Genealogical imagery and the quest for the familiar

Posted on January 26, 2013 by

I’ve gotten a lot of kind and positive response to my post about my grandmother’s portrait, and it got me thinking about the special appeal of old family photographs. We have discussed the magical quality of nineteenth century photographs of people, about how these people seem to call out and connect with us across the vastness of time. Their anonymity is part of their appeal. We are almost voyeurs observing long forgotten lives. In the case of family photographs it is almost as if the opposite is true. We are looking for something familiar, something of ourselves that creates a special bond of connection.

I remember once going to a good friend’s mother’s house and there on the wall was a nineteenth century picture of what appeared to be his teenage daughter. To me his daughter looked like her great-great grandmother – so strong was the family resemblance. That is the great power of our genes and therein lies the appeal of family pictures. They create a sense of personal connection and at the same time flesh out the ancestor almost as if they were remade.

The picture that I posted of my grandmother used to hang in my grandmother’s living room and next to it was a picture of my infant father on a bearskin rug from around 1918. I remember looking at them, whenever I visited my grandmother’s house. These hang again together in my study now. They are loaded with memories for me. Right now I am thinking about how sunny her 12th floor Bronx, NY apartment was, how she had a green thumb, which she was sure was because she spoke and sung to her plants.

And I suppose that there is a distinction between pictures of family that you once knew and family you never knew. In the latter case you can only imagine. And what you imagine is that the genes run deeper than any superficial physical likeness. You imagine that personality traits and feelings were also the same. Do you laugh like your parents, and they like theirs? Just as you may be like your mother or father, who in turn was like their mother or father, all of these people shared something of personality, with you – each in the context of his or her own time*.

There’s a lot of imagining going on, a lot of projection of self, and quite suddenly we see once more the true magic of photography. It projects a filtered reality through time and space. It makes us wonder about what makes us fundamentally human.

* I’d like to remind readers of my post of October 30 about Rafael Goldchain “I am My Family.“

Aerial view of the Great San Francisco earthquake 1906

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

On the subject of early aerial photography, we should also take a look and marvel at George Lawrence’s panoramic view of the devastation that followed the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. No hot air balloon used here! Lawrence used a string of Conyne kites to lift his handmade 49-pound camera panoramic camera 1,000 feet .

Today, needless-to-say there’s a website devoted to teaching you how to take aerial digital photographs from a kite. If you are going to try this I suggest that you remember George Lawrence and his 49 lb camera and also Benjamin Franklin and his kite experiments,

Photographic firsts #4 – the first aerial photograph

Posted on January 24, 2013 by

Nadar Aerial Photograph from Balloon Paris 1858

Figure 1 – Earliest remaining aerial photograph by Nadar. Over Paris in 1866 from the Wikicommons and in the public domain

I thought it would be fun today to consider another photographic first, in this case the world’s first aerial photograph. The first known aerial photograph was taken from a tethered hot air balloon 80 m over the French village of Petit-Becetre in 1858 by French photographer and balloonist, Gaspar Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar).

Figure 2 – Earliest known existent aerial photograph. Over Boston in 1858 by John Black from the Boston Public Library and in the public domain

Now the thing is that when we think about such an event, we tend to modernize it and imagine that we climb into a balloon with our digital SLR and snap snap snap. However, we are talking 1858 and we are talking wet collodion photographic process. Wet plates must be developed before the plate dries that is within 20 min of exposure. As a result, Nadar in addition to having to lug a large view camera into the balloon with him, had to build and use a whole darkroom on the balloon. Pretty impressive! Unfortunately, the fruits of Nadar’s 1858 efforts no longer exist. The earliest existent aerial phototograph from Nadar was taken over Paris in 1866 (see Figure 1). As a result the earliest aerial photograph known to be still in existence is James Wallace Black’s image of Boston, also taken from a hot-air balloon but in 1860 (see Figure 2). It is also interesting to see a side-by-side comparision with a modern shot with the same perspective taken by S. W. Dunwell on October 13 of 2012, that is to the minute 162 years apart.

