Yesterday’s talk about exploitation of native peoples in photography, especially the Chinese raft poler, got me thinking about how this can be done right.  Right here means with a true touch of sensitivity towards the intrinsic nobility of the subject.  So immediately comes to mind, one of my favorite photographers, Linda Butler.

In 2005 I went to see an exhibit of Ms. Butler’s work at the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.  This focused on her work Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake.  The exhibit, and its companion book, documents village life in the Three Gorges region of China, before it was completely inundated to provide hydroelectric power for modern China.  As such it is a tale of two China’s: the old and timeless China and the new modern China.

So consider, and contrast to the picture discussed yesterday, Ms. Butler’s “River Fisherman, Shennong Stream, 2000,” which shows a proud fisherman, with his metculously folded net and the basket in which he stores fish,  at the end of a day’s work.  Then look at “Carpenter’s House, Beishi 2001,” showing a carpenter sitting in front of the house that he built by hand for himself.  He built all the furniture himself as well.  The same carpenter is shown two years later in front of the ruins of his house, cleared to make way for the dam.  There is a sign on the hill above the house, top right, that reads 175 m, which is the eventual water level of the man-made lake.  Six months after Linda Butler took this picture the land was under fifteen feet of water, and the indefatigable carpenter had moved a half mile away and was constructing a new home for his family.  Those two photographs taken together define the meaning of  human pride and perseverance.

I cannot talk about Linda Butler’s work without showing my personal favorite of her photographs.  This is “Pig on a Motorcycle, Niehe, 2001.”  A farmer is taking his pig to market and has stopped at a local restaurant.  The pig sleeps “happily” on the back of the motorcycle.  He is in a stupor because he has been fed fermented mash.

Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake is just part of Ms. Butler wonderful opus.  She is, perhaps, best known for her work “Inner Light, The Shaker Legacy.”  I highly recommend exploring her website and, in particular, her extraordinary photographs of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, “Meditations on an Altered World, 2005-6,” and “Death of a Farm, Georgetown, KY, 1986.”  These series are haunting in their lack of people, but just the same the human presence is so palpable.

I love portfolios like those of Linda Butler.  There is so much to be learned from them.  There is the technical, of course, but most significantly there is the lesson of how to tell an intensely compelling story through the power of the image,

Well, the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue is out and, stirred up by a posting by Dodai Stewart on Jezebel, there is new controversy flying about the web and news media concerning the fashion industry .  Well there’s a mighty surprise.  The goal of Sports Illustrated is to tillilate its clientele and to stir up controversy.  Controversy equals kaching, kaching.

Men being titillated by sexy women is nothing new, nor is the saprophytic exploitation of the models.  The question that Stewart raises is one of culture.  SI is taking you to the seven continents, profiling its models against what it sees as characteristic of the cultural location.  Stewart objects to the use of “natives” as “props.”  She tells us that “people are not props.”  To be accurate I looked up the meaning of “prop” on the Free Online Dictionary.  This is definition 2: “a theatrical property.”  The word property applied to people is problematic, but I would argue that props are inanimate and that while people cannot be props they can certainly be background.  It is done all of the time and quite innocuously.

Let’s take a look at some of the pictures that Ms. Stewart is objecting to.  First we have Emily Didonato in the Namibian desert with a spear carrying tribesman, whose rear end is even more exposed than Ms. Didonato’s.  The photograph  by Kayt Jones is truly wonderfully constructed in terms of composition.  The background is out of focus so as not to steal emphasis.  The balance between sand and sky is perfect.  The tribesman is just sufficiently out of focus that there’s no question about what is foreground and what is background.  The juxtaposition of the spears is beautifully done.  And, of course,  Ms. Didonato is is gorgeous and exotic herself.  I see all of that and then I get a kind of lump in my stomach that says to me: “Ooh, how embarrassing!”  What is the man thinking about this strange creature in his world.  He is scantily clad because he’s hot, she because someone’s selling sex (not really bathing suits).  And as Ms. Stewart points out, no matter how much he was paid, does he really understand that his near naked behind is now in glossy print worldwide?

