Images of crime in the big apple

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The US National Endowment for the Humanities has announced a $125,000 for the digitization of thirty thousand photographs from the New York City Police Archives of crime scenes photographs.  The images cover the period from 1914 – 1975 and digitization begins in July after which they will become available on the web.

Remarkably many of these photographs were taken with 8 X 10 tripod mounted cameras.  The photographer typically having his service revolver ready in case the situation got dicey.  Whereas today police investigators can take literally hundreds of digital pictures with abandon, the large format demanded an economy of precision and choice.  And these images typically have that crisp hard perfection of the black and white craft.

Many of them are certain to bring back memories, such as an image of students at Columbia University scaling the police barricades during the antiwar demonstrations in April of 1968.   Others offer a more “the way we were” time machine feeling, such as a 1927 photograph of a policeman in a Brooklyn apartment examining two illicit stills for the production of bootleg.

In their book “Capturing the Light,” Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport describe the origins of forensic photography.  It was foreseen by Fox Talbot and first practiced very early on. The Belgian police may have been the first to experiment with photographing criminals in 1843-44.  Significantly, in 1855 Colonel Gilbert Hogg, Chief Constable in Wolverhampton, discovered among the abandonend belongings of con-artist Alice Grey found a daguerreotype.  He took this to Oscar Rejlander who made twenty calotype copies, which were then circulated around the country and led to Grey’s arrest and successful prosecution. It is certainly a story worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

It is a curious fact that the purposeful photography of one generation can become the art of another. Art relates us to a common humanity, to history, and the mythic.  Events, once news, have a way of becoming defining legend as the clarity of retrospection defines them in terms of greater social movements.  And it is through that process that the metamorphosis of the photograph occurs.  In the same way we desperate to look back. A keepsake photograph: a daguerreotype, calotype, albumin, or tin-type, of a century or more ago, becomes something precious to us.  We need to connect.

 

 

The wink

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Figure 1 - The Wink, IPhone photograph (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The Wink, IPhone photograph (c) DE Wolf 2015.

On my Saturday morning walk at the mall I encountered this woman, not quite real.  She was reclining on a furry chair and was ready to wink at all passersby.  I admired her friendly gaze and carmine lipstick that was ever so perfectly applied, as if printed on fabric. Hmm…

Troglodyte

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Figure 1 - The Troglodyte, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The Troglodyte,IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

A troglodyte is  a cave dweller, one who lives in a cave.  But the word has come to take on further and more sinister meanings.  The troglodyte is one who spends his days half-human toiling beneath the Earth.  So much for the happy seven dwarfs.  But more sinister still are the troglodyte Morlocks in H. G. Wells’ Time Machine.  These creatures, descended from humans in the year AD 802,701, live underground, tend machinery, and provide, clothing, and infrastructure for the childlike race of Eloi. Sinister? Well, yes.  The Morlocks eat the Eloi for food.  Shutter.

It was with these thoughts that I like Orpheus descended yesterday into the cave that we refer to as the mall parking garage.  I was intrigued by an intense and eery light that illuminated a foam covered joist with harsh contrast.  I looked up and there it was – not quite human, a specter, Morlock, or troglodyte.  I could not be certain but did manage to take his photograph (Figure 1).

Kathmandu street art

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I was struck yesterday by a series of truly stunning “Street Art” or graffiti photographs by in Kathmandu by BBC photographer  Richard Fenton-Smith. As in America graffiti of this sort is officially illegal and is a fairly recent phenomenon on Nepal’s capital city. Lovers of Keith Haring are sure to be delighted by these images, which wonderfully combine the modern with the traditionally mythic.  Consider for instance this image of the Hindu Cyclops deity Bishnu reclining with his IPhone by Deadline or the deity Bhairava, Lord of Destruction, with his own can of spray painting, this a collaborative effort Sadhux, Deadline, and #H11325.

This kind of art, photographs of paintings, raises the significant issue of which is the art, the painting or the photograph.  I believe that the answer is both.  The photograph, drawn obviously by color and form, chooses the details to concentrate on and chose the context in which to take the photograph, dramatically, for instance, in this image which juxtaposes street art with street dog.  The photograph in this case is derivative art, a reinterpretation of the original theme. And besides we have to be grateful to Mr. Fenton-Smith because otherwise most of us would never have seen these images.

Reassuring moments in physics #1 – it’s alive, mini-eskers in the melting ice

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A few days ago I talked briefly about thermal vortexes forming domains in coffee cups. People may think that I’m crazy, but for me there is something very reassuring about physical phenomena in everyday life.  You see something strange, something really cool, and then you recognize the fundamental science behind it.  That is very cathartic.  All is right with the universe and Newton’s equations.  Often it is cool enough to warrant a few photographs.

Today I was out for a walk, looking down, and I suddenly saw these little shadows appearing and scooting under the melting ice.  It was really neat, and I realized that what I was looking at were little pools of water collecting and then looking oh so like living things. Yet it isn’t magic, just driven on by a combination of gravity and surface tension.  There were visions adncing through my head of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park seductively explaining Chaos Theory to Laura Dern.

So I pulled out my ever ready IPhone 6 and took a little movie of the phenomenon for you.  How’s that for high tech?  Some of you may recognize that this is not all that dissimilar from what are referred to as glacial eskers in geology.  These are rivers or streams that form under glacial ice as it melts and they leave behind gigantic trails of debris. They are common features of the New England landscape, which once was buried under a mile thick blanket of snow and ice.  I guess that this puts this years snowfall record in a different light.

