AsimovsRobot

I used to always try for the best outcome but with this have it seems like half of the time a failure also leads to an amazing consequence and story.

Like this from act one in the Underdark:

This sounds like somebody's Saturday RPG session recap. Larian have managed to capture the spirit of this quite well!

What are some fun (non-spoilery) moments you've experienced?

The photographs of Cristóbal Hara show an undiscovered Spain--far from the beautiful beaches and urban centers--full of completely normal people and animals (and all their peculiarities) that reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. At processions and markets, funerals and bullfights, or simply on the street, Hara positions his camera to extract unexpected details from the hustle and bustle of the provinces.

... Towell’s work showed me that things didn’t need to be presented in neat, linear packages; you could breach the foundational tropes being taught in journalism school. And that made for much more intimate, feeling work that functioned alongside the great longform writing I had also begun to absorb.

I don’t really know how I found it (there wasn’t really a vibrant internet community back then), but I bought “The Mennonites” that year. It’s a book of lyrical and immersive black-and-white photos exploring the world of the Old Colony Mennonites. This was no quick hit wide-shot, tight-shot package like you might produce for a newspaper story. No, Towell threw himself into the lives of the people he was photographing. He spent nearly 10 years doing it! It was an enthralling read then, and continues to be today.

Text by Kenneth Dickerman from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/17/larry-towells-iconic-mennonites-is-back-expanded-edition/

This image is from Martin Parr's exhibition and accompanying book Bored Couples, published by Agnes B./Galerie Du Jour, 1993.

Colour photographs depict twenty bored couples who have run out of things to say to each other. The book design allows the viewer to open it from the front and from the back, so it reads French one way and English the other. Designed by Peter Brawne. Printed by Balding and Mansell, Norwich. Softback.

You can see several pages from the book on Parr's official website: https://www.martinparr.com/books/#gallery/8__3470940330/193

Though still relatively unknown outside Japan, Tomatsu, now 80, is arguably the greatest and most influential of all the photographers that emerged during his country's turbulent postwar era. Over a span of 50 years, his work has reflected, often obliquely, the changes in Japanese culture as the American military presence and then the unstoppable spread of American popular culture, helped shaped a new outward-looking, consumer-driven nation. Two series of photographs – Protest, Tokyo, 1969 and Eros, Tokyo, 1969 – record the often turbulent youth cultural changes of the time. His book, Oh! Shinjuku, named after a shopping district in central Tokyo, chronicles the rise of a young and rebellious Bohemianism that, as an older outsider, he saw – as he later put it – "through the eyes of a stray dog".

Those words seem prophetic. Tomatsu was one of the giants of Japanese photography that a younger generation of photographers who came to prominence in the late 60s reacted against. Known as the Provoke Movement, after the magazine that published their work, it included Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira and Koji Taki. In its founding statement of intent, Taki wrote: "We photographers must use our own eyes to grasp fragments of reality far beyond the reach of pre-existing language, presenting materials that actively oppose words and ideas ... materials to provoke thought." Forty years on, though, Tomatsu's radical approach – his freeform, expressionist style, odd camera angles, strange cropping and framing – has been reappraised and he is now seen, ironically enough, as one of the pioneers of the Provoke era. What he makes of all this is anyone's guess; he is famously reclusive and has never ventured outside Japan.

Text from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/sep/06/shomei-tomatsu-japanese-photography

For me traveling has always been about discovering myself through other people’s eyes. The more you get to know how they think, live and survive, the more you get to know the real world never revealed to you. You realise the confinement that all these social standards have caused and you are a part of it. A part of a prison with a camouflage of civility. And then you see purity in those eyes and those eyes set you free. They give a meaning to your entire existence. With time it is no longer a pursuit, but a way of life.

• Spiros Soueref

"The power of your Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can enslave you if you don’t run away from it, otherwise you are doomed for repetition. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It testifies itself not in the fear of doing the same thing over again but rather in the urge of not going somewhere you have been before."

• Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Gueorgui Pinkhassov is known for his vivid art-reportage, which elevates the everyday to the extraordinary. His richly-colored images are absorbing, complex and poetic—sometimes bordering on an abstraction which embraces the visual complexity of contemporary life. As well as his global documentary work, Pinkhassov has photographed iconic cultural events from Cannes Film Festival to backstage at Paris Fashion Week. “It is foolish to change the vector of chaos. You shouldn’t try to control it, but fall into it” he says of his approach.

