A study in scarlet

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Figure 1 - A Study in Scarlet, IPhone Photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – A Study in Scarlet, IPhone Photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

On Saturday I went to for a walk at the mall again.  I love these walks because, true to Bill Clinton style, they end in my sipping an intense double espresso in contemplation of the rest of the weekend. Early morning is a very peaceful time at the mall, and I had the chance to have one last look for the season at the Easter Bunny photographer with his smiling kids, crying kids, and kids not quite sure how to take the whole process in.  There was a bright sunlight made just a bit diffuse by light clouds filtering in the big skylights and this lit up the fashion exhibit in a beautiful way – not too high a contrast, not too dull.

I paused to photograph a glimmering wave of scarlet satin on one of the dresses to continue my IPhone collection of monotones. I include this as Figure 1. Scarlet is so amazingly intense to our eyes and it bears so many connotations to our collective literary consciousnesses: “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and then, of course, there is the Arthur Conan Doyle story, “A Study in Scarlet.”

This 1886 novel derives its name from a speech that Sherlock Holmes gave to Dr. Watson in which he uses the metaphor “study in scarlet” to define the nature of his work:

“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

A study in art is meant to connote just that artistic notes or sketches preparatory to a greater work.  In the present case it gives me the opportunity to explore what happens when you combine flowing form with intense overwhelming color and there is certainly no color that is more intense to our eyes than a brilliant red.

In the meanwhile, the beautiful light, the budding trees and flowers, which this year seem to be in a race with one another, the pollens assaulting my sinuses all beckon me outside for other photographic studies and explorations.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

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I was chided by a reader on Friday for posting only a link to a picture without enough words.  I had thought that the picture of Dutch tulip fields spoke for itself.  Indeed, is not a picture worth a thousand words?  We are certainly told that it is.  So then I started wondering what the origin of this phrase was.  Internet to the rescue!

First I was delighted to find that the phrase was anticipated by by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:

“This drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages of a book.”

I say delighted because back in college I vividly remember visiting the great wooden secretary in my parents’ bedroom and pulling down that gem of a story about inter-generational relationships from my own father’s library. It seemed so relevant to the 1960’s/1970’s.

Credit for the actual phrase is usually given to newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane who in a 1911 article describing newspapers and advertising wrote:

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

In a 1913 advertisement for the Piqua Auto Supply we find the phrase:

“One Look Is Worth A Thousand Words”

By 1927 in an article in the trade journal “Printers Ink,” by Frederick R. Barnard an ad by Barnard states: 

“One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words,”

where it is labeled a Chinese proverb. The phrase had undergone word inflation and appealed to the popular “Confuscius say…,” which he did not.

By this point we are stuck by the question is it worth a thousand or ten thousand words? Computer scientist  John McCarthy has made the inverse point:

“As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.”

The origins of the phrase in the history of print points to its fundamental meaning.  We have spoken extensively in this blog to the explosion of information over the internet and the sheer volume of meaning that we need to absorb each day.  What the phrase continues, a century after it was first penned and set into type, is the fundamental point that visualization enables us to absorb information far more rapidly and far more voluminously than the written word. This presumed brevity is an apparently contradiction.  It takes so many more bytes of information to create a picture than text.  So if the currency of information is gigabytes then this is a false economy.  However, if you want to get your meaning across, if you want to avoid confusing your audience, put in a picture.

Nessie on Apple Maps?

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Figure 1 - Apple Maps image possibly showing the Loch Ness monster.

Figure 1 – Apple Maps image possibly showing the Loch Ness monster.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a huge argument with my teacher over the existence of the Loch Ness monster.  She declared me to be argumentative – I still have the report card.  I declared her to be close minded.  And I was determined to visit Inverness and its famous Loch – which I did a few years back. For me, a budding scientist then, it really was a lesson in open-mindedness and the importance of evidence.