Second let’s consider Derek Kettela’s photograph taken in Guilin, Guangxi Province, China of model Emily V reposing on a raft as she is poled about by a “native” with serious dental issues and complete with “coolie hat.”  Yikes!  I mean somebody please help me.  Why don’t we just bring back the “black-face minstrel shows?”  A white women relaxing as a “native” poles her along or across the river is such a throwback to an imperial age.  I know a lot of modern Chinese, who would go ballistic over this photograph.  It is not the image that they have of their country – even with all its problems.  Yet SI has chosen this image as representative of China.

The issue here is not the right of an industry to take the photographs that they want, exploit whom they want, and to make as much money as they want.  The issue here is the subliminal messages that come across, that the photographs convey.  I am not a supporter of the concept that one must always speak or photograph politically correctly.  To me the question of what you are thinking, what’s in your heart, is much more important than what comes out of your mouth.  However, when your pictures are going out to 3.5 million subscribers, 23 million readers (of whom over 18 million are men BTW) there is a very serious issue of social responsibility.

My colleague and I were oohing and ahing over the videos of a meteor crashing to Earth in the Chelyabinsk region of the Russian Urals last Friday.  We are told that this is a once in a century event; so certainly worthy of being the “iconic image of the week.”  People will likely still be watching it a hundred years from now..

It got me thinking of meteors and photographs of meteors and meteorites.  Of course, my first thought was a blog on “The first photograph of a meteor.”   I was able to learn that the first meteor photograph was taken on a glass plate negative by Ladislaus Weinek director of the Klementinum observatory in Prague on Nov. 27, 1885.  However, I was unable to find a copy of this image on the web.

Figure 1 – Tunkuska tree fall, 1908, from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

So I combed the cobwebs of my memory for thoughts and visions of meteors.  The first is obvious.  On June 30, 1908 near the  Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia there was a great meteor fall and blast generally referred to as the “Tunguska event.”  It is now believed that the meteoroid actually exploded in the air rather than striking the ground.  It probably had the force of a ten to fifteen megatons of TNT and  knocked down an estimated 80 million trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).  That is a circular diameter of 52km.  While there were no “robotic eyes” or surveillance cameras to photograph the event, there are many amazing post blast photographs of the tree fall made by subsequent expeditions.

Figure 2 – Robert Peary and tthe Ahnighito Meteorite, 1897, from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

My strongest memory association with meteorites is as a child being taken by my father to see the great meteorite collection at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.  In 1818, British arctic explorer Sir John Ross was astonished to find that a tribe of Eskimos along Greenland’s western coast possessed spear heads of iron.  The Eskimos smartly refused to reveal the source saying only that they came from a mountain of iron, in their language saviksoah.  A number of subsequent explorers tried, but failed to find the saviksoah.

By the the turn of the twentieth century Eskimos were actively trading for iron and no longer had the same need for their magic source.  An Eskimo named Tallakoteah told explorer Robert Peary that there were three irons: “the woman,” “the dog,” and “the tent. The legend was that there once had been a sewing woman and her dog, who lived together in a tent in the sky.  An evil spirit hurled them to the Earth and they landed as great lumps of iron.  Tallakoteah led Peary to these stones and, true to imperialist form, he decided to cart them away to New York. This was a Herculean task which ultimately took him several attempts and years.  As a child I remember looking with amazement at the tent, or Ahnighito, (also referred to as the Cape York meteorite) where Peary brought it for permanent exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

There are many classic images of Peary collecting this colossal stone in Greenland, transporting it to New York, and then carting it up from the peer to the American Museum.  Figure 2 is a example of these images.  For a complete telling of the saga of meteorite collection and Peary’s efforts see Douglas Preston’s book, “Dinosaurs in the Attic.”

I am an avid reader of “View Camera, The Journal of Large Format Photography.”  Practitioners of this form of photography are the keepers of many of the wonderful time-tested forms – from wet colloidon to large format Polaroid –  of the art that might otherwise be lost.  Indeed, they keep these forms new and vibrant, since their goal is not merely to copy but to create.  I was despaired, however, to read in one article recently, the comment that digital printing was merely poster printing, not truly a photographic process.  That is not true and misses a very fundamental point.

