Hermits around the web – Hermitary
news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
Media site Insider offers an item titled “Intimate photos show what it’s really like to be a modern-day hermit.” Among the hermits are some familiar, some less so: Rachel Denton (UK), Masafumi Nagasaki (Japan), Barry Edgar Pilcher (Ireland), Viktor (Siberia), Sostis (Greece), Valentin Pantin, wife Ekaterina, and four children, (Russia), Yiorgos (Greece), and several others.
URL: https://www.thisisinsider.com/inside-the-lives-of-modern-day-hermits-intimate-photos-2018-12
Photographer Ricardo Ramos has posted an entry on the “Bored Panda” website titled “I Photographed A Series Featuring People Who Live In Constant Solitude.” Ramos explains that he traveled to Portugal’s Trás os Montes region,”which in English means ‘behind the mountains,’ known for villages with less than 10 inhabitants,” where he captured a series of intriguing photographic portraits. The photos have been added to a National Geographic gallery as well. Explains Ramos:
“Those little villages have mostly elderly population as young people left a long time ago in search of a better life. So many of the residents continue the same lifestyle their grandparents had for years.
Many of those villages are untouched by technology; television and cell phones are a rarity. People survive mainly from agricultural production and sheep farming. During winter, these elderly people spend days or even weeks without leaving the house because of the cold. But the greatest obstacle they have to deal with on a daily basis is loneliness.
I joined a young team of the PII project (Proximity to the Isolated Elderly) that regularly visits seniors who are living alone. The goal of this project is to ward off the loneliness of these people and improve their quality of life.
The people I’ve met have fantastic stories that I could listen to for hours.”
URL: https://www.boredpanda.com/photography-lonely-elderly-people-ricardo-ramos
The Guardian article “Storms and solitude: the literature of lighthouses” summarizes the lore of lighthouses and their enigmatic keepers: “The solitary existence of a lighthouse keeper has long captured the imagination,” the article notes, whether as adventure fiction or psychological study. Concentrates on Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Wolff, M. L. Stedman, and the nonfiction account of W. J. Lewis. Includes a photo gallery of notable lighthouses titled “Seashaken Houses,the stark loneliness of lighthouses – in pictures.”
URL (photo gallery): https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2018/oct/23/seashaken-houses-the-stark-loneliness-of-lighthouses-in-pictures
A Financial Times article announcing a London exhibition of the Japanese photographs:
Focusing on the inauspicious presence of ravens in the coastal landscapes of the photographer’s native Hokkaido, Masahisa Fukase’s dark and haunting series Solitude of Ravens (1986) is a chronicle of emptiness and obsession.
BBC offers an outstanding set of images.
The photographs were first mentioned in Hermitary in the context of the image of ravens in art, in June 2010: http://www.hermitary.com/thatch/?p=964
URL (Financial Times): http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/60991acc-d49f-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html#slide0; BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-35541661
Nidaa Barwan is a young Palestinian artist who took up solitude in order to withdraw from the horrors of war and oppression around her residence in Gaza. Taking up reading Garcia-Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude inspired her to conceive of consolidating her digital photographs into an exhibition theme titled “One Hundred Days of Solitude,” although she has maintained her solitude now for over a year, excluding only short forays from her room.
The exhibition has received attention, having been presented outside Gaza in Israel and profiled in the New York Times and by France24. Barwan structures the solitude of self as colorfully interior spaces, enriching the still-life photographs with a strong personal presence. As an artist, she asserts a protest to the world, naturally, and justifies this sentiment with a consciously constructed and maintained solitude.
URLs: http://www.nidaabadwan.com; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/world/middleeast/finding-gaza-unbearable-artist-creates-her-own-world-in-one-room.html; http://www.france24.com/en/20150512-palestinian-artist-badwan-photography-bedroom-israel-hamas