Well, the years have past, and I will even more vehemently defend the scientific method.  Nessie has gone through a lot in the intervening years: including a serious argument against based on biomass and the publication of a photograph of a “fin” in the scientific journal Nature, which led to its being declared a protected species.  Then there was the sorry news that the clearest and most convincing photograph ever was indeed a fraud.  I had, and pretty much still do, or is it no longer, hold out much hope for the erstwhile plesiosaur.

Now here’s the thing.  Yesterday it was announced that 27 year old  Andrew Dixon claims to have been scanning Apple Maps and on zooming in seeing an image of the Loch Ness Monster.  Now wouldn’t that be lovely!  I am posting that picture as Figure 1.  I have unfortunately become just a bit jaded with age and suspect that it will be shown to be a fraud.  I will keep you “posted.” It is, after all, the age of Photoshop.  However, some people have independently found the image on their IPhones and IPads.  So for now we cannot be exactly sure what this is.  It is the spitting image of the plecostamus cat fish that I had in my  office aquarium.  However, that was not fifty feet long.  I remain hopeful that there are fifth grade teachers out there who will learn a lesson from all of this – probably not!

Cute, cuddly, and incongruous

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As we have discussed I love cute cuddly animal pictures as much as the next guy.  However, I try not to fall into the trap of posting them.  Today I’m going to come pretty close. Yesterday, I came across this picture by Sutanta Aditya of AP/Getty Images of a veterinary staff member of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program center examining and treating an orangutan on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, on April 16.

This big guy had been shot with an air-gun, and pellets were still lodged in his body when he was rescued by local forestry officials from a nearby plantation. The center has cared for over 280 rescued orangutans and has returned more than 200 animals to the wild.

What is so appealing about this image is its incongruity.  One expects a person to be lying on the examination table, not an orangutan.  And the expression on his face is, after all, so very human.  You start to wonder whether this is a scene from “Return to the Planet of the Apes.”  Is this really an orangutan or is it merely a person in an orangutan costume?  It is a great example of how dynamics can be created in a photograph by adding the unexpected or incongruous.  It is a classic example of the genre of incongruity developed by photographers like William Wegman. I suppose that there is a whole greeting card industry based on images of animals dressed as people.

The other question that this image of the orangutan raises is, why he is so calm.  Is it anesthesia?  Is it trust?  Why doesn’t he strike out and kill the woman examining him.  We are left, perhaps, with the famous quote from the movie classic “King Kong,” and certainly this photograph reminds us of that movie.

“And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.“

Transparent Nature by Arie van’t Riet

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I’ve spoken a fair bit about the misplaced dichotomy of science and art and about the intrinsic artful beauty in many subjects scientific.  This past week, I came across some beautiful soft X ray images by Arie van’t Riet.  These he refers to as “bioramas” and they are exciting because Dr. Van Riet has totally crossed the line.  These are studio images taken with X-rays and then partially colorized in Adobe Photoshop.  The transition is seamless and the colors appear as if they were always meant to be.

The artist by the way emphasizes that these are things dead, not alive.  No animals were sacrificed in the production of these images.  So we can begin with his image of the “John Dory Fish,” which has very little color but is an excellent example of the delicacy of form that X rays reveal.  You do not need to be a taxonomist to appreciate the structural beauty here.  But then van’t Riet combines the X ray images with color.  A good example is his his photograph of tulips growing out of the ground.  The colors have no significance.  But they appeal to the eye and enhance the beauty.

Color is an fascinating dimension in photography.  In mundane photography it can be a crutch, by which I mean that if if you have dramatic color, you can often fool yourself into thinking that you don’t need anything else to recommend your picture. I prefer to take images in black and white, or more accurately to convert to black and white, to emphasize form and dynamic range.  But sometimes the image screams out for color.

The really interesting balance, to my mind’s eye, lies in starting with a great black and white image and making the pictorial  decision between a pure black and white image vs. a toned one.  And if toned: cold or warm.  And if toned: exactly how much.  So in the same context, I think that we can appreciate Arie van’t Riet’s photographs in his decision process of exactly how much color to apply.  I think that some of his images are dazzling and dazzling because he uses color so sparingly.