Theodore Roosevelt Riding a Moose

Posted on January 23, 2013 by

Figure 1 – Theodore Roosevelt rides a moose supposedly c. 1900 and from the archives of Life Magazine via www.history.com and in the public domain

Well we’ve been talking about and looking at a lot of early twentieth century photographs and I came upon this one and couldn’t resist posting it. The picture from supposedly c. 1900 shows Theodore Roosevelt riding a swimming moose. It is said to be from the archives of Life Magazine. I am a little skeptical. First, I’ve read a lot of books about Teddy and I’ve never seen this before. Second, his hands rather than being onto the sides of the moose or holding onto its fur, appear to be holding non-existing reins. Third, what’s that funkiness in front of Teddy. Fourth, if you blow the thing up and play with the contrast you start to see a halo of sorts around Teddy but not the moose. Fifth, there’s a shadow of the moose but not of the president. And finally there’s a strange tonal/texture change behind Teddy’s left pants leg, which by the way isn’t wet. One way or another “It’s Bully!” ’nuff said.

Sonja Hall – Reflective Silverback, 2009

Posted on January 22, 2013 by

When I work my way through magazine contest portfolios, I am always looking for the picture that grabs me, the one that makes me say wow. So I was making my way through the February contest issue of Black and White Magazine #95, when I came across a photograph by painter and photographer Sonja Hall entitled “Reflective Silverback.” And I said, “Wow, that’s a great photograph!”

Suprisingly, when I visited Ms. Hall’s website I found a color version of the image and I liked that even more. The shades of gold on the gorillas fur and the shades of green behind the boy really make the image. What we have here is a gorilla reflective in the sunlight and reflective in demeanour, perhaps dreaming of Africa. A young boy his hand pressed against the glass of the enclosure is behind the gorilla. The story is right there, at so many levels. The eyes, of both, tell everything and the hand, albeit perhaps unintentionally, is held in a sign of trans-species peace and greeting.

This is one of those pictures where timing was everything. Usually when you photograph at the zoo, you try to eliminate the zoo aspect from your pictures. You try to pretend that you took the picture in the wild. Here however, the zoo is the whole point. The smudged and scratched glass rather than detracting from the image adds a story to it.

Go and have look at this picture at Ms. Hall’s website. While you are there spend the time to look at the other photographs and paintings of this talented young artist. It’s worth the adventure. And don’t forget to watch the slide show on her homepage.

The intelligent camera

Posted on January 21, 2013 by

In his book “The Singularity is Near” futurist Ray Kurzweil points out that people are always asking when is artificial intelligence coming, but that it’s already all around us. It’s just that every time it gets developed, we call it something else. A real case-in-point is the modern digital SLR.

My father’s camera was a Ciroflex twin lens reflex camera, the “poor man’s Rolleiflex.” It focused manually with a thumb dial and that was about all it did. There was no flash and no light meter. For exposure you had to use either the guesstimates that came with the Kodak roll film instructions or an external exposure meter. My father would mount this camera on an enormous set of external floodlights during birthday parties. My sister and I still laugh at this since these slights were so bright that some of our childhood friends may still be seeing after image.s all these years later.

My first SLR was similar in its capabilities, a Praktica from East Germany. Then I saved up my pennies and bought myself a Leica M3, arguably the best camera ever made. So let’s say it’s 1968 and I wanted to photograph a flower, but also wanted the building behind it in focus. The process was 1. consider the scene and decide on an f-number that’s going to give you the needed depth of field, 2. set the f-number, 3. choose the point that you want to use for focusing, 4. move the exposure time dial which was linked mechanically to the exposure meter until the the needle lined up in the center, 5. look at the exposure setting and decide whether it was fast enough to hand hold, 6. focus the lens on the flower using the split screen parallax range finder, 7. note the distance to the flower and then mover the lens focus so that both that distance and the distance to the building were both bracketed by the appropriate f-number lines on the lens barrel. 8. push the shutter. I used to be pretty good and pretty fast in executing this set of events seamlessly.

Moving on, in 1985 Minolta, with the introduction of the Maxxum 7000, developed “autofocus.” I remember clearly at the time that many reviewers though this pretty much useless. I mean, who cannot focus a camera? Today we may be moving towards a crisis on the other side. With the abandonment of split screen parallax views on the focusing screen, manual focus is becoming harder and harder, even under the many conditions where it might still be preferable.

OK, so today with my Canon T2i, I choose depth of field mode, “A-Dep.” My camera chooses the exposure time for me based on my chosen f-number. This is based on the placing nine focal points into simultaneous focus. If this cannot happen, the camera tells me. Focus is achieved automatically. Really, if I don’t want to fuss with it, all I have to do is push the shutter button. If you think about it, the only thought process required of me was the knowledge that A-Dep was the best way to take this picture. The little person that lives inside my camera is pretty smart – smart in all sorts of amazing ways!

