Figure 1 – Painting of a horse from the great cave at Lascoux. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

On July 20th, I blogged about the photographs of Beth Yarnelle Edwards, and I went on a bit about an image named Friedo that shows a little boy running madly through a long white tunnel, and I said at the time: “This is one of those great recurrent mythic themes, the long passageway of birth, moving towards the light, or perhaps it is the rebirth that some primitive cultures create as a rite of liminal passage,  It shows the great joy of youthful motion and is symbolic as much as it is literal.”  I have been more than a bit concerned that you might, as a result of this statement, think that I have taken some kind of Freudian pill or at the very least that I am myself quite mad.  It’s partly because of this that I have introduced the mythic context as a way of looking at photographs.

For the last year, we have been talking about photographs fairly randomly.  But if you think about it or are keeping score, you are going to realize that tunnels keep cropping up.  Besides little Friedo we have Abelardo Morell’s rabbit going down the rabbit hole in his Alice in Wonderland portfolio, the tunnel through the woods in our discussion of surreal images, Peter Gedeis’ journeys to the center of the Earth, photographs of construction of the Second Avenue Subway in NYC, and even Timothy O’Sullivan’s magnesium powder photograph taken deep in a mine on the Comstock Lode.  The bottom line is that tunnels are everywhere, consciously or subconsciously.

Think about the earliest pictures that we have.  Figure 1 is an example –  petroglyphs from the great cave at Lascoux in France.  This was not a walk in the park but it was exquisitely spiritually profound.  You had to crawl on your belly through narrow passageways carrying torches.  But when you reached the cave the world was suddenly and miraculously transformed.  The flickering torchlight made the drawings come to life and dance on the walls.  You had achieved a mythic plane.

Call it what you want: myth, meme, or recurrent theme. This is what tunnels mean and do.  They transform you from where you are to a magic place, to a higher and sometimes a lower place.  Beowolf descends into Grendel’s cave to do battle with him.  Bilbo Baggins follows to battle dragons and Gollum.  Alice descends down the rabbit hole to “Wonderland.”  Dorothy descends up the tunnel like vortex to Oz and the Emerald City.  The list is pretty much endless.  Indeed, in classical mythology and literature there are so many gods and mortals like Irana, Orpheus, Odysseus, Persephone, and Dante descending into the underworld that you start to worry about a traffic jam.  The point is that when you see a tunnel in a photography think magic, transformation, and passage.  You’ll never be too far off target.

Figure 2 – Picture from the tunnel between Rigshospitalet (National Hospital) in Copenhagen and Amagerværket (Amager Powerplant) in Amager. The tunnel transfers heated water and steam for the city. Photograph by Bill Ebbesen, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I’ve done a lot of Barbie bashing in this blog, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due.  So please have a look at this image by Tytus Zmijewski of Landov*.  It speaks directly to our topic of yesterday – the concept of the fundamental nobility of human beings.  It was taken on July 19, 2013 and shows a little girl and cancer patient, Nikola Cichowczyk aged eight playing with one of the twelve bald Barbie dolls at Jurasz University Hospital in Bydgoszcz, Poland. This is the only place in Poland where children, who are recovering from chemotherapy, get to play with special bald, wig wearing Barbie dolls.  The Mattel Company created these bald dolls so that young patients, who have lost their hair as a result of cancer treatments can relate to the body image. These are unique dolls and are not for sale at retail stores.  I guess that it’s the other side of the coin, there ultimately being two sides to everything, and the Mattel Company deserves a lot of credit.

*I cannot resist commenting technically about Zmijewski’s photograph.  It is a powerful tool in portrait photography to not have your entire subject in focus.  Here the doll and wig are sharply in focus in the foreground, while little Nikola is clearly discernible, but not in focus, in the background. Notice, in fact how narrow the sharp focus is, only the doll and the wig are sharp; even Barbie’s feet are out of focus.  Zmijewski has chosen wisely for the subject matter, which demands this setup, but in general you can do it either way.  Note also that the perspective elongates the distance between the two, creating even greater interest.  Interest is further accentuated by the matching color of Barbie’s out fit and the little girl’s shirt.  So it’s not just a wonderful picture, but an expertly executed one as well.

