Faces in all sorts of strange places

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I want to thank reader, Andrew, for directing me to this wonderful photograph* by Roni Bintang of Reuters taken on November 18 showing a woman in Sibintun village, Indonesia, watching as Mount Sinabung spews ash. Sinabung threw a plume 8,000 meters into the atmosphere as thousands of residents sought refuge in temporary shelters, wisely fearful of more eruptions.

This is a great picture on many levels: yes, yes rule of thirds; foreground-background flip, the low perspective, and then wonderful twirling plume creating a great sense of motion.  But Andrew also points out the face in the smoke in the upper right.

This got me thinking about all the grade B horror movies I watched as a kid, which end in a fire and the face of the demon appears in the flames or fire.  Seeing faces in everyday objects, particularly nebulous ones like clouds and smoke plumes, is fairly common.  There is the now famous devil’s face in the flames of the World Trade Center.  And I’ve got a long going photo-project that I refer to as “Search for the Ents” where I photograph faces that I see in trees.  The best of which is “Old Tree Man.” My friend Michael D. and I have been trading these for years.  In the first instance you need only your imagination.  But photographically you often enhance – burn and dodge a bit to emphasize what is perceived.

This is such a common phenomenon that I think that it has more to do with the way in which our brains work than with the workings of demons.  Sorry, as a scientist, I tend to see nature as super rather than the supernatural.. Our eyes and brains are programmed to seek familiar structure, and the whole process functions by focusing or concentrating on a very limited number of code points.  We seek to create something of the nebulous.

*Actually, a number of you have been sending me interesting images and this is very helpful.  So please keep them coming!

 

 

Remembering Jack Kennedy

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Figure 1 - Photo of Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Jr, Caroline and Peter Lawford at the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 25 November 1963, walking down some steps. From the National Archives via the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Photo of Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Jr, Caroline and Peter Lawford at the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 25 November 1963, walking down steps of the United States Capitol. From the National Archives via the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

As most people know, today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  My original thought was just to post the image of Figure 1, and let it speak for itself.  But really there is a lot more to be said in terms of what the myriad of iconic images from that day have to say.

First, consider Friday, January 20, 1961.  It was a snow day in New York City and as a result I got to stay home to watch the inauguration on the television.  It was the first inauguration that I watched, really the birth of my political awareness.  What is significant was the view that Americans had, at that moment, that whatever we set our collective minds and spirits to we could accomplish.  Those were heady times coming out of World War II, the center of what has been called the American Century – and, of course, it represents a classic example of what others have derogatorily called “American Exceptionalism.”  I think that rather than deriding American exceptionalism we should look towards a more universal human exceptionalism. The important point is that these were enormously optimistic times in the United States, and, of course too, we were about to pay again for racial intolerance.

This optimism ended on Friday, November 22, 1963.  Really!  It just died with the presidnet. When the word came out of the loud speaker at my Junior High School – the principal simply turned on the news – the feeling of despair and lost innocence was honestly palpable.  I remember one little girl shouting out: “He deserved it!”  And I remember thinking that she really didn’t mean it.  Now five decades later I take that utterance as an awful harbinger of the depths to which our political discourse would plummet.  The level of disrespect for our current president by his domestic opponents – well, and I hate to say it – is thinly disguised racism. It is not worthy of a free people.

So then the weekend progressed.  From one in the afternoon Eastern time on Friday when the news first broke, the networks broadcast endlessly until Tuesday night.  And television was a three network show in those days – thre channels of drivel instead of two hundred. For four days there was live-from-the-scene reporting.  For the first time, there was extensive mobile on-the-spot video.  Ever seen what a 1960’s vintage television camera looked like – this was a tour de force technically.

It is hard to remember what television was before the Kennedy assassination.  This is because that moment changed it.  We demanded ever detailed on-the-spot reporting.  We wanted cameras on the battle field, covering an endless series of genocides, and even on the moon for that first footstep.

Throughout the sixties and seventies that phrase “We interrupt this program with an important news bulletin,” made your heart stop a beat and you held your breath.  Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s Assassination, Nine-eleven: everything became so real and visceral.

And as we have discussed we have become enured – really hardened. And at the same time the news media and now social media have trivialized the phrase “breaking news.” Beyonce’s baby bump (and I wish her only good thing) does not, in any context of the phrase, truly constitute “breaking news.”

Our world and what we expect from our media was changed that Friday in November.  The endless personal and raw imagery that we demand and then devoured evolved from what we saw on our little grainy black and white televisions that weekend.

 

Mark Twain’s cats

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Figure 1 - Front page cover of the newspaper L’Aurore of Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J’accuse...!, written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair. The headline reads "I accuse! Letter to the President of the Republic," from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Front page cover of the newspaper L’Aurore of Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J’accuse…!, written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair. The headline reads “I accuse! Letter to the President of the Republic,” from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I went this past Saturday to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair.  You never know what you are going to see at the Book Fair, which is where the fun comes in.  There are six hundred and fifty years of the printed books; so invariably there are the great tombs of science, the great works of literature, and the everything in between.  Everything in between runs the gamut from, exploration and politics to phrenology.  The whole event serves as a time capsule – an if you think of it as the flotsam and jetsam of human intellectual history, you’re pretty much on the mark.