The white rose

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A year ago this February I posted about the discovery of the remains of Richard III.  It was so remarkable that I allowed myself a little deviation from photography.  Richard’s death market the end thirty year long War of the Roses, and while Shakespeare was not so kind to Richard history has been taking a turn in his favor.  Well this week we get a whole new set of photographs that I never expected to ever see. Knights “in shining armour” standing guard at the funeral procession (Sofia Bouzidi for Cater News) and perhaps most touching of all is a photograph by Will Johnston showing showing Emma Chamberlein of the First Aylestone Brownies placing Richard’s crown upon his casket.  20,000 people have viewed Richard’s casket at Leicester Cathedral, and he is to be re-interred today.

Richard III’s DNA was identified based upon the DNA of  Michael Ibsen, a Canadian-born cabinet-maker from Paddington in London, Ibsen is a descendant of Richard III’s sister Anne.  In a tender twist, Mr. Ibsen was chosen to construct Richard’s coffin (Suzanne Plunket fro Reuters).

Perhaps this burial of Englands last Plantagenet king represents an unexpected but final conclusion of the War of the Roses.

“Prick not your finger as you pluck it off

Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red

And fall on my side so, against your will.”

William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, Act 2, Scene 4

Alexei Leonov

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Figure 1 - Video image from NASA of the first space walk by Soviet Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on March 18, 1965.

Figure 1 – Video image from NASA of the first space walk by Soviet Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on March 18, 1965.

We keep having these fifty year anniversaries, always documented with wonderful black and white photographs.  Figure 1 is from NASA and is a photograph from a television image of Alexei Leonov who on March 18, 1965 srepped out of his Voskhod 2 capsule to be the first human to walk in space. Connected to the spaceship with a 5.35 m tether Leonov was outside the spacecraft for 12 minutes and nine seconds. As he tried to return to the safety of his capsule he discovered that his spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could fit through the airlock. He was forced to dangerously release a valve in the suit to release some of the air. This is act is defining of the right stuff. At 80 Leonov is the last survivor of the five cosmonauts in the Voskhod program.

Ruskin daguerreotypes

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Figure 1 -= Daquerreotype by John Ruskin and John Hobbs of Venice, c 1851. In the public domain because of its age.

Figure 1 -= Daquerreotype by John Ruskin and John Hobbs of Venice, c 1851. In the public domain because of its age.

I was excited today to learn that famed Anitquarian Bookseller Bernard Quaritch is to publish a set of daguerreotypes, “Carrying Off the Palaces” owned and many taken by the great 19th century art critic and champion of the pre-Raphaeliltes, John Ruskin (1819-1900).  Much of this work was a collaboration between Ruskin and his valet, John Hobbs. These were purchased by collectors Ken and Jenny Jacobson for£75,000 in 2006. The images for the most part were taken in Italy, France and Switzerland around 1850.

Most of the daguerreotypes that we see are portraits and subjects like landscapes and architectural details relatively rare.  In that regard many of these images are unique and in the hand of a master like Ruskin quite stunning. Ruskin was the leading English Victorian Era art critic, and as such he helped define much of what we now see as “Victorian art and sensibilities.”  But he was much more: an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist, and now revealed to have been an accomplished daguerreotypist.

Today executing a daguerreotype seems difficult and fraught with danger.  But at the time it was embraced and mastered by many Victorians.  Such was the excitement about the process and about the concept that one could “capture the light.” As we have discussed there is something truly unique and magical about the daguerreotype, an amazing level of detail and the “magical” fact that as you approach one and move your head directly over the image it disappears and is replaced with a shiny mirror.  The discovery of Ruskin and Hobbs’ work represents a major development in our understanding of the development of photography, which after all is much more than a set of scientific discoveries, but really a redefining moment in the history of mankind.

The Orange Hat

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Figure 1 - The Orange Hat, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Figure 1 – The Orange Hat, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I recently upgraded my cell phone to an IPhone 6 and with that comes the “better” camera than the 4S. I have a love of IPhone photography.  You absolutely have your camera with you at all times, and it can be counted upon to give a reasonable image as long as the light is in the normal range.  Also, it enables you to step back into a less serious side of photography.  Figure 1 is my latest venture in this arena, “The Orange Hat.”  I have nothing profound to say about it.  Orange Hat was fun to take, no fuss no muss, and it was fun to work-up.

My mind does however, have a tendency to literary allusion.  I am forever making weird associations and this is not exception.  So I am reminded of a poem by Robert Burns (1759-1796) entitled “To a Louse.”  Well, you know lady’s hat and all. It seems that one Sunday he was sitting behind a young lady in church when he noticed a louse roaming through the bows and ribbons of her bonnet.  It was a more common thing in those days – both bonnets and lice.  It led to one of the most famous of Burns’ quotes “Oh would some Power with vision teach us to see ourselves as others see us!”  Here is the last verse in both eighteenth century Scottish and modern English:

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us                 
To see oursels as ithers see us!                        
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,                 
An’ foolish notion:                                           
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,           
An’ ev’n devotion! ”       

“O would some Power with vision teach us  
To see ourselves as others see us!
 It would from many a blunder free us,
 And foolish notions: 
What airs in dress and carriage would leave us,
And even devotion!”