Author Archives: AQLMWolf@gmail.com

Compromising photographs

Posted on by

While we certainly have more significant issues to worry about, we were diverted Labor Day Monday morning by the revelation that hackers had hacked the Cloud and retrieved deleted naked photographs, real and faked of several actresses and models. Hmm! I suspect that there will be much more to this in the end. And also why would people take and store photographs of themselves in compromising positions? Well really it is a right in a free society.

And I think that there is a simple and profound lesson that goes to the heart of the evil side of the internet and social media. Yes, as with anything created by humans, there is both a positive and an evil side.

We may begin our search for the evil side with the story of Lady Godiva, before she became a chocolate, and the “Peeping Tom.”  It seems that Mrs. Godiva, or as legend goes, begged her husband, ruler of the local kingdom to reduce the taxes on the suffering people.  he agrees provided she will ride naked across town.  The lady in question it seems is able to cover her more private regions with her long tresses of golden hair.  Everyone stays indoors and doesn’t look except for this voyeur, named Tom, who peers through a hole at the Lady.  He is struck blind.  This latter point is significant.  I mean so much for “blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy.” Ironically Godiva’s husband was Leofric, Earl of Mercia.

So I don’t think the Godiva story really relates.The point is not fear of reprisal but civilized action. And to this point, to me this current situation relates to certain private family letters by John Adams to his wife Abigail (July 24, 1775) then attending the Congressional Congress that eventually wrote the Declaration of Independence, in which Adams derogatorily expresses his impatience with certain members of the congress.

The two events may seem unrelated; but the point is this that gentlemen (gentle-people, people with class) do not read the private mail of other gentlemen. There is an implicit rule, a social contract, for members who value a free society and its free interchange and one that should be followed by people who wish to use the internet in an unhurt-full fashion. The term free society is key here. It is not an obligation it is civilized contract. While we probably cannot stop abuse of the internet and abuse of social media, we do not have to look at the garbage, to sneer, chuckle, or chortle at it. And this is also true of stating and restating political untruths over and over again until the seem real solely by repetition.  This is not ideal moralizing. Who is ultimately denigrated when one seeks out this kind of image?

East Indiaman, Friendship

Posted on by
Figure 1 -"Dory, Salem, MA." (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 -“Dory, Salem, MA.” (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I wanted to post this morning another image that I took at the National Maritime Historic Site in Salem, MA on Sunday.  They have a beautiful reconstruction of an East Indiaman, Friendship that I was photographing.  It is easy to lose yourself in the beauty of the rigging and the masthead.  But I often find that the best photographs are in the details and not where you expect them to be, but more often at different angles and from behind.  This picture I took from as close to water level as possible, by descending the boat launch until my feet were just short of in the water, where I was crunching the dried poppers on the cobblestones. I was interested not in the ship itself but in the dory and the ladder.

This photograph for me is all about composition – like an etude.  I spent a good deal of time composing it. And was happy when the necessary image cropping proved to be minimal.  The goal was to capture the stillness, intensity, and high contrast of a warm summer’s day, where the light was so strong that it made you squint. There was a strong breeze, seen here as the glistening ripples on an otherwise calm surface.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 109 mm, ISO 800, Aperture-Priority AE at 1/125th sec at F/16.0 with no exposure compensation.

 

E pluribus unum

Posted on by
Figure 1 -"E pluribus unum, Salem, MA." (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 -“E pluribus unum, Salem, MA.” (c) DE Wolf 2014.

It is, friends, the official end of summer – whatever that means.  New England photographers prepare first for the gorgeous light of September and then for the glory season of autumn.  I will admit to being just a bit psyched.  That’s psyched not psycho!  So it seemed pretty fitting to seek out the sea today.  To touch the Atlantic one more time at least before the winter. We went up to Salem Massachusetts to the National Maritime Historic Site and to the Peabody Essex Museum to see, before it closes the exhibit “J. M. W. Turner and the Sea.”

It was an amazing day, fist weather-wise.  But then I found myself having lunch in the tap room of the Hawthorne Hotel and I realized that almost fifty years ago to the day, August 1964, I had dinner there with my parents.  It is funny how the time machine of life goes.  And I am always amused to read the wall exhibits at the Inn about the shooting of an episode of the television series “Bewitched” there in 1970.  For how much longer will the fading collective mind of a generation remember that television series?

