Let me start with Figure 1. This is a stunning image of a Great white shark taken off Isla Guadalupe, Mexico on August 2006 by Terry Goss. It was shot with a Nikon D70 in an Ikelite housing under natural light. The shark is estimated to be 11-12 feet (3.3 to 3.6 m) in length. Beautiful picture, yes? And there are a couple of points. First, humans live in a largely two-dimensional world. As a result, and second, when we enter the water we are giving up a certain amount of control, where we are not necessarily on the top of the food chain.

This takes me to what is referred to as “Chrissie’s last swim” from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller “Jaws.” Chrissie has been a bad girl, well not really just livin’ the dream of Girls Just Want to have Fun, and is just a bit intoxicated, when she goes for her last swim. I’ve included a link here to the film clip, just to remind everyone of the absolutely visceral terror that the scene evokes. It is a cinematographic masterpiece. The scene is dark and grainy. You struggle to make out what is going on. And, of course, as is standard early in great horror movies, you don’t actually see the monster shark. You just hear Chrissie’s screams for help and her periodic violent disappearances beneath the surface.

Well, imagine that we fast forward forty one years. Chrissie is still running towards the water and shedding her clothes. But in a moment of lucidity and caution she pulls out her cell phone to check the Shark App to determine if there are any dangerous sharks in the area. “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!”

Well that little bit of fantasy has taken one step closer to reality. The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy in collaboration with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the Cape Cod National Seashore, and officials of Cape Cod and South Shore Towns has recently released “Sharktivity.” You can report shark sightings, follow shark activity, and receive shark alerts, as in “Stay out of the Water, Folks.”  This app is modeled after Uber, which certainly creates the image of “Hello, this is your Great White tag CC2015GW16. I will be arriving to eat you in approximately 5 minutes. Please confirm your location.” And then you get to see a little map with a pin at your location and observe a little shark icon moving ominously towards you. Dah dumph.

I’ve actually loaded this on my IPhone ,and it is, for the present, a bit sparse. But, and here, is the really important point, it is representative a form of international connectivity that is not usually discussed. Connectivity is much more than a modern-day Chrissie sharing her selfie with friends on Facebook. It is the sharing of scientific and scholarly information. Hmm, isn’t that what the internet was originally created for? There is a mass of geophysical and other data basically open and free on the internet, and scientists and scholars everywhere are free to use and analyze it.  Apps such as Sharktivity are meant to promote connectivity to nature, much like eagle- and panda-cams. They are meant to connect us, as we were born to be, to our planet and to nature.

“Supposin that he says
Your lips are like cherries
Or roses or berries
Whatcha gonna do?
Supposin that he says
That yer sweeter than cream
And he’s gotta have cream or die
Whatcha gonna do when he talks that way?
Spit in his eye?”

Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Oklahoma“

I have blogged before about mannequins and their various state of dehumanization: the loss of face, the loss of features, even the all pervasive loss of heads. They are the ultimate of abstractions – diminished to emphasizing whatever body parts are necessary to sell clothing. Today I came upon the latest in this trend – a bald, ghost white, and featureless visage upon which ruby lips have been painted or is it decaled. There is something very odd, enigmatic, and disturbing about it. What are they trying to say to us?

First of all, there seems to be the implicit assumption that the lips have been added to nothingness. That is, we assume that it is not the other way around, where the lips the mouth are the last feature to disappear. You know like the Cheshire Cat. The loss of humanity in the Cheshire cat was recognized by Julian Huxley in his “Religion Without Revelation:“

““Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.”

I am just saying that there is something deeply disturbing to be found in a face with only lips. It is as if, in parting, the face was kissed by someone else’s lipstick coated lips. That is someone empathetic of the mannequin’s plight.  Therein, I think, lies the essence of the the paradox of the only-lipped mannequin. Lips speak, and they speak of intimacy.  In that regard they are the most humanizing of features. Walk around your local mall or store and you can become a “little creeped out” by the faceless and headless mannequin army. But give them lips and they become just a little bit more human.

“It’s tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won’t drink from my glass.”

Rodney Dangerfield

I’d like today to follow up on yesterday’s blog “Mysteries of the Belle Époque.

”Mystery I – One of my absolute favorite autochromes from the turn of the twentieth century is Andre Hachette’s stunning c 1907 photograph of the equally stunning Miss Sarah Lievine (Figure 2). After a lot of searching I have still not been able to figure out anything about Sarah Lievine. I keep hoping that someday I will. Indeed, I hope that some reader will have some knowledge of her. But for now this Mystery of the Belle Époque remains.

