Oh brrr!  It has been really cold here in the Northeast, so much so that I am wont to venture outside too much to take photographs.  Am missing a lot I know.  But when I look out at the Charles River frozen shore to shore in Watertown, I feel for the Canadian geese.

Well shame on me, a friend has brought to my attention a fabulous portfolio of pictures of lighthouses on Lake Michigan encased in ice.  Not just ice, but magical ice with wind twisted icicles.  This portfolio by Thomas Zakowski is spectacular and conjures up thoughts of the impending Fimbuvlter, when the wolf Skoll shall devour the sun and his brother Hati , the moon and the world will know no light. Mr. Zakowski is not afraid to venture out into the cold.

Enjoying his magical images by a warm fire while sipping hot chocolate sounds like an excellent way to spend a cold winter’s day.

Last March I posted about Murad Osmann and his Instagram sensation “Follow-me.”  Osmann has taken a truly rare perspective, focusing on the back of his girlfriend Nataly Zakharova as she leads him all around the world.  Each picture is shot from the photographer, or observer’s viewpoint, and you see Nataly’s hand as she reaches back and leads Osmann onto adventure in some dramatic world. He takes these pictures either with his IPhone or with his DSLR and then uses Camera+ software for processing.

Well, throughout the year this photoseries and mystery has gone viral, as they say.  There are thousands of fans following Murad and Nataly on their journeys.  But Nataly never turns her face.  That is until now, when she turned it for NBC’s “Today Show.”  Murad’s muse is finally revealed.  Both Murad and the newly revealed Nataly both informed us, they do it for love.

I know that I should be giving up on the New Year by this point.  It’s old news and time to move on.  Still I found myself this past weekend checking out BBC News’ “Best Reader Photographs of 2013.”  So I am hoping that you will excuse me one more trip down the memory lane that was 2013.

One of the nice things about that BBC is that they feature readers’ photos.  So it’s not just about professional photographers from this and that news agency.  I was amazed at how many pictures from this past year’s BBC series I loved, that is even if i exclude the cute cuddly animal photos.

My top like from BBC 2013 is Samina Farooq’s “Puzzles and Riddles.”  I like the dramatic colors, the gesture of the hands, the enigmatic numbers on the fingers, and the black background.  It all brings new life to the Rubick’s Cube.

Then there is the wonderful photo by Manisha on the theme of “Hands.” This is a very well done and excellently composed example of perspective shift and ambiguity.  The transfer from the two size reference frames is seemless.  And I think that the floor tiles and the stairs really add to the drama of the photograph.  Placing them diagonally in the image adds a very dramatic effect that I do not believe would be there if they were pependicular or parallel to the image.  The complement the theme.

Next there is Alan Walker’s “Just a pink hat on a sunny day – to take your mind off winter.”  Frankly, I really need this about now!  It is truly freezing here.  I just love the way that the lip gloss matches the hat and the little sparkles of sunlight on the woman’s face.

I’d like to also mention the Zara Sumpton’s “A frame within a frame A self portrait taken with a disposable camera in the jungle, Ecuador.”   A hypocrite would also mention the kitten peering over the edge of a table in N Sishat’s “My kitten Prof. Piddles eavesdropping on a private conversation between my husband and me.” But, of course, I will not!

My town dump is big on recycling, and one of the  features there is a little unheated shed, where people share books.  It’s my favorite book store, the books are old and the price (free) is right! A couple of weeks ago I found a 1957 book entitled LIFE photographers, Their Careers and Favorite Pictures.  I took it home and it was sitting on a shelf unopened and unread until a few days ago, when I received an email from a reader alerting me to the passing of one of the great Life Magazine photographers, John Dominis.  Dominis died in New York City on Monday, December 30 at the age of 92.  I immediately went to the almost forgotten book and looked him up curious to see what were his favorite own photographs in 1957.  It was needless-to-say a half baked story.

Dominis has been praised for his ability to masterly photograph anything, and his career spanned the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as the turbulent sixties and seventies.  So in 1957 his career was just beginning, and some of his most iconic images – the ones burned into our collective consciousness were ahead of him.

Many believe that his greatest image was his 1965 photograph showing Mickey Mantle tossing his helmet in disgust after a terrible at-bat.  This is one of those pictures that tells the whole story without words.  It is a most eloquent pictures of a great athlete in decline.  And remember that in the late fifties early sixties Mickey was one of the true greats. In 1961 there was a heroic battle between Mantle and Roger Maris to be the first to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record by hitting 61 homers in a single season.  I was at Yankee stadium when Maris succeeded.

For me personally however, his greatest image, the one the still brings shivers to me was this picture of defiant atheletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the awards pedestal at the 1968 Olympics.  This is one of the great defining moment images.  It contains in a single photograph all of the ambiguity of 1968.

So with the New Year we may reflect on the loss of a truly great photographer and at the same time we may reflect on an opus that truly helped define the second half of the twentieth century.

Figure 1 ‘ Edward Steichen “Flat Iron Building, 1904.” From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I grew up in New York City and there were many fascinations there for a child – stll are.  My favorite place was the American Museum of Natural History.  There was an exhibit there about the evolution of the horse.  The horse, at one point in our history, was second only to man.  New York City at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century was filled with horses.  That, of course, was when the exhibit was assembled.  But even when I was a boy all this was already fading.  We would leave the museum and walk down to Sherman Plaza, where the horse-drawn carriages still gathered to ferry tourists through Central Park.  My other memories  of horses was the horse head on the garage ,nee stable, across the street from my elementary school PS 61 in lower Manhattan and, of course, the police horses.

Today I pass horses every day on my drive to work.  Such are the advantages of living in the burbs.  These are beautiful, pampered horses that wear blankets to protect themselves from the cold, and prance about with an aristocratic air.  The horses in Manhattan are more of an ambiguity.  They are certainly an anachronism.  Are they pampered?  Are they stressed by the sights and noises of dangerously, heavy traffic?  Do they suffer in winter’s cold?

Like the horse-drawn taxis in Sherlock Holmes, they are a remembrance of a century ago.  We see them lined up expectantly along Madison Square in Steichen’s “The Flat Iron Building, 1904.” (Figure 1). There they are dim shadows of the past century.  There are other horses as well, in Steiglitz’s “Terminal, 1911” (Figure 2) there pulling a tram through the city snow.

New York City’s mayor-elect Bill de Blasio announced on December 30 that  “We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York City… “They are not humane. … It’s over.”  Does this mean that they horse-drawn carriages, the icon of so many great photographs and films, are soon to be gone?  Will the only horses that school children know in New York City be the bronze monuments?It’s all very controversial, and I am not going to enter the fray.  Photographically at least,  “times they are a-changin’.”

Figure 2 – Alfred Steiglitz, “Terminal. 1912,” from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.