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) was born in Salem, MA, then a teeming seaport and the capital of the “China Trade.”  The “House of Seven Gables” is preserved as is the “The Customs House,” were Hawthorne actually worked.  There is a magnificent gilded American Eagle atop the Customs House a three-dimensional variant of The Seal of the United States, “E pluribus unum” – “Out of the many, one.”   I took a few photographs of the eagle, but the distance is trying.  I found a smaller replica at the National Parks Service’s Vistor’s Center, got down on the floor to get the angle that I wanted, and used my 70 to 200 mm lens at 91 mm from a few feet away to achieve the in the eagle’s face off center look that I wanted.  Since the light was low, I shot with an ISO of 3200.  I don’t find that too grainy in the digital world, and it enabled me to use 1/80th sec (approximately 1/focal length) necessary because the lens is not image stabilized. Note the catch-light in the eagle’s eye.  It is not added and gives a real-life sense to the bird.  I got home and was delighted to find that I could achieve exactly the tone and mood that I wanted.

Canon T2i with  EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens hand-held at 91 mm, ISO 3200, Aperture-Priority AE, 1/80th sec at f/5.6 with no exposure compensation.

Burning the Library at Alexandria

Posted on by
Figure 1 - An exhibit case in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien where artist models enhance traditional fossils. From the Wikimedia Commons and the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, uploaded by laika ac, under creatve commons attribution license.

Figure 1 – An exhibit case in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien where artist models enhance traditional fossils. From the Wikimedia Commons and the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, uploaded by laika ac, under creative commons attribution license.

I have been a bit more circumspect about my short tirade yesterday concerning museum exhibits that aren’t museum exhibits, specifically not genuine photographs but merely copies of photographs.  Grrr!

It all began this last spring when my wife and I visited the “Old Slave Mart Museum” in Charleston.  It is a terribly important site of infamy to preserve, but the fact is that it is a historic site.  They have almost no artifacts, so they cover the walls with posters of facts, pictures, and first hand accounts.  Is that good or bad?  Whatever it is, it is not really a museum.  And the problem is that such material can be much better presented on a website, or a Ken Burns documentary.

In actuality, the “Old Slave Mart” is hardly the beginning.  There is a huge history of natural history museums having copies of, for instance, dinosaur skeletons; and art museums having copies of great statues.  Natural history museums, indeed all museums, serve multipurposes, and one of their major purposes is to provide students of natural history with specimen examples to see.  Similarly when it comes to sculpture, you might argue that a true copy provides the art student with the ability to really take in a three-dimensional object.

But photographs of photographs? And would you feel somehow cheated if your favorite art museum had nothing but copies?  Why not forget the galleries altogether and go straight to the gift shop and look at the postcards?

What is of course going on is that the world is changing.  No surprise! We are in the middle of a technological revolution, where the only thing stopping libraries from going totally digital is copyright laws.   Oh no, oh no, some will scream.  I need a tangible, physical book to touch and to read.  Listen I like, no love, books as much as anyone.  But there are very few cases where seeing an original carbon copy is justifies. It’s not even environmentally PC. Times they are a changin’; so get over it.

So I think that really what we are observing is the process of redefinition that libraries and museums are undergoing.  It is a metamorphosis.  As for thinly disguised photographs of photographs, the issues, but not the answers, are clear.  I look at historic images every day, and I benefit hugely from the sage commentary that accompanies these high-resolution images on the web.  Museums are not websites.  Wall space is expensive real-estate.  Certainly, there are people who would not visit the websites that I frequent, who will not watch television documentaries (for as long as television lasts), people who would not know important historical stories were it not for the museum “exhibit.”

“The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the
world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames…. What is burning is the memory of mankind.”
George Bernard Shaw, “Caesar and Cleopatra” 1898

The Last Muster Project

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Portrait before 1867 of Lemuel Cook the last official veteran of the American Revolution. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Portrait before 1867 of Lemuel Cook the last official veteran of the American Revolution. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Yesterday’s post about Alonzo Cushing was fresh in my mind, when I went this morning to the “Concord Museum” to see a special exhibit tracing the events of April 18 to 19, 1775 hour by hour. These were the events that sparked the American Revolution.  And I was not expecting photographs because of age.  But as it turns out there was another exhibit called “The Last Muster” and this was only photographs, photographs of the few veterans of the American Revolution who managed to live to see the invention of photography and to be themselves photographed.