Figure 1 – Jacob Riis, “Bohemian cigar makers at work in their tenement, 1914” from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

The concept of photography as a form of story telling, of creative mythology, is a useful one for interpretation of images.  A couple of days ago, I discussed the images of Bruce Davidson’s “East 100th Street” portfolio, and it is significant to contrast these with the work of Jacob Riis and John Thompson, which I have discussed previously.  They are all documentaries on poverty, yet they and their intrinsic messages are quite different.

In Davidson’s images the little stories that they evoke in our minds, that our minds create in reaction to them, contain the fundamental message that human beings are noble, that they live, love, and are capable of ultimate triumph over adversity.  In the case of Riis’ and Thompsons’ images the humanity and nobility are there, but the message is that these are almost squashed and completely beaten down.  It is a faint and almost muted voice. Thompson’s image “The Crawlers” touches not only on the mythic image of “noble mankind” but also and in the most disturbing manner on the mythic image of “madonna and child.”  It has all gone awry in a hideous way.

What my mind pulls up (again fishing a sea of mythic imagery) is the 1981 novel “The Hunger” by Whitley Strieber and the 1983 movie by the same name with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie.  The vampire’s lovers become immortal, but in the end they become barely alive, faint, and muted.  I don’t know if many of you have read this story; but the effect of it is horrifying.  I guess that’s why it’s called a horror story. Well duh, Wolf!

The basic message of Riis and Thompson, is almost a Calvinist one – appropriate for the Victorian and Edwardian age.  It’s almost like these people are atoning for something, but we as good people must help them.  Davidson’s message is ultimately uplifting.  If anyone’s to blame, it’s society.

Perhaps, I’m reading a lot into this.  But the important point is that all three of these portfolios grab at us because we have a fundamental belief that human beings are noble beings deserving of, or fundamentally possessing, dignity.  The way in which that is portrayed is a function, as it always is, of the prevailing views of society then and now.

I know that this isn’t a meteorology blog, but when did I ever hesitate to go off topic?  And I couldn’t resist this wonderful image of mammatus clouds over Iron Mountain, Michigan taken recently by Michigan meteorologist Joe Last.

Mammatus clouds? you ask.  Actually, that’s short for mammatocumulus.  These are patterns of cloud pouches seen bubbling beneath the base of larger clouds. They form following sharp gradients of temperature, moisture, and wind shear.  They can extend for hundreds of miles, and yes, they can mean trouble!

Clouds offer endless photographic possibilities.  It’s an art form onto itself.  And mammatus clouds are not something that you see every day.

Figure 1 – The mythic tradition, Stonehenge at sunrise on the summer solstice 2005, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

We have previously discussed photography and the concept of sacred memes.  Clearly, photography can play a central role in the creation of memes.  But, there is another, albeit equivalent, way of looking at the problem.  This is to consider photography as a form of creative mythology.

We also spoke briefly before about Joseph Campbell(1904-1987) and his concept of the protomyth.  Protomyths are stories or myths that keep reappearing in different cultural contexts, indeed stories that seem innate to the human psyche.  I say seem, because the quality of human innateness is a very controversial one.  However, genetic or acquired, nature or nurture, does not really alter the sociological issues regarding protomyths.

Campbell’s magnum opus is “The Masks of God.” This four volume books is a magnificent tribute to Campbell’s ability to make amazing cross-cultural connections.  He begins with “Primitive Mythology“, where he lays out his case for the themes of primitive cultures hunting myths of resurrection, human sacrifice to the mother goddess, and rites of liminal passage and how these have metamorphosed into our modern religions.  Because of when it was written the book offers up a very healthy dose of Freud and Jung and spends a lot of time discussing the interpretation of dreams.  Then Campbell presents the two fundamental religious traditions: “Occidental Mythology” and “Oriental Mythology.”  Finally, and here is our important point for the discussion of photography, he presents the tradition of “Creative Mythology,” of people writing and telling stories, stories that often fit tightly into the molds of the protomyths.  It is not coincidental that James Joyce entitled his great hero myth, “Ulysses.” Bloom is the “Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

Photography is a form of creative expression.  As such, it can be a form of myth-maker – a cauldron and birthplace of memes.  The role of photography in myth making is enlarged by the fact that vision is our dominant sense.  As a myth creator photography is unique.  Despite the phrase that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” photography intrinsically catches little glimpses.  You see a photograph, and yes it tells a story.  However, your ability to read the story accurately closely depends upon your familiarity with the mythic tradition of your culture, and so does your ability to create a photograph. You see an image of a mother and child and you immediately think, “mommy.”  Then you, consciously or subconsciously, relate this image to the mythic filing cabinet in your brain, perhaps to Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair.”  I prefer consciously myself, because understanding really adds to the enjoyment! So the uniqueness of photography as a creative medium is defined, first by  the power of visual dominance, and second by the fleeting ephemeral character of exposure.

