shining is conceptual social photography blog that was born during a family trip to rome by my brother and i (he is the original shiner).
as a child i had to go to places like notre dame, the eifel tower and the statue of liberty with my parents, and to watch and hear them and all the other people around us being amazed from those huge blocks of stone that were built to show the power of some ego maniac who wanted people to remeber him.
as a consequence today i find no pleasure of visiting these kind of places, and often even feel sick from humanity when i see that those assholes who built those buildings got exactly what they wanted.
I feel that shining brought back for me the joy of being a tourist. on this trip to rome when my brother and i hanged around and took those photos we had a chance to act as normal tourists but to be very special at the same time.
i would like to see shining photos from famous monuments and buildings around the world, i would be happy to recieve pictures and post them here.
go and join the tourists!
Showing posts with label jews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jews. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (im a jew its ok)


The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (GermanDenkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711concrete slabs or "stelae", one for each page of the Talmud arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38m (7.8') long, 0.95m (3' 1.5") wide and vary in height from 0.2 m to 4.8m (8" to 15'9"). According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. An attached underground "Place of Information" (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public on May 12 of the same year. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately 25 million.
The memorial is controversial, and was described by Ignatz Bubis, the then leader of the German Jewish community, as unnecessary.[citation needed]

Friday, October 22, 2010

the jewish ghetto in rome

The Roman (Jewish) Ghetto (ItalianGhetto di Roma) was located in the rione Sant'Angelo, in the area surrounded by today's Via delPortico d'OttaviaLungotevere dei CenciVia del Progresso and Via di Santa Maria del Pianto close to the Tiber and the Theater of Marcellus, in RomeItaly.
Papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1555 segregated the Jews, who had lived freely in Rome since Antiquity, in a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night, and subjected them to various restrictions on their personal freedoms such as limits to allowed professions and compulsory Catholic sermons on the Jewish shabbat.
The measures contained in Paul IV's bull, including the establishment of the Roman Ghetto, had the explicit objectives of segregating the Jewish population of the city from the Christian majority, both spatially and legally, and of placing the former on a level of legal and social inferiority with respect to the latter. However, the ghetto was welcome to some Jews who thought that its walls served also to protect the small Jewish community from the possible attacks of Christian mobs and from the drain which must follow from assimilation to the majority, at the same time enabling special religious customs to be observed without interference[1].