Bunched cloth

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Figure 1 - Bunched cloth, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Bunched cloth, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I am strolling with my IPhone again, well I’m actually always strolling with my IPhone. So this past weekend I took the image of Figure 1, one of my favorite subjects for this kind of photography – bunched cloth. Here a tee-shirt tied in the back. This represents a purity of subject, simple, yet elegant, lines and texture. Here i have gone to black and white, surrendering all color to the simplicity of black and white, which is dominated by geometry and dynamic range.

Miss Olive Lewis of Pepperell, Massachusetts

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Figure 1 – Miss Olive Lewis of Pepperell, Massachusetts, photograph taken at the Wilson Studios in Brockton, MA in 1916-17.

Figure 1 – Miss Olive Lewis of Pepperell, Massachusetts, photograph taken at the Wilson Studios in Brockton, MA in 1916-17.

This past Saturday I found myself poking around a couple of antique shops in Concord, Massachusetts. I like to dig around old photography items especially sorting through the stacks of second rate photographs or tin-types labeled as daguerreotypes. I was attracted to the inexpensive portrait of Figure 1, a silver gelatin print, which was taken in 1916-17 at the Wilson Studios in Brockton, Massachusetts. It is a portrait of a pretty young lady in a white summer dress named Olive Lewis of Pepperell, Massachusets and it contains a faint but elegant inscription that I believe reads to “Persis with love, Olive.”

I think that the photograph is a fine example of the quality of portraiture at the time. I find both the combination of the delicate soft focus, the pretty smile of the subject, and the gorgeously executed side illumination stunning – a far cry from the myriad of boring portraits that one usually comes across.

There is an advertisement that I found on the web for the sale of Wilson’s Studio in Abel’s Photographic Weekly from 1920. This because of the death of the proprietor. The studio was at 68 Main Street in Brockton, a city of 75,000, at the time and had been in continuous operation fro forty years; so 1880 – 1920. The back of the photograph bears in addition to the subjects name and place of residence, the name Howard Lemmary(?), who may have been the photographer. Finally if you look into the Lewis genealogical records of Pepperell, Massachusetts you find that Persis was a Lewis family name; so it all seems to fit together.

I have spoken before about the nameless faces with forgotten stories that, captured in silver, stare, or in this case, smile back at us. Here with a little electronic research, part of the veil of obscurity is cast away. Still we know so little of Olive’s story. It is part of the photographer’s skill and art that it matters to us. And it would have astounded Miss Lewis to learn that a century later her portrait would be posted on the web.

 

Plugging in

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Figure 1 - Electric outlets. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Electric outlets. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Think about it. All around the world people are plugging in, tapping into the energy source, the so called grid. It is a great symbol of modern technological achievement – the wired network. Of course, a little more than a hundred years ago it didn’t exist. I am tempted to ask, who then would have thought it possible? However, that is just the point there are dreamers – people like Tesla and Edison.

So it makes you wonder whether it might someday be possible to have a wireless source of energy, and there are already inductive schemes like those charging disks at your local Starbucks and airport. Two things come to mind. First, that with high voltage power-lines the energy is actually stored between the wires, and second there is so much energy nowadays in electromagnetic waves that we are essentially bathed in, that you can build a little antenna/circuit and charge your cellphone without plugging it in.

Fifty years ago we were slaves or captives to wired telephone systems and now wired systems (landlines) are becoming antiques.  The dreaming here is very obvious. “Kirk to Enterprise. Beam me up, Scotty.”

Tele-transporting? Is that next? There are about one hundred reasons that it makes no sense in terms of physics. And then there is the problem of the call “dropping.” I mean would you really trust your carrier with your elements?

Captain James T. Kirk: You ready, Bones?
Dr. McCoy: No. I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.
Captain James T. Kirk: You’re an old-fashioned boy, McCoy.

Droning on

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Figure 1 - The image is by Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information and is in the US Library of Congress and in the Public Domain in the United States.

Figure 1 – The image is by Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information and is in the US Library of Congress and in the Public Domain in the United States.

There is an intriguing commentary in this past week’s New York Times by Farhad Manjoo entitled “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick? Think Again” The bottom line is that it’s coming. I have a lot of friends who tell me “that will never happen.” The that being automated drone-based delivery in that magic zone of the first 400 feet of airspace. Well, friends, it’s coming

Even before anyone talked about the “singularity” progress was marching on along four parallel, or at least complementary, paths: the push to transmit information (text), the push to transport voice, the push to transport images, and the push to transport material. All of this as fast as possible. And it is the definition of “as fast possible” that fades forever as the horizon.

Companies like FEDEX and Amazon have their business models set on rapid transport of material, of things. And friends, it’s coming. It’s coming because people want it.

So I am offering up today and image of Miss Helen Ringwald working the pneumatic tube mail delivery system in Washington, DC in 1943. Who woulda thunk it?

Photopictorialism Study #15 – Translucent impressionism

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Figure 1 - Translucent pictorialism

Figure 1 – Photopictorialism Study #15 – Translucent pictorialism, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

One of the more dramatic forms of illumination that you see in shopping centers are transparencies illuminated from behind across a milky plastic surface. It creates a very dramatic and intense late and makes colors essentially explode. I made use of this today and photographed a detail of such and ad to create a kind of impressionist of photopictorialist image. The result is the intensely colored image of Figure 1.