This is really a clear example of artificial intelligence, as long as we don’t quibble over the semantic question as to whether an algorithm-based program incapable of learning is true artificial intelligence. But this definition is pretty satisfactory for most folks, and, perhaps of equal or greater importance, nonthreatening in that we don’t expect the intelligence in our cameras to declare “cogito ergo sum,” or to emote in response to the subjects they are photographing by, say, crying or laughing. Most importantly they are unlikely in this stage of development to pass the Turing test.* But they really do take great pictures!

* The Turing test is a test of a machine‘s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior in such a way that it is indistinguishable from intelligence. In Turing’s original conception of the test a human asks questions of another human and a machine. The judge cannot see the participants and they only communicate via a single mode such as a key board and monitor. That is the test is designed such that the machine does not have to replicate human speech. If you’ve ever watched the closed captions with the news, you’ll realize that this last point would still be critical.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875) – Darwin’s Photographer

Posted on January 20, 2013 by

Figure 1 – Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “The Two Ways of Life, 1857” from the Royal Photographic Societ, Bath, UK, and in the public domain.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875) was born in Sweden and first made his name as a painter, lithographer, and copiest (of classical paintings). Therein lie his roots in classical pictoralism. There are conflicting accounts of what caused him to turn towards photography. One story has it that it resulted from a visit to the great Crystal Exhibition of 1851 in London, another that he was converted when he saw how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve, and a final account has him inspired by one of Fox Talbot‘s assistants.

Figure 2 – Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Portrait of Hallam Tennyson, the son of Alfred Lord Tennyson,1863,” in the public domain.

Around 1846 he set himself up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, and in 1850 he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes from Nicholas Henneman in London. He set up a photostudio and supported himself with genre work and commissioned portraiture (see Figure 2).

Figure 3 – Oscar Rejlander, “The head of Saint John the Baptist, 1850.” in the public domain.

It was while experimenting with the issue of depth of field in portraiture that Rjlander developed combination printing – the use of multiple negatives to create a photomontage. Today in Adobe Photoshop this is straight forward. A hundred and fifty years ago in the days of analogue photography, this was difficult and pioneering. An example of this work is shown in Figure 1 above from his allegorical study “The Two Ways of Life.” The same figures are shown on the two sides of the image, depicting right the way of virtue and left the way of sin. The work was view as scandalous by many of his contemporaries. But the perceived ‘indecency’ faded when Queen Victoria bought a copy for 10-guineas as a gift for Prince Albert.

To our century the portraits, particularly those of children still bring a smile and retain a special loveliness. The religious allegories are no longer in vogue. However, we can still very much appreciate the creativity in producing something as convincing as his work, “The Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1850.” This image is so reminiscent of classic works by Titian and Caravaggio.

The was a controversial and darker side to Rejlander. He also created erotic work using circus girls, street children and child prostitutes. He created images referred to as “The Charlotte Baker series.” The most notable of these is “Mother’s Clothes,” which depicts a nude teenage girl trying on her mothers clothing. It tests even our modern sensibilities and reminds us of sinister images of children taken by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), a colleague and friend of Rejlander’s.

As previously discussed, near the end of Rejlander’s life he was approached by Charles Darwin to do the photographs for “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872.” He added a special humor and artistic quality to this early example of photographic illustration of scientific books.

* In addition to the sites hyperlinked, background for this blog was obtained from the ever useful and magnificently produced “The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839-1900.”

The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals – a photographic and scientific milestone

Posted on January 19, 2013 by

Figure 1 – The title page of Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.” From the Open Library and in the public domain.

Today I’d like to talk about a book – Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.” Paul Johnson has suggested, and I believe rightly so, that Darwin’s magnum opus on the Theory of Evolution really consists of three major works: “The Origin of Species (1859),” “The Descent of Man (1871),” and “The Expression… (1872).” In “The Expression…,” Darwin seeks to trace the animal origins of human facial expressions such as: the pursing of the lips in concentration and the tightening of the muscles around the eyes in anger and efforts of memory.

