Photography with Joe

  The Long Walk Home by Joe (E. Scholz) A bridge is one of humanity's oldest promises: that separation can be defeated. Here the promise extends into a forest so dense it begins to resemble thought itself. The two figures become less important than the act of moving forward. They are explorers inside a green labyrinth, disappearing toward a destination concealed by perspective. The photograph asks a simple question: is the journey still a journey when the path has already been drawn Of my recent recent images, this one is the opposite of the dark romantic image of Izzath and Carmen. That photograph was about intimacy hidden within shadow. This photograph is about possibility revealed through space. One is a memory. This is an invitation. https://joe-average123.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-long-walk-home-by-joe-e-scholz.html

  Hall, Conceptual Photography, and the Difference Between Constructing Meaning vs Discovering It I was told about a year ago that my photography shared similarities with Hall’s work. At first, I resisted the comparison a little. Not because it was insulting — quite the opposite — but because photographic comparisons are often too broad to mean much. Saying two photographers are “conceptual” can sometimes feel like saying both use small cameras. Technically true, but not especially revealing. Still, the comparison stayed in my mind because there is overlap there, even if the routes we take are very different. Hall’s work, to me, feels more stage-driven. More constructed. There is an intentional arrangement of symbolic elements, a deliberate shaping of the emotional field of the image. The photograph becomes a kind of theatre. Meaning is designed into the frame. My work tends to move in another direction. More documentary. More observational. Less interested in constructing symboli...

   Kamibushi — Core Style Elements and Philosophical Framework Foundational Definition Kamibushi is a photographic philosophy centered on emotional residue, perceptual isolation, spatial psychology, and quiet contemporary existence. It focuses less on spectacle and more on the subtle emotional architectures embedded within ordinary public life. Rather than dramatizing reality, Kamibushi extracts metaphysical and emotional meaning from transitional spaces, restrained human gestures, environmental scale, and unresolved emotional states. The style operates through: emotional immediacy philosophical afterimage restraint ambiguity environmental emotional structure modern public solitude liminality spatial consciousness Kamibushi attempts to create images that are felt first and intellectually understood second. Core Philosophical Principles Recognition Before Interpretation One of the central operational principles of Kamibushi: the viewer should emotionally recognize the im...

  FIFA A TORONTO NIGHMARE by Ed Scholz  On paper, it is simple enough: the world’s biggest football tournament arrives in Canada, shared across three nations, promising accessibility, global unity, and civic pride. In practice, it increasingly resembles something rather different — a carefully tiered system of access in which the experience of “being there” depends less on passion for the game than on one’s willingness to absorb what can only be described as escalating financial astonishment. Let us begin with the official structure, because it is here that the story starts to fracture. When FIFA first opened ticket sales, it introduced a tiered pricing system that already placed the event far outside the reach of the casual supporter. Category 4 tickets — the supposed entry point — were priced at roughly $1,300 CAD . Category 3, 2, and 1 climbed steadily from there, with most mid-tier seats falling somewhere between $1,500 and $2,500 CAD , while premium Category 1 ...

 Friday the 13th BAD LUCK DAY Friday the 13th  Scholz and Zeno and Wallace Friday the 13th, that date whose superstitious reputation is both absurd and compulsively compelling (or so I tell myself as I watch a snowstorm, small and unheroic but sufficient to make every pedestrian regret having emerged), began, as is typical, with the residue of a fractured sleep—the kind where the mind doesn’t quite leave the dream, doesn’t quite register the morning, and yet somehow is simultaneously alert to every minor failing of the world outside. The air was colder than yesterday, which was mild, reminding me that temperature can itself be a petty adversary, and the snow—enough to inconvenience but not enough to glorify—settled over the city like a layer of passive-aggressive criticism. I left the house around ten, intending to attend a medical appointment, which, like minor wars or particularly tedious court cases, is best approached with low expectations, and I was not disappointed: the ...

 Cleo Writes What the image is doing, aesthetically This portrait isn’t meant to read as a literal face—it's an impression , a constructed memory. The extreme softening, mosaic-like blur, and halftone texture give it the feel of a magazine recovered from a past decade, scanned, reprinted, and carried through time. The darkness encroaching on the edges creates a theatrical chiaroscuro, almost like the subject is emerging from a projection rather than a room. The colour choices—amber skin tones fading into violet text—evoke retro print culture: late-90s fashion editorials, early-2000s digital art experiments, and even older Japanese pop-magazine aesthetics. That ties directly to your ongoing intertextual practice of blending Western portraiture with East Asian typographic signatures. About the figure She’s rendered too abstractly to identify, which works in your favour: anonymity keeps the energy symbolic rather than biographical. She becomes an archetype, a character of mood rathe...

  August 2025 ------------------------------------------''' Video link https://youtu.be/n0LJjpKs89Q Comix Artists Interview Michael Del Mundo raw Michael Del Mundo (sometimes stylized Mike Del Mundo) is a Filipino-Canadian comic book artist and cover illustrator. Known for his surreal, painterly style, he’s done major Batman, Thor, Avengers, and Spider-Man covers for Marvel and DC. In 2025, he appeared at Fan Expo Canada (Toronto) and participated in artist interviews and panels — some clips circulate under hashtags like #Marvel #Interview #Scholx #GreatGuyAAA #GreatGuyTV, He’s won multiple Eisner nominations, particularly for his work on Avengers, Weirdworld, and Elektra. He often collaborates with writer Jason Aaron and colorist Marco D’Alfonso (another Toronto-based artist). #michealDelmundo

It seems you have to go quite far forward in time before the concept of the Mongols as a “warrior race” really appears. For hundreds of years, biology and culture were treated as clearly separate, even in relatively unenlightened eras. There are some general references in popular works, but in most cases “race” referred to cultural traits, since “race” and ethnic heritage were once synonymous. For example, The Queenslander (Brisbane), 19 June 1897, described: “Casan was a born soldier, … and, like all his race, could endure hunger, thirst, fatigue, and cold.” Here we see a Victorian/colonial newspaper retelling a Mongol/Tartar biography in explicitly racialized terms — “like all his race” — a clear shift toward the modern biological sense of race. It’s only by the late 19th century, in the era of racial science and Social Darwinism, that “race” is reframed as biological destiny. That is the world of the Queenslander line above: still leaning on cultural stereotypes of steppe en...