Oh,and before I move on, allow me one major peeve.  I object to the current trend in museums not to show original objects.  We don’t see the original photographs; but more often than not barely disguised copies of the originals.  I saw this in Charleston as well. Boo!!!!

This exhibit relates to “The Last Muster Project” and book by a similar name, by photodetective Maureen Taylor.  Taylor has done an amazing job of searching out photographs of “the survivors.”  Still, who actually was the last man out is a matter of some controversy.  It all depends on what you mean. Last proven veteran? Last pensioner? Are drummer boys acceptable?  You know what, it really doesn’t matter; the effect of all of the images on our psyches is the same. So I am not going to enter the fray here and I have sided with the United States Governement and included as Figure 1 a portrait taken before 1867 of Lemuel Cook (1759-1866). Cook was  the last official veteran of the American Revolutionary War, who enlisted in the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, Continental Army.  To me this is really amazing.

And the reason that it is so amazing is, as always, that it connects us across time and as a nation.  Indeed, as a generation dies out unless we record their stories, or in this case photograph them, we loose their first hand experience.  The momentous event becomes by degrees just a bit more abstract and impersonal.  We see that now as we rapidly lose the “Greatest Generation,” the World War II warriors.

Indeed, in 1864 the Rev. Elias Brewster Hillard a congregationalist minister from Connecticut set out desperately to document these “Last Men” before they died out.  He published his photographs and stories in “The Last Men of the Revolution (1864).”  The date is important, because at the time the nation was embroiled in a civil war that put at jeopardy what these men set out to accomplishe.  Indeed, I would argue that the American Civil War as a fight for liberty was the American Revolution, part II. This book was reprinted by Barre Publishers in 1968.  Hillard recognized the importance of this task of preservation.  Ms. Taylor, using modern techniques set out with her Last Muster Project to discover more of these memorable men and women.  Her book documents the lives of seventy of these individuals.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize how often I am drawn back to the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA as a place of beauty and history.  When my son was younger he used to march in a band that crossed that bridge on Patriots Day commemorating what happened there.  I would stand with the other parents and revelers on the other side of the bridge, where the British Regulars came to cross, and it struck me on many a cold and windy April morning how insanely brave these framers and tradesmen were to stand and defend that spot against the mightiest army in the world.

 

Theodore Roosevelt in Color

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The Roosevelt Family, colorized Pach Brothers Postcard. From the Wikimedia Commons, upload by Infrogmation and in the public domain. because of its age.

Figure 1 – The Roosevelt Family in 1903, colorized Pach Brothers Postcard. From the Wikimedia Commons, upload by Infrogmation and in the public domain. because of its age.

Our discussion yesterday about the Panama Canal got me thinking about whether there were any autochromes or color photographs of Theodore Roosevelt. So after a few Google, Bing, and Wiki searches I came to the conclusion that yes there were. The most definitively autochrome of the Roosevelt images is a rather unflattering photograph of Teddy holding an American flag from 1907 from the George Eastman House. There is also, by the way and as an aside, an absolutely gorgeous autochrome of our old friend Mr. Samuel Clemens taken in 1908 by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Figure 2 - "Wiggle" stereo image by Underwood and Underwood of Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir in the Yosemite Valley. From the Library of Congress through the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – “Wiggle” stereo image by Underwood and Underwood of Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir in the Yosemite Valley in 1903. From the Library of Congress through the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

There are a fair number of color pictures of Theodore Roosevelt. I wanted to include one of the more spectacular of these as Figure 1. It was taken by the Pach Brothers in 1903 and shows the entire Roosevelt Family. Pres. and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seated on lawn, surrounded by their family; 1903. From left to right: Quentin, Theodore Sr., Theodore Jr., Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel. This is actually a contemporary colorized postcard version of a really gorgeous black and white image that is in the United States Library of Congress. I vote for the black and white as most beautiful. But what I wanted to point out here was the thirst that people had at the time for colored photographs. There was a huge demand for color in images and both the highly talented photographic colorists and the autochrome process filled this need. Innovation is ever driven by two factors: public demand and the belief that if we got clever something just might be doable. Note, that is the belief not the fact that something is doable that gets it accomplished.

Figure 3 - "Princess Alice" in 1903. Colorized photograph by . From the Library of Congress and the Wikimedia Commons. In the public domai because of its age.

Figure 3 – “Princess Alice” in 1902. Colorized photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. From the Library of Congress and the Wikimedia Commons. In the public domain because of its age.

