Figure 1 -Fred R. Archer’s 1915 portrait of Edward Weston. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of its age.

I have been reading Mary Street Alinder’s new book “Group f.64.” I think there shall be more on that book to come.  But last night I read a quotation from Edward Weston’s Day Books where he compared himself with Alfred Steiglitz.  I think that nearly a century later the conflict between the Group f.64 on the west coast and Steiglitz’ Photosecession on the east sees rather antiquated and beyond the point.  We can safely love both point of view.  But coming on the heels of my New Years photographic resolutions what Weston said could easily be a timeless resolution for all photographers in all years. So I thought that I really should share it with all of you.

“But it has come to me of late that comparing one man’s work to another’s, naming one greater or lesser, is a wring approach.

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities. What a marvelous world if all would, could hold this attitude toward life.”

Happy New Year everyone! Couples, young and old, have kissed and toasted the New Year at celebrations all around the world, and we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.

I have been scouring the “Year in Pictures series for 2014” and found lots of spectacular and gorgeous images, just not too much that was positive and uplifting.  I mean if the best that we can do are sports images, we are in serious trouble! However the New Year is meant to represent a fresh start, a blank slate upon which shall be recorded the events of the coming year.  So, let’s at least try to be optimistic.  The future, after all, is really up to us. So let’s dig deep into the wellspring of our common humanity.

In the end what struck me as closest to my feelings this January 1, 2015 about where we are today, at this precise moment in time, is a remarkable image by Marco Secchi for Getty images showing a visitor walking inside the installation by Doug Wheeler at a preview of the new exhibition last April, The Illusion of Light, at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. For me the photograph emphasizes that photographically, intellectually, and in terms of experience the New Year is indeed a tabula rasa. By this time next year the whiteness will be filled vividly with another set of images expressing the common experiences of mankind.  And perhaps we may find hope in the fact that the only reason that photography works is because we are all connected.

We have spoken in the past about hobbyist drones, both in terms of what they offer as a new means of photographic creativity and what they mean for the future. As Amazon thinks about drone delivery, they might well be advised to recall the old television ads for Chiffon Margarine – “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

Drone photography enthusiast Christopher Schmidt took his quadcopter drone to Magazine Beach Park in Cambridge, MA  to photograph the Boston skyline this past week.  As it turns out he was violating the airspace of a hawk that did not hesitate to claim its territorial rights as raptors have done for at least 100 million years.  Schmidt caught the whole, albeit brief, dogfight on drone-cam.  The hawk attacked and Schmidt mindful of not hurting the bird immediately shut down the propellers.  Propellers being required for lift and flight, the quadcopter plummeted to Earth landing unceremoniously upside down as the camera documents.  It is perhaps a harbinger of things to come.

I can see the future of package tracking:

Tuesday 7:30 pm order received.

Tuesday 8:00 pm left service center, Louisville, KY.

Wednesday 1:05 am en route.

Wednesday 1:45 am attacked by hawk, whereabouts thereabouts.

George Shuba died at 89 this past Monday.  Back in the 1950’s he played in three world series for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  But today what Shuba is best remember for is a minor league game. Shuba reached out his hand as a welcoming gesture to Jackie Robinson on the day that  Robinson broke the color barrier and integrated baseball.  The moment was captured by an AP photographer in a famous photograph?

Famous photograph?  I am amazed at how many images are stored up in my brain and instantly recognized for the story that they tell.  We tend to catalogue them as well.  Black and white images, especially fuzzy grainy ones, are safely categorized as “of the distant path.”  That is until we examine them closely and recognize that while we have come so far, we still have so far to go. So many images introspectively reveal this sort of ambiguity.  Images of war, human brutality, civil rights, and women’s rights are all obvious examples.

I think a significant point.  Because such images are not merely relics.  They tell us where we’ve been, and when we are honest, they continue from there to tell us both where we are and we we need to be.  As such, they are so much more than simply history.  Such photographs are living, breathing, and organic.

Figure 1- Image from Mars Rover showing putative “Thigh Bone.” From NASA and in the public domain.

Well jumpin’ pareidolia! The world of UFO enthusiasts and other wanna believers was set into an internet frenzy with NASA’s release last week of an image (see Figure 1) from the Mars Rover showing what looks very much like a human thigh bone.  Well sometimes a rock is just a rock, and such is the case here. Sorry!

I want to admit that there is nothing that would excite me more than the discovery of a fossil on Mars. And while Mars Rover has conclusively shown that Mars was once dripping in water, geologists and exobiologists think it very unlikely that Mars ever harbored large creatures – the atmosphere and environment are not believed to have ever been sufficiently sustaining for evolution to progress in that direction.

On the other hand, we may continue to wonder what if – and such is the thought provoking nature of images like this.  Mars indeed has long been a refuge for seeing things, for associating natural inanimate phenomena with objects of human or even divine origin.  There were the “Canals of Mars,” the “Face on Mars, “the Mars Rat,” and now this thigh bone.

Two years ago when I launched this blog, I promised that one of the points that it would feature was the pure magic of photographs.  Well, the Martian Thigh Bone now joins the ranks of images that titillate and fire off the associative neurons of our brains.  Just as we post our selfies in pursuit of connection, just as we look at nineteenth century photographs and see connectivity, so too we look at the alien worlds that NASA brings into crystal clarity and seek something familiar, a connection with what we know that goes beyond a bit of iron rich rock lying in the sand.  We seek the magic of the image.