I used to believe that if you painted squares or lines and dots on a canvas, but couldn’t paint like Rembrandt, if required to do so, then you weren’t really an artist.  Somehow I believed that being an artist required achieving technical prowess beyond that required for your own art.  It seems silly now and rather convoluted.  It is not true and misses a very fundamental point.

Art is vision and the ability to express that vision.  It encompasses everything from a detail fifteenth century tempura or fresco that might have taken years to complete to minimalist art – a string glued to paper or a paint-laden sponged dabbed selectively on a white board.  You can like it or not, but it expresses vision and is art.

And the marvel in all of this is the individuality of vision.  I have a coworker who showed me marvelous pastel photographs that she had taken in Greece.  They were wonderful, and I remember thinking that if I had been standing right beside her and taken the same pictures they would look completely different.  It’s all about vision.  And it’s all art.

Modern digital cameras, even cell phone cameras, have become progressively easier to use.  They have made the technical part easy and allowed us to concentrate on vision.  Or said differently, they have opened up for us previously unheard of technical capability.   One may argue that the endless droning litany of drunken partiers posted on Facebook, represents a new low in photography.  But I would argue that the real mediocritization of photography came with a vengeance with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.  Dull meaningless black and whites, or was it gray and grays, and colors automatically set by processing machines to muddy indifference.   They have given more artists a voice.

Let’s embrace photography in all of its forms from the most ancient to the most modern.  They all contribute an important vision or voice to the diversity of the art.

I found myself wondering recently how many photographs have ever been taken.  I recognize that this is a little weird.  However, it is what geeks do.  I knew that there would be an answer on the web, that someone besides me had wondered about it before.  So with a little searching I found that everything that I could find written about the subject dates back to a 2011 blog posting by 1000memories.com,  which estimated the number in 2011 to be about 3.4 trillion (3.5 x 10 ^12 for us geeks).  I’ve come up with a slightly different number, but close enough for government work and it’s interesting in that it really demonstrates Kurweil’s concept of the “Singularity.”  The Singularity is the view that technology is growing so rapidly that it’s becoming essentially infinite and  going off the scale.  So let’s have some fun and look at this.

To begin with 100memories.com uses as the number of cameras in the world an estimate by media expert Tomi Ahonen at 2.2 billion in 2011.  In 2012 Ahonen revised this estimate to be 4.2 billion cell-phone base cameras and about a quarter of that, say 1.0 billion non cell-phone based cameras.  So let’s take this number to be a total of 5.2 billion cameras.  The next thing that we have to ask is how many pictures are taken each year per camera.  1000memories.com estimated this in 2011 to be 150 photographs per camera.  As I’ll show you in a bit there is reason to believe that the rate of growth is on the order of 16% a year; so lets go with 175.  So we have something like 910 billion photographs being taken each year at the start of 2013.  Wow!

Alright, so where do we go from here?  So let’s remember that the first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827.  That’s 186 years ago.

Figure 1 – The growth of photography 1827-2013

The problem is a lot like compound interest.  Suppose that your great-great grandfather had gone into a bank in 1827 and offered to deposit a dollar with the proviso that the money would not be taken out of the account until January 1, 2013 but that he wanted 16% interest.  How much would you have today?  Yes, you guessed it $910 billion. The growth is shown in Figure 1, years 1827 to 2013.  I’ve taken it back to photographs per year.

The Figure doesn’t show the early years very well.  I’d have to expand the scale or make it logarithmic.  But notice how it explodes as we get close to 2013.  That explosion in math is known as a singularity.  Hence “The Singularity.”  Kurzweil generally places the singularity at around 2025, for various reasons.  All sorts of technologies follow this pattern towards blinding almost  inconceivable growth.  Take our calculation out to 2025 and we’ll be talking 5.4 trillion photographs per year!

Getting back to our original question of how many photographs have ever been taken, to calculate this you need to add up the number for each year since 1827.  That is you have to calculate the area under the curve in Figure 1.  This number is 6.62 trillion.* Pretty impressive!

*Last year Facebook estimated that people were uploading 250 million photographs a day.  This is about 91 billion photographs a year or about 10 % of the photographs taken in the world last year.  Facebook current has 220 billion images stored.  That’s 3.5 % of all the pictures ever taken.