Mystery 2 – Last August I posted what I referred to as photographs of a young couple by portrait artist Napoleon Sarony from c 1871. The gentlemen is shown in Figure 1. I purchased the two images together and the dealer referred to them as a young couple and I could create a story about them in my mind. Of course, it was equally possible that the two were not related. One could not be sure. Well, I have since looked at a lot of Napoleon Sarony and contemporary portraits – particularly those of actors. I now am pretty sure that the gentleman in Figure 3 is the same although slightly older person seen in Figure 1.

Figure 3 is a portrait by Gurney & Son of the then famous actor McKee Rankin. So I am pretty convinced that it is the same person in the two photographs – this just by looking at a lot of photographs, which is pretty remarkable. The lady in my original blog is not however Rankin’s wife, Kitty Blanchard – so that mystery remains. Rankin was extremely successful in his day and was a key player in the development of American theater. He was a founder of a short-lived acting dynasty: himself, Kitty, and his daughter Phyllis Rankin. His story was itself the stuff of theater. In his youth he was charming, handsome, and highly successful. He married a beautiful wife. But in the end alcohol and financial risk taking led to ruin, obesity, and divorce.

So while one mystery of the Belle Époque has been solved, two remain. There is the question of who was Sarah Lievine, and there is the question of the lady in the crinoline.

 

Yesterday’s posting about Arnold Genthe and Buzzer the Cat poses what I like to refer to as a Mystery of the Belle Époque. It raises the question of exactly who was the spectacularly gorgeous Anna Holch. I suspect that there are students of Women’s Fashion Design who know the answer right away, but actually that is beside the point. There are few puzzles that I love more than a question like “Who was Anna Holch?” And this is because the Belle Époque is just remote enough from us that the embracing tentacles of the internet merely touch and brush against it.

I asked the question of Siri, and she got all confused; so you can see what I mean. The sophistication of the question requires more sophisticated searching or, and more to the point, more sophisticated information coding. But the significant point is that you can ask the question and there is a good chance that it is out there somewhere in cyberspace.

We have often spoken here of the magic of photography. That bewitchingly lies in its ability to hold a century’s old moment – a face – a smile-frozen forever. These are the faces of the nineteenth century and in a sense the ability to name the person and to understand a bit of their lives restores, or reanimates, that life. There is the arguable concept that the coming singularity will merge human and mechanical life, thus rendering it immortal. At least superficially, photography has been doing that for 178 years. That is, it gives immortality through entirely mechanical means. I would suggest that the marriage of photography and the internet deepens or extends this immortality. “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It is as if the effects of the singularity diffuse, seep, and move backward in time.

A beautiful age filled with beautiful people, and that illusion is an important part of the magic. This was the time of our grandparents and great grandparents. I have a portrait on my office wall of my grandmother taken in 1911; so contemporary with Miss Holch’s portrait. Like Anna my grandmother was young and beautiful. I remember her as a sweet old lady, but the silver gelatin reanimates her and returns her to youth. Like H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha she is reborn.

What of Anna Holch? Women of the time typically took their husband’s names. And if I am correct Anna Holch rapidly became Mrs. (or Madame) Tappé after marrying fashion designer Herman Patrick Tappé. Anna Holch was the leading hat model of her day. Rather clever of Genthe to pose her with a mere head-band, don’t you think?  According to the Shelby (Ohio) Historical Society:

“He was the first to use models in his business. One of the girls was Anna Holch. She was known throughout New York City as ‘the beautiful Anna.’ She accepted his proposal for marriage, but Tappe wanted to time the announcement to gain maximum effect. He hosted a grand ball at the armory in Sidney in December of 1918 to celebrate the end of the First World War and announce his engagement. Over 600 people attended the social event of the season. … Local folklore has it that Herman later redecorated some of ‘The Chimneys’ in blue to match the striking blue eyes of Anna.

Over the next two decades, with Anna at his side, Herman Tappe became the rage in ladies’ fashions. In a book entitled The Ways of Fashion, author M.D.C. Crawford hailed Tappe as a “designer of creative imagination and authority,” who “for a generation has been recognized as an artist in costume by the most discriminating fashionables in the United States.” Crawford credited him with being the first American designer to gain international fame.”

So at least this little mystery from the Belle Époque is solved. But there are a couple more that I would like to consider, but those for another time. There is at least one more picture of Anna Holch by Arnold Genthe, but it lacks Buzzer; so in my opinion is not as interesting. As a result, I thought that a more fitting ending for today (although it could spark another mystery) is a photograph by Genthe of Buzzer with his companion Miss Jocelyn Stibbens (later Mrs. Fletcher) created in 1912/13.