Roosevelt, of course, live just as photography was moving into color and as moving pictures were appearing. There are, in fact, several film clips of the President. There is also a wonderful Underwood and Underwood stereo pair showing Roosevelt with John Muir in the Yosemite Valley from 1903 (Figure 2). Click on this image to “animate” the 3D effect. When Roosevelt woke up in the morning and his sleeping bag was covered with snow he exclaimed: “This is bully!”

Finally, I’d like to share as Figure 3 one more colorized image. This is of his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980). It is a coloration of a black and white portrait made in 1902 by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Alice was one of the great beauties of her day. She was outspoken and her antics led to her being fondly dubbed as “Princes Alice” by the public. When asked why he couldn’t better control his daughter, Roosevelt famously said “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

I remember back in the late seventies reading an article about Alice Roosevelt Longworth who then lived in a house near DuPont Circle in Washington, DC.  This was was covered in poison ivy. She was said to have a pillow on her settee that read “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.“

Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Children on a spiral staircase,” Favorite Photographs 2103, #5

Posted on by

It has been brought to my attention by photographer Vincenzo Vitale  that I made an error in attribution in my December 26, 2014 post.  The photograph “Children on a Spiral Staircase” was not taken by Cartier-Besson, but by his second wife photographer Martine Franck. (1938 –  2012). She was a well-known Belgian documentary and portrait photographer and like Cartier-Besson a member of Magnum Photos for over 32 years. She was also co-founder and president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. It is, of course, embarrassing, and I am very grateful to Mr. Vitale for bringing this to my attention.

If you search the web you will find this photograph attributed to Cartier-Besson, all over the place.  That is not a defense but illustrative of just how pervasive the internet can be in diseminating incorrect information. This is why I have gone back to the original posting and added this correction.  It points very clearly to the need to be vigilant of the quality of information that we get from the web.  Our cell phones are ever with us and whenever a question arises we look it up instantly, but are often oblivious to veracity.

In the present case, I believe that it is very important that this beautifully composed and crafted photograph be properly attributed, especially as it draws our attention back to Ms. Franck’s wonderful work. It seems appropriate to quote Martine Franck on photography:

“A photograph isn’t necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It’s more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can’t anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.”
What follows is the original and uncorrected post.

 

Instead of writing my blog this morning, I find myself endlessly searching the prolific work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004).  Cartier-Bresson is often credited with the “invention” of street photography and he was a founding member of Magnum.  Often associated with Cartier-Bresson is the phrase “the decisive moment.”  It is setting up your camera and then waiting patiently for that moment when the photograph is defined and ready to be snapped with a single press of the (Leica) shutter.  So much of his work is in our collective consciousness as defining the twentieth century – and defining the meaning of “candid photography.” To pause for a few moments in the heart of Cartier-Bressons work is to learn to understand the meaning of phorography.

The image that I have chosen for today’s “Favorite Photographs, 2013” is Cartier-Bresson’s classic and well composed image of children on a spiral staircase.  I believe, but am not sure, that this picture was taken in 1932.  Perhaps a reader can inform me of the correct date and whether it has a title that Cartier-Bresson used.

Cartier-Bresson was a master at using lines, such as the spiral, in defining his pictures.  And even in as static a subject matter as children peering down from a staircase, the spiral creates dynamics.  But of course, with spirals there is something more.  This is, of course, the “Golden Proportion,” the perfect division of a rectangle from an aesthetic point of view, and how by repeatedly dividing progressive rectangles by the “Golden Proportion” one obtains the Fibonacci spiral.  This spiral occurs repeatedly in nature: in, for instance in the shell of the chambered nautilus and the horn of the ram.  It creates a sense of natural perfection.  This is the effect that Cartier-Bresson seeks here. He does not center his spiral at the center of the image but rather so as to divide the image by the Golden Proportion. The position is pretty much perfect* and you wouldn’t really have it any other way.  I suppose that it is best stated in Cartier-Bresson’s own words:

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life.”

* I have measured this approximately.  If you divide the vertical length of the image by the longer distance between the center of the spiral and the top of the image, you get a ratio of ~1.68, which is close enough for government work to the Golden Proportion of 1.62.  The actual size of the photograph is 1.5, which, of course bows to the artistic approximation of the Golden Proportion namely the Golden Rule of Thirds.

Early color photography – the autochrome process

Posted on by
AdditiveColor.svg

Figure 1 – The additive color wheel from the wikicommons b Mike Horvath New version by jacobolus and released to the public domain.