I do a pass of all the great books and then I return to each stall to explore the ephemera: political and social pamphlets, photographs, and autographs.  One year I was amazed to see Emile Zola’s expose of the Dreyfus Affair, see Figure 1.  But this year it was “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

But more importantly on just about my last pass I found a half-tone copy of the image of Figure 2.  Showing Mark Twain in 1907 with one of his beloved kittens.  Mark twain was a great lover of cats:

“Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential; but the Clemens tribe are not of these.“

Twain recognized the fundamental point that the love of a cat was a thing to be sought,  won, and nurtured.

“By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a “noble” animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward–you will never get her full confidence again.“

In Figure 2, we see the fundamental human quality of Twain.  Once more photograph transports us across time and he becomes real to us.  We are admitted into his private life.

Figure 2 - Mark Twain with one of his cats, 1907. By Underwood and Underwood, from the NY Times Arcghives and the Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Mark Twain with one of his cats, 1907. By Underwood and Underwood, from the NY Times Archives and the Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.

Recording and doing useless things

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Figure 1 - Annie Edson Taylor and the barrell in which she became the first person to survive a plunge in a barrell over Niagra Falls, October 24, 1901. Image originally from the Francis J. Petrie Photograph Collection Author, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Annie Edson Taylor and the barrel in which she became the first person to survive a plunge in a barrel over Niagara Falls, October 24, 1901. Image originally from the Francis J. Petrie Photograph Collection
Author, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Let’s start with Figure 1, which is a photograph of Annie Edson Taylor, who on October 24, 1901 was the first person to survive a plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel – yes the same barrel pictured.  I mean woot, woot!  What a useless, nay what a stupid thing to do!  Sorry Annie, just saying it as it is.

Swimming from Cuba to Florida, braving jelly fish and sharks – what’s with that?  At least Diana Nyad‘s feat is a personal goal and triumph.  She even swam around Manhattan Island in 1975 – yuck to that.  So today, I was reading the BBC News and came across this very nice photograph by Stephanie Mahe of Reuters showing Canadian rower Milene Paquette arriving in Lorient Harbour in France, becoming the first North American rower to row solo across the Atlantic.  One can, at least appreciate the feat, both the physical and mental challenge.   The BBC also had this picture by Andrew Milligan of PA, showing Sean Conway emerging from his four month swim along the entire length of mainland Britain from Land End to John O’Groats.

Personal challenges and great geographic challenges, why do we attempt them?  I have previously quoted the great nineteen century British explorer, Sir Richard F. Burton:

 “Starting in a hollowed log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself ‘Why?’ and the only echo is ‘damned fool!… the Devil drives’.”

Great feats, even foolish feats are all a part of the human experience.

Lost image of the New Frontier

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This morning I was watching a special “Meet the Press” that featured interviews with John Kennedy, when he was running for president of the United States in 1960.  It kind of takes you back, and it is a bit shocking that Kennedy actually answered the interviewers’ questions.  What a concept! We know that this week marks the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, TX, and I will have more to say about that later this week.

But the “Meet the Press” clips got me thinking about Kennedy and his image.  Despite the fact that he suffered from Addison’s disease and severe chronic back pain.  He almost always, for the camera portrayed a vigor – or as he said it “vigah.”  If we analyze our collective image of John Kennedy from countless archetypical photographs, he is always impeccably dressed: a suit or even black tie.

However, in the fall of 1960 as the presidential campaign was moving to its close, I went with my mother to see Kennedy’s motorcade head west along East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.  My mother and I decided to stay back from the crowd which was swarming a block or so up from us, where Kennedy was going to speak.  Then there was the moment.  Kennedy was standing up in his car.  The only way to describe it was that he was bronzed.  His hair had shining streaks of blonde, and he was deeply tanned.  And he was wearing a tan buckskin jacket.  It was what every boy wanted in those days, the ultimate cowboy jacket, and, of course, symbolic of Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”

Kennedy turned, flashed a big smile at my mother and I, and waved.  I have just spent several hours trying to find a picture of Kennedy campaigning in that jacket.  I know that they are out there, but I have not yet been able to find one – a picture that captured that shining moment of Camelot and optimism.

 

Roll clouds

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Figure 1 - A classic example of a roll cloud. Photgraph from the US NOAA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – A classic example of a roll cloud. Photgraph from the US NOAA and in the public domain.

I posted recently about cloud photography, and the night that I wrote the post I saw a clip on the NBC Nightly News showing a so-called “roll cloud” spotted and filmed over Texas.  The Texas roll cloud is, I think, best viewed as a video.  But I have included as Figure 1 a from NOAA.  There is also a really impressive image from the United States National Weather Service showing a roll cloud forming in Sterling, VA, Figure 2.