I have been blogging and talking to readers a lot recently about the Cthulhu mythos of H.P Lovecraft. These seem dark times, and there is a certain foreboding sense to dark places – hence, long-forgotten ammunition bunkers and twisted, eaten trees.

For those of you who don’t know much about this mythos, it is an ongoing theme in Lovecraft’s work that emphasizes the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors of the universe. Lovecraft made frequent reference to the “Great Old Ones”: a loose pantheon of ancient, and powerful deities from space, who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep.  But – dum dee-dum-dum – they may reawaken if mankind crosses the line and becomes too wicked. Anybody watching the news? So you have a world where dread creatures burrow underground, live like troglodytes, and rise at night to eat the dead. Well, you asked. Oh sorry, actually you didn’t.

These strange creatures travel in Einstein’s four dimensional universe of space-time, which was exciting the scientific community at the time. As a result there can be a loss of correlation between perceptions.  You may listen to the roar of the wind through the trees, the cracking of limbs, the explosions as they plummet to the ground; but look outside and not a leaf is moving

Among the absolute greatest of Lovecraft’s works is a short story entitled “Pickman’s Model.” The story is a dialogue between an unnamed “speaker” and someone named Eliot. It tells us of an encountered with an artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman paints scenes of horror with an amazingly rare skill. And it is a telling point that photography plays prominently in the story’s plot.

“You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.”

But Pickman’s scenes are too vivid and troubling for polite society. He has been “dropped” by the art galleries. The speaker has gone and sought out Pickman and visited the artist’s studio late a night. He is taken down into the basement, a dungeonous place, where Pickman has his studio.

“A large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the studio instead of carting his outfit around the town for this or that view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.“

So Pickman claims that the photographs are used to record backgrounds. But, of course, the speaker soon realizes otherwise. And the story ends with with Pickman and his quest running from blood-curdling scrambing noises and the terrifying revelation by the speaker.

“Don’t ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don’t ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned life-like Pickman’s paintings were—how we all wondered where he got those faces.

Well—that paper wasn’t a photograph of any background, after all. What it shewed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using—and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life.“

In a sense, it all begins with the statement that seeing is believing. But what does seeing mean? It is to see in the flesh and blood with one’s own eyes.  The painter is known to use artifice; so horrible creatures in a painting are merely a manifestation of the disturbed mind of the artist. But a photograph? A photograph could never lie. Of course, we now know otherwise.

 

I’d like to take a break today from the discussion of photography and revisit another favorite theme of this blog – artificial intelligence and the singularity. It relates to digital photography in that digital photography is itself part of this grander scale phenomenon of a redefined man-machine world.

The subject came rushing back to mind this week, when it was reported that the Artificial intelligence Program AlphaGo has defeated for the third time in a row SOuth Korean Go master Lee Se-dol. The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo’s wins are being heralded as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. That is until we call it something else.

For chess we have the so-called Shannon’s number which estimates a minimum number of possible chess games as 10¹²⁰. That, friends, is a very large number. But it pales in comparison to the number of possible Go games, which is calculated to be 2.08168199382×10¹⁷⁰. The point of all of this is that in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov, it was argued that Deep Blue wasn’t really intelligent that it was mere calculating all possible combinations of moves.

But supposedly Go is way too complex to do that and AlphaGo has to simulate  human intelligence.  Humans think along a very complex pathway that is both digital and analog. Significantly, human thinking is a rather slow process compared to digital computing. And I have to point out that when you have a fundamental clock limitation and have to respond faster and faster to more and more complex problems, you’re going to evolve according to your clock. This is not to say that both man and machine aren’t intelligent.

Curiously, this all relates to what is referred to as the AI Effect. Pamela McCorduck wrote: “It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, ‘that’s not thinking’.” Everytime AI is invented, we call it something else, as if the term is inherently anathema, and, of course, it does threaten our fundamental world view. Douglas Hofstadter poignantly expresses this AI effect by quoting Tesler‘s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

It isn’t so. We are ourselves machines and like it are not are sky rocketing to the singularity. Note that I did not say “plummeting.”

Last night I took a respite from the election news and watched the Matt Dammon movie “The Martian.” We have a brilliant future ahead of us, the election of 2016 not withstanding, both humans and machines, as the singularity approaches and the distinction between the two blurs. I am reminded of the film “Ex Machina.” We are way beyond the Turing Test and as the character Nathan tells us:

“One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa… an upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.”

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