Figure 1 – Astronaut Karen Nyberg on the International Space Station savoring the gift of a grapefruit from Earth. From NASA and in the public domain.

It has always struck me as pretty wonderful how many of our memories instantly evoke a sense of smell.  My grandmother had this aluminum serving dish shaped like a flower.  When you pushed down on it the petals opened to reveal these wonderful after dinner mints.  To this day I cannot see a picture of my grandmother without the sense of a peppermint. And I can still smell Sunday dinners at my mother’s home.

Despite the fact that the olfactory is not our dominant sense by any means, it is striking to me how strong these image-smell associations can be.  So I offer today this absolutely wonderful picture from July 28 of NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg aboard the International Space Station smelling a grapefruit sent up from the Blue Marble.

Back in colonial times, oranges were considered a rare delicacy, suitable for gift giving at Christmas time.  So among its many meanings the image of Figure 1 is a reminder of the precious things that we give up when we leave the bonds of Earth to meet our destiny in space.

Phew!  It had been a very busy and stressful week.  So this past Saturday morning, in the peaceful early hours, I found myself looking for something soul-soothing and I found it on the pages of LensWork online in E. E. McCollum’s “Cocoon Series.”  Of course, I immediately visited McCollum’s own site and found many more wonderful images.

The cocoon series began when McCollum’s friend and model Kaitlin went into the dressing room of his studio, donned a nylon body cocoon, and began posing in it.  The effect is arresting.  The cocoon creates: first a sense of mystery, second its own marvelous forms, and third some of the most gorgeous ripple textures imaginable.  I just love these wave patterns.  To me, as a scientist, they are suggestive of what are called space time warps.  In physics, these gravity patterns represent being.  Every object or person creates a warp in space time that affects all other object or persons.

Of course, the cocoon represents transformation – the fundamental transformation between caterpillar and butterfly.  It is death and then it is resurrection to something much more beautiful.  It has that fundamental ambiguity of meaning about it and therein lies the great mystery.

I keep trying to figure out which image in “The Cocoon Series” is my favorite, and that is very hard.  Maybe it is #41, which I love for its photographic and compositional qualities.  But then there is #34 which is so beautiful because of its simplicity and its sense of beauty emergent.

I also think that McCollum’s “Dance” series holds many gems.  I am struck by the figures in motion leaping through the air.  It is curious, when there is a single figure captured in motion its kind of “OK that is cool!”  But when there are two figures, such as “Greenfield #2,” it all becomes just magical and balance.  It defies gravity,

This is a website that I plan on returning to.  And it offered up a wonderful start to a weekend.

I think that we need a break from memes and myths and themes.  So I thought that it would be a good day for confessions.  Like everyone else, I cannot resist a cute and touching animal picture.  This one is for reader Wendy S.  It’s from the AP and was taken on July 24 and shows an Indian parrot hatchling being fed by hand.  It had been caught in a forest in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland by a local hunter and offered for sale . It shows a mythic bond and relationship between species…  Sorry, maybe I should just say: “Aww!”

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.