Yesterday we discussed the fact that color photography first became practical with the introduction of the Autochrome process in 1907.  Autochrome was patented by brothers Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas and Louis Jean Lumière  in 1903,  It was the dominant form of color photography until the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935.  As many photographers lament, Kodachrome succumbed to the commercial onslaught of digital photography and was withdrawn from the market in 2010.  Kodachrome had a very unique soft pastel quality.  I think that you will agree, after seeing some Autochrome images here, that Autochrome also had its own unique appearance and aesthetic quality.

Color Receptors Human Eye

Figure 2 – The spectral sensitivity of the S, L, and M type cones in the human eye. Image from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Autochrome was an additive process (see Figure 1).    The human eye has three types of color receptors, S, M, and L cone types, each with its own spectral sensitivity, as shown in Figure 2. .  Color vision, in its essence, comes from the relative excitation of the these three types of photoreceptor cells.In additive color a set of primary colors, usually red, green, and blue is used for illumination.   You might imagine, for instance, that the image of Figure 1 was created with three slide projectors, projecting a red, a green, and a blue circle respectively.  Where they all mix equally you get white.  Essentially, any color can be achieved by varying the proportions of these three primary colors.

Lumiere

Figure 3 – A closeup of the potato starch particles in an Autochrome from the Wkicommons and in the public domain

Your eye will respond accordingly.  What does that mean?  It means that the different cone types respond according to the responses shown in Figure 2.  These responses are then interpreted by the brain to perceive color.  This is what we mean by physiological optics.  It’s not just a question of the laws of optics.  It’s the laws of optics interpreted by the eye and the brain.  Some will recall Plato’s admonition against trusting the perception of our senses in seeking truth about the universe (see for instance, Richard Tarnas, “The Passion of the Western Mind“).

This kind of additive color process is exactly how a modern LED monitor works.  There are three light emitting diodes that make up a pixel.  Each with its own color spectrum.  We tend to take our technology for granted, which we really shouldn’t do.  Think about how minutely small these diodes need to be, how perfectly the thousands of them must be assembled to create a monitor, and finally recognize that there is so little room for error.  You wouldn’t accept a monitor with many bad pixels.  All of this is why new technologies are so expensive initially.

Taj_Mahal_1921

Figure 4 – The Taj Mahal an Autochrome taken by Helen Messinger Murdoch for the National Geographic Magazine, March 1921 from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

The reason that I am blithering on about how marvelous our digital technology is, is that I now want you to image that it is over a hundred years ago.  The only tools that you have are analogue ones.  But you want to do the same thing.  You want to create a minute color pixel matrix.  How did the Lumiere brothers do it?  They used potato starch.  As a modern technology inventor, I stand in total and complete awe of them.

Nieuport_17_C.1

Figure 5 -n Autochrome of a Nieuport 23 C.1 fighter plane 1917 from the Wikicommons and in the public domain

The Autochrome process works as follows.  An adhesive layer was coated onto a glass plate. Potato starch grains graded to 5 to 10 um where attached to this layer.  The starch grains were dyed with either red orange, green, or blue violet dye (an unusual color wheel). Gaps between the grains were filled with lamp black (essentially soot). A closeup of this “pixel” pattern is shown in Figure 3.   Note that if we are dealing with a two inch by two inch plate, this density corresponds to about a 5.3 MPz image – pretty impressive for 1907.  This fragile layer was coated with a shellac and then overlain with a conventional silver halide gelatin emulsion.  Because of the high sensitivity of these emulsion to UV light from the sun, a yellow orange filter needed to be placed in front of the camera lens when taking a photograph to block-out these rays.

Arnold_Genthe-California_golden_poppies,_Autochrome

Figure 6 – California Golden Poppies an Autochrome taken between 1907 and 1911 by Arnold Genthe in the LOC from Wikicommons and in the public domain

When a photograph was taken the colored potato starch grains acted as minute filters.  The silver halide emulsion was developed by conventional means and then reversed to a positive by what is effectively a bleaching process.  Since the colored starch matrix remains intact, when the positive image (say illuminated from behind) will become colored as light passes back through the filter matrix.

This process very successfully creates color images, which certainly accounted for its popularity during the three decades of its dominance.  It should also be noted that towards the end of its commercial span roll film versions were also successfully introduced. Several examples of beautiful Autochromes are shown in Figures 4 to 6.