Burning the Library at Alexandria

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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

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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.

 

Portrait of Alonzo H. Cushing

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Figure 1 - First Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing, from the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by DIREKTOR and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – First Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing, from the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by DIREKTOR and in the public domain.

We have spoken before about the nineteenth century faces that stare back at us from antique photographs. They seem to possess a haunting element of awareness. None are more haunting than the faces of soldiers from the American Civil War. You wonder just what was in store for these people. And while you might not know, what you do know is how terrible the statistically odds were and the inevitable fact that at the very least the person in the photograph would experience hell.  The tense is confusing.  Would experience? Did experience? It is the photograph itself that creates the ambiguity.

This morning I came upon the photograph of Figure 1 in the New York Times.  If the face is anonymous what do I experience in the seeing? I am are taken by the soft, handsome, youthfulness of the subject. Notice the eyes. They probably were blue. They look slightly way from us in distractedness and the catch-light is there to give the portrait life.  And the catch-light is a connecting point, because any of us would light the eyes in just this way if we were taking the image today. There is a certain jauntiness to the tie. Yes it all makes you wonder and it all brings the subject back to life.

But in this case there is no need to wonder. The image is of First Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing. Cushing was a West Point graduate and he was there at the battle, at the spot, and at the most pivotal and momentous of moments. Cushing stood his ground on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg against Pickett’s Charge 151 years ago last month. Despite mortal wounds he kept firing his canon. Cushing is credited with playing a major role in turning the tide that day, an event which arguably led to preservation of the Union.which shows West Point graduate and Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing.  It seems just a bit incomprehensible.  These were the battles of a century and a half ago and a lot has happened since, the world and America have moved on.  Yet it was important and for this bravery, Cushing was just posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Obama.

When he went off to fight, Cushing told a cousin that “I may never return…I will make a name for myself.” Now a hundred years later the promise seems both prophetic and ironic. It makes us realize all the more that everyone of these soldier images, Union and Confederate, is a silent witness to something both monumental, something beyond themselves, and at the same time something intensely personal.

It is really kind of odd the importance we attach to historic photographs of people. Read a biography and you inevitably find yourself drawn to the portraits. Somehow the visage in the photograph gives genuineness and life to the story. In this case what a horrible yet courageous story it was.

Theodore Roosevelt in Color

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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.“

The Panama Canal Centenary

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Figure 1 - The Pedro Miguel Locks of the Panama Canal photographed by Earle Harrison in color using the Autochrome Process. From the Wikimedia Commons uploaded by Mschlindwein and in the public domain because its was photographed before 1923.

Figure 1 – The Pedro Miguel Locks of the Panama Canal photographed by Earle Harrison in color using the Autochrome Process. From the Wikimedia Commons uploaded by Mschlindwein and in the public domain because its was photographed before 1923.

In addition to the centenary of the start of the First World War, this August, August 15th to be precise, marked the opening of the Panama Canal, that great dream of a “Path Between the Seas.” I have been looking at a lot of photographs of the construction of the canal, including, of course, many pictures of that larger than life and somewhat controversial figure, President Theodore Roosevelt.

Most interesting among them are the color autochromes of Earle Harrison.  Figure 1 is an example of these and you might also what to check out the link above for some more dramatic examples. The whole collection of these images was recently reissued.

I have spoken at length about the autochrome process and will, in fact, admit to be really intrigued by it. 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).  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.

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.

Like our own time, the early twentieth century was a period of huge technological advancement, posing a series of complex moral an ethical issues.  Indeed, it is all really an accelerating continuum.   And again like our own time, it was a period of great ethical hypocrisy.  World War I represented the worst that technology had to offer, highly efficient mechanized killing.  The Panama Canal represented the middle ground. There was the dream, powered by visions of huge profit, that drove men to build the canal, which was the ultimate Herculean project.  It took over thirty years to complete, and was a triumph (?) over nature both in terms of the actual digging and reinforcement and in terms of overcoming yellow fever.  The autochrome, I would argue, ever subtle, was the best.

Humans see in color, and as long as photography was confined to black and white there was something important missing. Color represents a significant dimension of reality.  Actually, as we have seen it really adds three dimensions.  And thanks to the Lumiere brothers we can look back and marvel, as if we were there for the events.  Shackleton set sail for his destiny in the Antarctic.  The Panama Canal opened. And Europe leaped head first into disaster.  All caught on camera.

A hideous cocoon

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Hmm!  It was another hideous week, and there are lots of very dark thoughts.  I came upon an unattributed picture yesterday from Reuters on the BBC that pretty much sums it all up.  It shows two men intertwined and sleeping on a kind of disgusting bridge over a railroad station in Yangon (Rangoon) Myanmar.  They are covered in mosquito netting.  The disconcerting element for me, other than the desperateness of their lives, which is a little made up story in your mind, is the red floral pattern in the netting, which make the sheet look bloodied.

A year ago I posted about E. E. McCollum’s incredible “Cocoon Series.”  They are such gorgeous images, woven to tell a tale of rebirth, emergence, and resurrection.  In the Myanmar image we have the opposite effect where netting tells a tale of desperation, crucifixion, and death.  It is a very powerful image to my eye.

