No discussion about photos of the past week would be complete without considering this insanely terrifying little video from the AP taken by Dan Yorgason as a tornado moved through an oil drilling rig camp near Watford City, ND.   This is really a far cry  from A. A. Adams’ first tornado photograph of 1884, which bears a certain nineteenth century after the fact abstraction.  A profounder reality comes from the fact that it is video and in color, not to mention that it is about as intimately close as one can get to a tornado without dying. The reddish brown is where the twister meets the ground churning up dust and debris and the white area further up into the pristine funnel cloud.  These images essentially look straight up into the vortex of the tornado.  It is a modern day Charybdis.  Odysseus had to choose consciously between Scylla and Charybdis.  It all happened so fast that Yorgason had no choice.  But having the presence of mind to grab his camera and photograph is pretty amazing.

Although they have appeared in this blog, I am not usually an admirer of sports photographs.  However, I must make an exception again this week.  On the BBC I came across this incredible image by Miguel Medina for the AFP of Italian tennis player Camila Giorgi returning the ball to Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova (not pictured) during a second round match at this year’s  French Open.

The lines in this photograph are beautifully composed.  There is a complex construction of the rule of thirds between Ms. Giorgi and the lines on the clay court that act visually as a puzzle that creates an enigmatic dynamic tension appropriate to the a sense of power and motion.  The grim determined look on Giorgi’s face is riveting, and the relative positions of her legs and arms are perfect.  This photograph is oh so reminiscent of the fifth century B.C.E. statue by Myron the “Discobolus” or the “Discuss Thrower.”  The Discobolus is the ultimate sports image.  It celebrates the perfection of the human body of youth, as does Mr. Medina’s wonderful photograph.

I am thinking pleasantly back to the sweet time of childhood when in addition to a favorite color (red) and a favorite television star (Fess Parker) I also had a favorite animal (the hippopotamus).  Yes the “river horse” was my favorite, and nothing delighted me more than seeing him at the Central Park Zoo dine upon copious quantities of cabbage.

Maturity has led to a more studied respect for the hippo and an appreciation of his ambiguity as a gentle giant.  Yes, there were the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” – pure fantasy.  And there was the National Geographic Magazine showing photographs of a hippopotamus rescuing a disemboweled antelope from the jaws of an alligator and pushing the mortally wounded beast up unto the shore – I suppose to be devoured by jackals. 8<( And my favorite was an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” where they attempted to photograph hippos with their young underwater.  Finally, they resorted to using a very expensive remote camera.  All goes well until momma hippo is alarmed by the sounds of the camera’s mechanism.  She leaps out of the water and crashes down on the very expensive camera, flattening it like a pancake – Momma Hippo meets Paparazzi.”

All of these cobweb memories ran through my head yesterday as I was looking at Pictures of the Week on BBC News and came upon this lovely image by Mel Evans for the AP showing a little girl named Audrey Bruben at The Camden, New Jersey Adventure Aquarium posing with Genny a 4000 lb hippopotamus – all grins – or so it seems.  Wonderful, cute little girl and equally cute, albeit of ambiguous cuddliness, animal.

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.”

Ogden Nash, “The Hippopotamus”

We have discussed the technical aspects of pinhole photography in the past as a means of introduction to how the camera works.  But we have not discussed the aesthetics of pinhole photography.  Pinhole cameras create: somewhat distorted images, in many cases soft out-of-focus images, and vignetting – that is a fading of light intensity as you move away from the center of the field.  Overcoming all of these distortions is why camera lenses cost so much.  But in the case of the pinhole image, all of this contributes to a sense of dreaminess and a sense of the antique.  If you want to create a picture that looks like it was taken in the mid-nineteenth century, this is certainly one way to go.

With all of this in mind, I was struck with a recent readers’ series on BBC News, a collection of pinhole camera images.  And to my mind’s eye the most strikingly dreamy of all was a wonderful image of a swan on a lake sent in by Daniel Ramsey.  Because this beautiful color image required a 30 second exposure the swan’s head and neck are blurred out as if captured in several positions, but in none really.  The distortion is four dimensional, encompassing all the dimensions of space and time.  It is truly a vision from a dream.

Unfortunately, The Week in Pictures is all too reminiscent of the movie “Apocalypse Now,” or worse the mythological concept – the Ragnarok  being a favorite theme of Hati and Skoll.  Among this weeks news pictures we’ve got wars (you almost lose track of all the wars), we’ve got fires, we’ve got desperate parents in Nigeria, and we’ve got natural disasters floods and earthquakes. I thought that representative all this misery is a stunningly and therefore, hauntingly beautiful, photograph by Stuart Palley for the EPA.   It is an  extended time exposure showing smoldering remains of overnight fires on the hillsides of San Marcos, California, early on May 16. Firefighters are deparately battling fast-moving wildfires in southern California. The light in this image is amazing.  The blue is an unworldly iridescent shade, perhaps contradictory in that this kind of blue more often depicts water and wetness, not fire, heat, and dryness.  The rocks in the foreground combine with the morning light to evoke the sense of an other worldly lunar landscape – the ultimate in lonely isolation.

Sorry people, I know that I could have chosen the sloth!