In composing the book, Darwin circulated a questionnaire to scientist around the world so as to gather data to test the universality of emotional expression in different ethnic groups. Other sources (see Figure 2) were photographs of babies, children, and actors, and also descriptions of the behaviour of psychiatric patients at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in West Yorkshire. This kind of thorough attention to detail was characteristic of Charles Darwin, characteristic in fact, of much of Victorian Science, and is one of the reasons that, even today, he is so compelling in his arguments. Darwin also performed experiments involving electrical stimulation of the facial muscles to induce expression and elicit emotions (other than fear of electrocution) from his subjects (see Figure 3).

Figure 2 – Images of hatred and love from Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,” in the public domain.

This book was published in 1872 and represents a cornerstone in the history of science (most particularly the then fledgling science of psychology) and photographic book illustration. It was one of the first scientific books to use photographic illustrations. Darwin saw this as imperative saying: “Several of the figures in these seven Heliotype Plates have been reproduced from photographs, instead of from the original negatives ; and they are in consequence somewhat indistinct. Nevertheless they are faithful copies, and are much superior for my purpose to any drawing, however carefully executed.”

Figure 3 – Plate 2 from Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.” In the top image the photogrpher, Oscar Rejlander, using himself as subject. The bottom image shows and example of Darwin’s experiments on electrical stimulation of expression and emotion. In the public domain.

What exactly is a heliotype and why was Darwin concerned about its loss of sharpness? A heliotype was a photomechanically produced plate for pictures in a book that was made by exposing a gelatin film under a negative. The film was then hardened with chrome alum, and the pages of the book printed directly from it. What Darwin was interested in was a faithful and scientific rendering of the faces in the pictures and he was willing to suffer a little loss of sharpness to get the realism.

Darwin saw photography as a means to convey scientific observation, both accurately and in detail. Indeed, in a sense, the reader gets to observe for his/herself. He set a new course and was followed by other luminaries, such as Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904) and his work on animal and human locomotion.

But beyond science, there is something wonderful and often humorous about the photographic illustrations of “The Expression…” This immediately raises an important question. Who was Darwin’s photographer. The answer is Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875). He is the man with the muttonchops in Figure 3. Rejlander used himself as subject for many of the heliotypes in Darwin’s book.

Although a somewhat controversial figure in his day, he was one of the great British photographers and a master experimentalist with the new medium. As in science, the Victorian era was a golden and innovative time in English photography. Who was Oscar Gustave Rejlander? That is the story I will tell in tomorrow’s blog.

André Kertész – La Fourchette, 1928

Posted on January 18, 2013 by

I was looking at a website today that was doing a series similar to my “Ten Favorite Photographs for 2012,” and I came across André Kertész , “La Fourchette, 1928” or in English, “The Fork.” Please click on the hyperlink and have a look. It was interesting to me because I had actually considered this for my 2012 list. It is certainly, one of Kertész’s most famous works and as an abstraction pretty perfect and wonderful. It defines all the right elements of a well composed and well executed black and white image. There’s black and there’s white and there’s beautifully everything in between. Then we see a well and interesting use of the “Golden Rule of Thirds.” The objects are contrasted with their shadows, which in the case of the bowl forms a concentric circle. The fork creates a marvelously strong diagonal line and presents a fantastically well done metallic sparkle. The image is well designed and cries out “simplicity.” And in a high resolution copy you can read the letter on the back of the fork. The sharpness is intriguing.

I have read a bit of a “tongue and cheek” discussion of what it all means. And I respect the expression, indeed I practice, the exploration of why the piece personally moves one. But here ultimately it is like the old adage about over Freudian interpretation. Sometimes a pencil is just a pencil, or in the present case a fork is a fork.

But something does bother me. Something is incongruous. And the problem is that the viewer, or a least this viewer, feels a bit like the chess master, who sees a board set up as a display and realizes viscerally and immediately that the position of the pieces could never have evolved. What exactly is going on here? Why is the fork teetering on the edge of the bowl? Generally forks are associated with plates and spoons with bowls. My mother would have insisted that the fork be placed tines up on the left hand side in anticipation of dinner. And if dinner has already taken place then it would be rude to tangle one’s fork at the edge of the bowl, or so my mother taught me. And finally, if dinner has already taken place, then why are both the fork and the bowl pristine and shining? Puzzle me all of this!
So we are left, I believe, with two options either reject these incongruities and reject the picture, or accept them and conclude that they give the picture a sense of the dynamic a sense of motion.

Hati and Skoll Gallery

Home to the photographic works & blog of physicist David E. Wolf.