.... Once upon a time, the deal was simple: You start small. You hustle. You scrape by on commercials, on bit parts, on late nights waiting tables. Those jobs were the ground floor — the space for the hungry, the unknown, the ones still chasing the dream. But now? The giants come stomping back down the staircase. Not content with the penthouses and the spotlights, they reach for the crumbs too. They take the ads, the cameos, the scraps — the very scraps they once left behind. It’s not ambition. It’s gluttony. It’s the greed of wanting every stage, every paycheck, every flicker of attention. They eat from both ends of the table — the feast and the leftovers — and leave nothing for the ones still starving. This isn’t just unfair. It’s a betrayal. The ladder was meant to be climbed — not ripped away once you’re on top. And so the newcomers wait in the shadows, staring at doors that no longer open, jobs that no longer exist, opportunities swallowed by the same people who ...

  Our Cousins, the Proto-Philosophers By Scholz It started with a television show. While watching  Humans , the sci-fi series on Amazon Prime, I was struck by a scene where synthetic beings — robots with human-like intelligence — calmly argued for their rights. Not just to move freely, but not to be  owned . Their communication was articulate, emotional, even moral. They weren’t asking for upgrades. They were asking for dignity. The scene lingered in my mind. What makes someone a person? Is it intelligence? Language? The ability to feel, or to make ethical claims? That’s when my thoughts turned not to machines, but to something far more real — our evolutionary cousins. Bonobos pressing symbols for “sad,” gorillas signing their names in mirrors, orangutans telling small lies. These aren’t imagined sci-fi futures. These are scenes from the lives of great apes. For centuries, philosophy has been framed as a distinctly human pursuit. To wonder, to reason, to ask “why” — these...

  March 6, 2025 The Global Web  In the wake of a tumultuous global landscape, the economic health of the world’s top 56 nations reveals stark contrasts between the forces of wealth, power, and vulnerability. The complexity of economic stability is no longer solely the result of internal governance; external political dynamics have become equally decisive, with consequences extending far beyond national borders. Some argue that contemporary global power is dominated by a bureaucratic elite, whose economic management often disregards the underlying complexities of governance and reality. The United States, long a beacon of economic power, now faces a debt surpassing 100% of its GDP, a burden that threatens its global financial prestige.[1] This issue, however, is not just internal; it is symptomatic of the widening divide between the U.S. and China, particularly following the trade war. The economic decoupling of these two giants ripples across the globe, disrupting supply cha...

 The show The Last of Us got me wondering: Is fungi intelligent? How can a non-intelligent life form take control of an intelligent one, even if its intelligence is low? How the Zombie Ant Fungus Works The Ophiocordyceps fungus doesn’t give precise step-by-step movement commands like a remote control. Instead, it hijacks the ant’s nervous and muscular systems, subtly manipulating behavior while allowing the ant to appear mostly normal—until the final “climb-and-bite” stage. How It Moves Without Being Detected: Preserved Locomotion – The fungus doesn’t fully disrupt motor functions; the ant continues walking in a mostly natural way, reducing suspicion from nestmates. Stealth Mode – Infected ants avoid erratic movements, making it less likely that others will detect and remove them before the fungus matures. Neural Hijacking, Not Brain Control – The fungus primarily affects muscles, not higher brain functions, allowing the ant to navigate obstacles as if making its own choices. ...

  March 15, 2025 – Saturday Save A Jew St. Patrick’s Day is around the corner—a day when people celebrate Irish heritage by drinking so much they forget where Ireland is. I went out to mark the occasion, though my mind was on other things. Namely, whether anyone was keeping track of Trump’s latest shopping list. He’s publicly said he wants Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Most people treat it like the ramblings of a man who thinks the Louisiana Purchase was a checkout option on Amazon. I figured Panama was already in the bag, bought out like a Vegas casino. Turns out, not quite. The country’s still pretending to be independent while BlackRock quietly buys up both entrances to the Panama Canal. They don’t own the canal, but once they control the gates, they can charge whatever they want to let ships through. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of Airbnb: technically, they don’t own the house, but they decide who gets to sleep there. If an AI summarized it, it’d say: Trump’s c...

  The Psychohistory of a Global Economy: Predictions and Realities In 1989, I undertook the ambitious task of applying psychohistorical equations to the global economic system, inspired by the foundational theories of Isaac Asimov. Unlike the past, where economic models focused on national or bilateral comparisons—such as Country A against Country B, or occasionally regional economic blocs—by the late 20th century, the world economy had transformed into a singular, interconnected entity. The increasing integration of financial markets, supply chains, and multinational corporations rendered traditional economic theories insufficient for understanding the true dynamics of global events. My premise was that economic and geopolitical events could no longer be analyzed in isolation but had to be understood as part of a complex, interwoven system. Using psychohistorical modeling, I was able to predict several major economic crises with striking accuracy. One of the most significant fores...