A very striking “MSN must see” picture from July that of a lavender praying mantis camouflaged on a lavender orchid from the Borneo rain forest of Malaysia by Thomas Marent of Minden Pictures/Solent News and Photo Agency.   You might be tempted to label this as “lavender death,” for such it would be for any poor, unwitting insect victim.  But not too fast.  When I was in graduate school, I took a wonderful course in the Neurobiology of Behavior given by the late great Thomas Eisner (1929-2011), Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University.  Eisner gave  brilliant lectures in which he pointed out that the color wheel of insects is quite different than our red-green-blue wheel.  They don’t see red, but they do see much more in the violet and ultraviolet.  Flowers tend to provide nice clearly visible little landing pads for pollinating insects.  So why has the praying mantis evolved the matching lavender camouflage?  It is protective and meant to thwart mantis-eating birds.  Oh, and beyond this little lesson in physiological optics, it is a beautiful photograph, albeit a bit scary!

In the twentieth century, street photography came to be defined by pioneers in the genre like New York photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933).  Davidson has been a photographer for Magnum since 1958 and he has produced several gritty and highly significant both photographically and socio-historically, photodocumentaries of the twentieth century. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston recently acquired forty-three prints from his defining photoessay, “East 100th Street,” originally exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1970.

These photographs capture life in what was characterized as one of the “worst neighborhoods” in NYC in the 1950’s.  Davidson began this large format project in 1967, returning day after day to the one block area of East 100th Street between First and Second Avenue in Manhattan’s East Harlem.  Early on in the project Davidson got the inevitable question from a woman on the street: “What are you doing here?” Davidson answered “I am taking pictures of the ghetto…” This he relates was followed by an awkward silence until the woman responded: “Well, what you call a ghetto, I call my home.”

And this is the very point of true street photography, isn’t it?  Davidson’s images epitomize the the media of fine silver gelatin printing.  He is a master.  But more importantly as you slowly walk around the intimate gallery in which the MFA has displayed them, your can not help but smile repeatedly.  These are people whose essential humanity rises above poverty and adversity. Their nobility is in the gestures, a hand touch here, a couple hugging or dancing in front of a jukebox, a mother and infant child, or a strong muscular man holding a little baby on his shoulders.  This was the meaning of East 100th Street.

The exhibit runs through September 8 at the MFA.

My read of “Pictures of the Week” yesterday was totally delightful.  Maybe it’s the glory of summer, but there were more than the one or two that really caught my eye this week.  This image from the “Festival of Colors” in Saint Petersburg, Russia was taken by Dmitry Lovetsky of the AP on July 13th and is, I think just glorious!  Isn’t it refreshing to just see young people just having fun?  And of course, there is that je ne sais quoi Age of Aquarius quality for my generation! 8<}

Yesterday, I was reading my news feed on Facebook and saw a video of a man on a beach being attacked and, sadly, eaten by orca, aka killer, whales.  My immediate comment was “OMG!”  However, then I got to thinking.  Is this real?

Over the years I have read conflicting reports as to whether or not killer whales will actually attack humans in the wild.  I emphasize the term wild since we know of the recent tragic death of a trainer at Sea World, and there is a controversy now about whether these beautiful giant creatures should really be confined to performing circus acts for people in confined aquaria.  What always haunts me is Herbert George Ponting’s description of orcas trying to tip him into the water, while he was photographing on an ice flow in the Antarctic.

The video in question was not amusing.  It purports to show a fellow human being’s untimely and terrible death.  The good news it is a fraud.  Cleverly created (falling under the current definition of Photoshopped, I guess), it is actually advertising footage for “La Sirena,” a retail chain in the Dominican Republic. La Sirena has an advertising character for it’s back to school promotion called “The Lucky Pencil,” and the footage ends with the words: “No todos los lapices dan suerte solo el lapiz la suerte de La Sirena” (Not all pencils give you luck, just the pencil “La Suerte” from la Sirena).