Of the Charleston Chew, the Charleston, and Josephine Baker

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Figure 1 - Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston in 1926. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of expired copyright.

Figure 1 – Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston in 1926. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of expired copyright.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about “The Charleston Chew,” the question may be asked why a Boston manufactured candy would be named after Charleston, SC and not Charlestown, MA, where the USS Constitution resides.  Well the answer, perhaps obvious, is that the Charleston Chew is named after the the dance the Charleston, which was so popular at the time it was invented, if candies are invented, or introduced.

The Charleston was indeed. named for the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. It was popularized by a 1923 tune called “The Charleston” by composer/pianist James P. Johnson from the Broadway show “Runnin’ Wild.” The rest, as they say, was history.  The dance electrified and defined the decade and its generation.

There is some wonderful vintage images to share regarding the Charleston.  The first is the photograph of Figure 1 showing the incomprable Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston at the Folies Bergère, Paris, in 1926.

Figure 2 - Josephine Baker in her world famous banana costume. Photograph by Walery, French, 1863-1935, from the Wikimedia Commons (uploaded by http://www.sheldonconcerthall.org/bakerpress.asp) and in the public domain because of copyright expiration.

Figure 2 – Josephine Baker in her world famous banana costume. Photograph by Walery, French, 1863-1935, from the Wikimedia Commons (uploaded by http://www.sheldonconcerthall.org/bakerpress.asp) and in the public domain because of copyright expiration.

Wonderful image!  Baker, of course, was a the first African American superstar and a heroine of civil rights. After Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Correta Scott King asked Baker to take on the role as symbolic leader of the movement. I am also including another picture of Miss Baker in her world famous “Banana Costume.” Carmen Miranda eat your heart out!  This is not directly related to the Charleston but is really cool just the same.

I want also to include a vintage video clip with the classic Charleston Music.  But before you click on it, be careful.  It is contagious and you may start dancing.  I offer it as a tribute and remembrance of my mother, who was of that generation, and could still in the late sixties and early seventies dance a mean Charleston without losing her breath.

The Charleston Chew

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Figure 1 - Sign of the Kendall Confectionery Co, Cambridge, MA, August 19, 2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Sign of the Kendall Confectionery Co, Cambridge, MA, August 19, 2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Charleston Chew, now there’s a name from my childhood, and it wasn’t my favorite by a long shot. NECCO wafers are a totally different story – little chalky disks, of well, of chalky flavor.  And what they both have in common is that they were manufactured in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cambridge has a long history of candy making going back to 1765 when John Hannon established America’s first chocolate mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Dorchester.  A half century ago candy makers stood tall, exactly where BioTechs now dominate.  Cambridge’s Main Street was sweetly referred to as Confectioner’s Row and the tooth decay of our youth was produced: Junior Mints (my grandfather Louis always had a little box of Junior Mints waiting for me when I visited), Charleston Chews, Sugar Daddies, and NECCO wafers.

So today my photographic goal was more one of archaeology and recording.  Near my office is the faded and chipped historic sign on the façade of the Kendall Confectionery Company, which still produces and distributes candies.  I noticed yesterday that there were painters doing something to the sign.  It doesn’t look ominous, actually, maybe just cleaning it. But just to be sure I took the image of Figure 1.  There is an antique flavor to the sign, accentuated by the fonts and the almost lost art of punctuation.  I might just challenge my pancreas with a Charleston Chew tomorrow.

The sacred and the profane

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I was attracted this morning to an intriguing photograph by Arno Burgi for the EPA showing a workman in Dresden where the “Semper Gallery” is undergoing restoration.  The construction worker in hard hat enters a door that seems to lead him through a poster of Raphael’s (1463-1520) painting “The Sistine Madonna.”

Really wonderful, and the painting works on several levels.  First, there is the sense of incongruity, of “the sacred and the profane.”  But really it is more than that.  The

Figure 1 - Ra[hael's "Sistine Madonna," from the Wikimedia Commons, The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.

Figure 1 – Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” from the Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by the  Yorck Project and distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH and in the public domain because the painting is more than 100 yrs old..

man walks through a door.  It is symbolic of liminal passage, the entrance to the cathedral, the ascent from the profane to the sacred.  The man seems just a bit hesitant, the virgin just a bit worried (as has often been said of this work by Raphael), and finally you find yourself wondering exactly what is behind the door.  And never once do you, or, at least, do I think that the man is exiting rather than entering. Hmm!  That’s a lot.  That’s pretty subliminal.

If you know the painting you will recognize that there is a wonderful; element not shown in the poster or the photograph.  This is the two cherubs at the bottom of the painting.    It is said that they are looking up at the Virgin and child, and at Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, also not shown, or perhaps the cherubs are rolling their eyes at my over interpretation. One point ‘though, it has been said that Raphael’s painting is such a masterpiece that upon first seeing it the artist Antonio Da Correggio (1489-1534) was driven to tears and exclaimed, “And I also, I am a painter!”