Looking through windows

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Figure 1 - Windows IPhone image. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Windows IPhone image. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Yesterday I talked a bit about minimalist structures consisting of dots and lines, or strings of broken glass. As a follow-up to that I’d like to post an image that I took this morning of windows, seen through windows, seen through windows, seen through windows, seen through windows, seen through a store window. Or put more simply Figure 1 is an IPhone image of windows.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

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Figure 1 - The glass wall, Highfield Hall and Gardens, Falmouth, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – The glass wall, Highfield Hall and Gardens, Falmouth, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

There is the old adage that “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” In its most literal sense, does this apply to when the house is made of broken glass. Figure 1 is an image of an art display at the Highfield Hall and Gardens in Falmouth, Massachusetts. It shows a single wall of a glass “house,” albeit not one that will have much utility in the event of rain – but it does make one wonder about the old saying, and also seems to speak to the general issue of living transparently. The structure illustrates how to our minds a three-dimensional structure is defined simply by a set of dots connected by lines.  In terms of the photograph, i was struck by the simplicity of the structure and, of course, by the way that the light glistened off the shards of glass.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 75 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/500th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

The blitz meme

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Figure 1 - People seeking shelter during an air raid in the London tube. From the Wikimedia Commons, released by the Imperial War Museums under IWM Non Commercial Licence.

Figure 1 – People seeking shelter during an air raid in the London tube (1940). From the Wikimedia Commons, released by the Imperial War Museums under IWM Non Commercial Licence.

I’d like to end this little three-part series about subways and historic subway photographs with the image of Figure 1. This is a photograph that really does not require a title. It is both memetic and thematic. This is photograph HU 44272 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums. It shows people seeking shelter from the blitzkrieg at London’s Aldwych tube station 1940. And the meme is that the English people were indomitable. In that regards it speaks to an important point for those of us who in our time face constitutional travail, that as Edward R. Murrow said “we are not descended from fearful men.” People sacrificed for us, and we should not out of fear succumb to the narcissist who calls on us to sacrifice our democratic ideals and institutions.

The clarion call to history and purpose is why such photographs are so moving. These people appear to be like the Eloi of H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine” driven into the mechanized tunnels by the Morlocks. But they retain their humanity and individual identities despite becoming trologytes. You can imagine a personal story in everyone of the faces. This sense of the “undead” is emphasized by the stark flash-lamp illumination. But note, that to a man and woman they are engaged with the photographer and through the photographer with us. They recognize the importance of what is happening to them.

We have spoken before about how photography captures and instance in time and acts as a means of time travel. Here it is palpable and quite intentional on the part of both the subjects and the photographer. They mean to speak to us. They mean to challenge us.

The pneumatic subway

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Figure 1 - Historic photograph of Beach's pneumatic transit showing both the tunnel and the car in 1873. From the Wikimedia Commons. Original in the archives of the New York Historical Society and in the public domain because its age.

Figure 1 – Historic photograph of Beach’s pneumatic transit showing both the tunnel and the car in 1873. From the Wikimedia Commons. Original in the archives of the New York Historical Society and in the public domain because its age.

When it comes to cleaning up ectoplasmic mood-slime, “who you gonna call? Ghostbusters.” You may recall in Ghostbusters II their discovery of  a river of such slime, feeding on all the urban badfeelings. Such is the first point of fiction in the movie. New Yorkers filled with bad feelings? But anyway, in the movie this river runs through the “Old Pneumatic Railroad tunnel.”

Such a subway system, referred to as “Beach’s Pneumatic Transit” did, in fact, actually exist from 1870 to 1873. As was common in 19th century America, the pneumatic transit, like all railroad projects, was heavily controlled by politics. Alfred Ely Beach in 1867 demonstrated a model of a railroad powered by pneumatic pressure at the American Institute Exhibition in New York City. Construction of a full-scale demo-system beneath Broadway in lower Manhattan began in 1867.  It consisted of a  single tunnel, 312 feet (95 m) long, 8 feet (2.4 m) in diameter and ran between Warren Street and Murray Street.

I read an article in Scientific American about the pneumatic subway many years ago. One of the big concerns at the time was the effect of the driving vacuum on women, who were, or so it was believed, already oxygen starved because of their tight corsets.

William “Boss” Tweed of Tammany Hall would not support the transit project. Beach circumvented the lack of political support by claiming he was installing pneumatic postal tubes. The pneumatic transit never expanded further but served for three years as a tourist attraction. Beach charged riders 25 cents a ride, which he donated to the Union Home and School for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans. During its first two weeks of operation, the Beach Pneumatic Transit sold over 11,000 rides and over 400,000 total rides.

While the pneumatic subway only lasted three years, Beach’s pneumatic mail system ran until 1953. Physical letters were delivered almost instantaneously. Such a pneumatic mail system may be considered an early or transitional form of the internet – part of the unstoppable march towards the singularity and worldwide connectedness,