Born in Moscow in 1952, Pinkhassov’s interest in photography began while he was still at school. After studying cinematography at the VGIK (The Moscow Institute of Cinematography), he went on to work at the Mosfilm studio as a cameraman and then as an on-set photographer. He joined the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists in 1978, which allowed him more freedom to travel and exhibit internationally. His work was soon noticed by the prominent Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who invited him to make a reportage about his film Stalker (1979).

Jonas Bendiksen’s sharply evocative images explore themes of community, faith and technology.

Bendiksen was born in Norway in 1977. He began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum’s London office before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former USSR, a project that was published as the book Satellites (Aperture, 2006).

In 2017 he published The Last Testament (Aperture), which told the story of seven men who all claimed to be the biblical Messiah returned to earth. The Book of Veles (Gost, 2021) probed the vulnerabilities of our perceptions, and became hotly debated after Bendiksen revealed that what had appeared to be a classical piece of photojournalism was in large part synthetic computer-generated renderings.

"Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world" - Bruno Barbey

Bruno Barbey, born in Morocco, has dual nationality – French and Swiss. He studied photography and graphic arts at the École des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland. From 1961 to 1964 he photographed the Italians, considering them as protagonists of a small ‘theatrical world’, with the aim of capturing the spirit of a nation.

Over five decades Bruno Barbey has worked in all five continents and covered wars and conflicts in Nigeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Kuwait. His work has appeared in the world’s major magazines and he has published over 30 books.­­­­­

He has received numerous awards for his work, including the French National Order of Merit. His photographs are exhibited worldwide, and feature in numerous museum collections.

Bruno Barbey died on November 9, 2020.

Information from Magnum's website.

I’ve known this picture now for nearly 40 years. It was a sunny 
day in London in 1974 or 1975 when I walked into a second-
hand bookshop on Great Russell Street, along from the British
 Museum, to find a copy of Tony Ray-Jones’s book A Day Off.
 It was marked down to £1.50 (the original price was £4.75),
 so I bought it. I’m not sure if this was my first sight of the 
picture — there was an Arts Council exhibition of Ray-Jones’s
 work called The English Seen going round the country at the 
same time. But the version in the book, the second image in,
 is the one I return to and have shown in lectures ever since 
to say something about the decisive moment, traditions in
 documentary, the English seaside and so on.

Of course, it’s not only the young lovers who make this such
 a great picture. They are central to the image, but around 
them are an array of older people, their gazes outward, keen 
it seems to look anywhere other than at this couple in their
 midst. It is this refusal of social interaction which makes
 the picture an acute piece of satire, just as the network of
 divergent gazes makes it visually so satisfying. Part of my 
response to the picture has of course to do with my own age 
and background. I feel I recognise these people — their faces
 are like the ones that gaze out of my own family album from
 the period and, as I look, I assign them characters.

The woman at bottom left with glasses and a worried look 
resembles my Auntie Lil and, in my mind, that is who she becomes.
The old man in the flat cap is an archetypal working-class figure,
 though his check waistcoat, watch chain and tie clip are actually
 rather dressy. At the top, the boat’s captain fulfils his supporting 
role as weathered sea dog quite perfectly. The woman below him is
 another auntie and the placement of her face next to that of the girl 
— tilted in the same direction yet tense, almost a mask — says much
 about age and experience.

To the other side of the couple stands a rather gaunt man, taking
 a drag on his cigarette. Here we are surrounded by all this fresh
 air and it’s time for a fag; defining him by his action, I call him the ‘
smoking man’. Finally, at bottom right, there is another man, whose 
neat white shirt and swept-back grey hair l instinctively read as 
middle rather than working class. He seems to have a contemplative 
look on his face and l’m struck by his resemblance to the English
 painter John Piper.

The title as it was given in A Day Off was ‘Scarborough, 1967′. 
Immediately one imagines the rugged Yorkshire coast off to the 
left as one simultaneously thinks of hippies in San Francisco with
 flowers in their hair. (Somewhere out there, Simon and Garfunkel
are singing the old English ballad Scarborough Fair’.) All that seems 
a long way away from the microcosm of this picture, but one of the 
things going on here (very gently) is a contrast between old English 
repressions and a newer, younger freedom of thought and action.

Text from Ian Walker, full text here: from: https://the-golden-fleece.co.uk/wp/tony-ray-jones-tripper-boat/