Life among the humans

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Figure 1 - Mannequin in a black dress, IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Mannequin in a black dress, IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

There is something both appealing and haunting about mannequins.  They are almost human and at the same time other worldly.  And, I suppose, for people like me who grew up watching the Twilight Zone called “The After Hours” and the adventures of a certain Miss Marsha White, played by the beautiful Anne Francis, in a department store.  She ultimately discovers that she is herself merely (?) a mannequin.  It is an adventure that can only happen in (doo-dee-doo-doo) the twilight zone.

So I was thinking about Miss White this morning as I was walking in the mall (IPhone camera in hand) in quest for my espresso.  There she was in a simple, yet elegant, tasteful black dress. She had no hair and her eyes were darkened by deep shadows giving her a most alien specter.

Polar extremes

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Figure 1 - The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken on February 5, 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken on February 5, 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

Today is April 15th.  Yesterday I posted two images taken on April 14th – the second was on April 14t, 1865. This is a black day in American history because on April 15, 1865 – a day after the second image President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth of the then famous Booth family of actors. He died at 7.22 on the morning of April 15, 1865.

So my pictures of today were both taken by Alexander Gardener, one of the great Civil War photographers, and a rival of Mathew Brady.  Figure 1 shows Gardner’s “Last formal picture of Abraham Lincoln” and was taken on February 5, 1865.  Figure to is Gardner’s portrait of the famous (now infamous) actor John Wilkes Booth taken on an unknown date also in 1865.

The two images in a sense represent polar extremes – extremes of political thought certainly.  The camera in a way fails us.  It does not allow us to really see, and only to speculate in retrospect with knowledge of who the sitters were, into the tormented souls of these two men – Lincoln tormented by the heavy responsibility for so man deaths and Booth tormented by the lost cause of his beloved South.

Lincoln, as we know, had a premonition of his own death.  It was as if his worldly task was to save the Union and with that accomplished the fates discarded him.

Figure 2 - John Wilkes Booth Figure 1 - The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – John Wilkes Booth Figure 1 – The last formal photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

“About 10 days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for
important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed
when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued
sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed
and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same
pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to
room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of
distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every
object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were
grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What
could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a
state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived
at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque,  on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered,
others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded
of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed
by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which
woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was
only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.[12]

A difference of four years

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Figure 1 - The raising of the Confederate flag over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861. From the LOC and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – The raising of the Confederate flag over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861. From the LOC and in the public domain.

Today is April 14th.  Today and tomorrow I’d like to talk about images that represent polar extremes.  Todays are a pair separated in time by four years.  The years are 1861 and 1865.  Today I’m posting two pictures from the United States Library of Congress: one taken on April 14, 1861 and the other taken on April 14, 1865.  On April 14, 1861 after the bombardment by confederate forces of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and its subsequent evacuation by Major Robert Anderson and his Union troops, the Confederates raised their flag over the fort (Figure 1).  On April 14, 1865, Brigadier General Anderson returned to Fort Sumter for the raising of Old Glory over the fort.  Also present on that day was Harriet Beecher Stowe (Figure 2).

The contrast or similarity of these two historic images speaks to the symbolism of flags and to the aspiration of men and women with conflicting ideas.  History is ultimately a cauldron, and war its most unpredictable brew.  Wars like the American Civil War are so terrible that you would think that we would do everything possible to avoid them.  Yet in our imperfections we tumble irrevocably towards them.  This particular war, really the second phase of the American Revolution, was truly born of unresolved conflicts of the eighteenth century. Ultimately, we are driven forward by the ideas of the times and these images can only in a very small way give us a glimpse what was in the minds of Americans during those years.

Figure 2- The raising of Old Glory over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865. From the US LOC and in the public domain.

Figure 2- The raising of Old Glory over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865. From the US LOC and in the public domain.