psychology dector

Photo courtesy of Lenzartis One of my heroes passed last week.   Bill Cunningham first drew my attention when I saw a documentary about him.   He was a tiny wisp of a man, always with a blue smock jacket, his bicycle, and his camera as he raced through the streets of midtown Manhattan photographing street fashions for his weekly spread in The New York Times .   At night, he hovered and flitted through the summer garden parties of the rich and famous to document the gatherings in a second collection prominent in the paper’s Sunday Style section.   At 87, he seemed indestructible, that he would go on for ages and ages even though he appeared delicate and child-like.   No one does the kind of work Bill did.   He was an artist living an ascetic life.   His photography was everything to him.   I admired his singular focus, his obsession with his art.   Like most true artists, he would continue even if no one paid him.   In fact, there were...

Col. Charles E. Shelton “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”   Gustave Flaubert In the early days of the Vietnam War, Charles Shelton, was shot down over Laos while taking reconnaissance photographs of Viet Cong and Laotian military POW camps on the shared border between the two countries.   It was his thirty-third birthday.   His plane was armed only with cameras, but his fighter jet escorts saw his parachute deploy, watched him float to the earth and land in the steaming jungle, and they talked to him repeatedly over his radio throughout the night.   He spent three days hiding from Viet Cong and Laotian patrols before being captured and transported back to one of the very prisons he had been sent to photograph.   Over the next years, he was tortured and beaten and robbed of his freedom.   In return, he killed three Viet Cong interrogators with a folding chair while he was locked in chains.   He attempted to escape numero...

Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860) Working Sketch of the Mastodon Sam was a skateboard aficionado in my seventh grade literature class.   He wore his blue uniform shorts without a belt, and did not ditch his blue Vans even when they had holes and had seen better days.   Sandy brown hair and blue eyes capped him off.   He was the stereotypical San Fernando Valley teenager, but he was not apathetic nor a daydreamer.   He had a brain and was not afraid to use it. During class, Sam kept his head down, drawing furiously in a notebook.   From my position in the room, he sat front and center.   I could see figures, cartoons, speech bubbles, and ray guns.   Meanwhile, I took the class through Night and Tom Sawyer and a host of other novels. When I called on him, Sam always had a ready and correct answer.   His work was thoughtful and full of insights.   All the while, he kept drawing in his notebook.   When I thought he was lost in his art, I’d call...

This week, I stumbled upon a remarkable artist:   Sister Corita Kent .   She was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, but grew up here in Los Angeles.   At the tender age of 18, she entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary , a group of Catholic women who, among other things, ran the Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood (now the campus of the American Film Institute).   In the heady days following the Second Vatican Council , the sisters had the temerity to re-evaluate the way they prayed, ministered, and lived, which upset Cardinal James Francis McIntyre , the archbishop of Los Angeles.   Given an ultimatum to conform or disband, the women voted to become a lay community and a nonprofit organization.   Facing declining revenues and financial hardship, the college closed its doors in 1981, but Sister Corita had already made a name for herself in the art world.   Corita ran the college art department, and specialized in creating serigraphs, or silk sc...