, put on my clothes, and went to eat breakfast. The sensation of hovering above ground, using my body in different physics, followed me like a shadow. I tried washing it away in the shower, but to no avail, it stayed attached to my feet. On my way to my room a glittering luggage transporter drove me outside the hotel doors, where I was confronted with the mountains. It seemed like they had bent the land around them to their will, and I understood why the soil and the trees bowed their heads and backed out of the way for these juggernauts of geography. They had a power over their surroundings, an unspoken agreement with the world that they persevered, watching over the earth, as the rest of reality rose and fell. In the depths of my situation, the wet and shiny eyes of the day after drinking, I too could sense the immense back catalogue of thoughts that had been projected onto their silent and stoic bodies, as I bent my neck, searching for the end of the massive wall of rock. My stomach grumbled. I had neglected to eat all morning, and to see to it that my vessel would carry me through a day of the never ending discipline of team building.

Returning to the subject of carpets. They made us stand in a circle. The shoes of the participants were all pointed to the middle of the zigzag carpet. A young smartly dressed guy talked about an exercise in teambuilding. I had always hated the idea of networking and being social, making contacts, because the words left somewhat of a metallic taste in my mouth. Maybe I should stop biting down so hard when they emerged. My eyes followed instead the lines on the floor, and I fell in to the light brown crevices between the black and blue stripes. When I came back up I was making a tower out of spaghetti, tape, and a magenta colored string. We skewered a marshmallow on top of the construction and came third in the competition. I sighed, and yesterday’s vapors filled the conference room. We applauded ourselves. A room filled with masturbatory youth workers. I jerked along with the others. Reflective store fronts and structured beams started rising from the zigzag carpet. They had followed me into this hotel in the middle of nowhere. They manifested themselves in the room between the participants. I took a step back as one sprang up from beneath my feet. I felt myself growing irritated. There was apparently no complete escape as long as people sought it out, this feeling of things being hollowed out. A string tugged at my wallet.

Day three
Cream gave me shit for my writing. She thought it could be funnier. It was fun for me though. The situation, the sweaty hands, the smell of feet, the insecure glances and the whole setup was somewhat ridicules. Hold that thought a second; we have to do an energizer game. After being turned into a chicken, a penguin, a human, and lastly a wise human I returned to the notion of
being more fun.