Roll clouds are really rare.  They are a form of arcus cloud.  These are low forming horizontal clouds.  The other major form of Arcus Cloud is the shelf cloud.   While they appear to be horizontal tornados, they are, in fact, not related to tornadoes at all. They are caused by convective down draft at the leading edge of frontal systems.

So now I want to see and photograph my own.  And I am still waiting to see mammatus clouds as well.

Figure 2 - Roll cloud forming over Sterling, VA. From the US National Weather Service and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Roll cloud forming over Sterling, VA. From the US National Weather Service and in the public domain.

On the limina and terrified – photographs by Gabriele Stabile

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Over the last few months in the United States, we have been rather appalled, and most of us embarrassed, by the shoddy performance of our congress in dealing with real issues, and yes, in their failure to do their jobs.  I had the opportunity over these months to take three trips.  The first was to Washington, DC – the helpless Capital of us all – the true belly of the beast as it were.  The second, was to New York City – Capital of the Blue Zone – and the third to Houston, Texas –  Capital of the Red Zone.  In both cases, I was struck and really moved in the end by the hardworking immigrants to America, who are trying to build a future for their children here.  You just need to speak with them.  I had a long conversation with a New York City taxi driver, originally from Cuba, who told me about his children, who were going after advanced degrees in college, and about how he was working to build their futures.  I came away from all of this pretty optimistic.  We will be OK in the end, because, as it always has been, the future of the United States lies with its immigrants.

On a typical day at my job, I work with Indians, Iranians, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Chinese and Iranians.  We are the United Nations!  I am, in fact, a little concerned that I might insult some valued colleague by omitting them from this list. This kind of diversity is one of the great benefits of being a scientist.

But there is a very special class of immigrants – the refugees, the people who came here fleeing persecution, indeed often fleeing imminent death.  So imagine this – imagine that you are a refugee and you have just crossed over, just arrived in America.  You stand at the limina, the threshold of passage from an old to a new world.  What do you feel?  Is it terror, relief, elation, ambiguity?  Every one of these refuges has been at that point and felt those feelings.  I remember a friend in college who told me about her family’s escape from Ceausescu’s Romania.  Her father had been imprisoned and tortured.  Their escape was via Italy to the United States.  I have never forgotten her story.  I can still hear her soft quiet voice as I write about her. And there were other friends as well: one who told the harrowing story of her narrow escape from Idi Amin’s Uganda, fearing rape and murder; and another from a friend whose mother carried him on her back across a river to freedom.  These are the refugees and their stories are unique and personal.

So I’d like to draw your attention to Kerri MacDonald’s blog in the New York Times on November 12, 2013 entitled “Checking In to a New Life in America.”  This blog and a new exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center  features photographs from Gabriele Stabile’s book “Refugee Hotel.”  There is also a book “Refugee Hotel, Voice of Witness,” by Juliet Linderman and Stabile.  Mr. Stabile gained access through the International Organization for Migration and documented over several years the “first night” that many refugees to America spent in the United States.

There are many touching stories  here.  One is a 2009 photograph of Somali refugees who spent the night in the hotel hallway for fear they would be left behind on their trip to resettlement.  Then there is the image of Karen refugees being introduced to modern hotel plumbing.  You don’t see their faces, but true to great photography you can read their expressions, feel their wonderment. Another great example is Stabile photograph of a refugee brother and sister asleep and locked in an embrace – holding on to beloved familiarity, to the very bonds of place and sanity for dear life.  I usually only give at most three examples.  But I am totally haunted by the face of a little Bhutanese girl in Los Angeles from 2008 that tells the entire story.  This image says everything.

There is a dark graininess to Stabile’s images that creates a certain grittiness. Like the subjects, your eyes are strained by the darkness, trying to adjust, and looking for brightness. The mood is totally captured.  And I think most clearly the total exhaustion of these people on their first night is vividly portrayed.  It is as if, indeed it has to be, all of their strength has been required to bring themselves to the limina, to the threshold of a new world.

A new light

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Figure 1 - A Waterton, Ma street during the first snowfall, November 12, 2013. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – A Watertown, Ma street during the first snowfall, November 12, 2013. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

As I was headed to bed on Monday night the late news was filled with the dire warning of first snow – the snowpocalypse that we have all be dreading since early July, when we first resigned ourselves to the waning length of the days.  Please, people! Get a life!  In any event, there was a lot of meteorological spitting of rain and snow and its mixture sleet during the morning commute.

So when I got into work I decided to snap an IPhone record of the event, see Figure 1.  It is not a great photograph by any means.  It does, however, show the clash of seasons: snow coming down, leaves still exhibiting brilliant color, and even last summer’s geraniums clinging to life in window boxes.

The splendid photographic light of late summer and autumn is now past.  Winter begins to beckon.  The sun will be low, the shadows long.  The sky will take on that deep blue frigid tone and then, of course, there will be snow.  The light is ever changing.  We have to adapt to it.