About a week ago I blogged about famous photographic kisses and yesterday a kiss of note came up on the web. This was of former President Jimmy Carter, who is currently battling cancer, kissing his wife of 69 years, Rosyln, during an Atlanta Braves game – all very sweet! So we have two of the great love’s of President Carter’s life, his wife and the Atlanta Braves.  All of this was caught on the MLB Web Cam at the Atlanta Braves park.

Web Cams are one of those peculiar phenomena of the twenty-first century, and particularly peculiar are these “Kiss Cams.” Kiss Cams in a sense a voyeurs. In another sense they offer up that little bit of fame that people seek, those few moments of being on reality TV – hint there is no reality to TV. On the other hand (wait that’s three) baseball games are long and can be quite boring since they are filled with long periods of time when the players are doing nothing. In fact, that’s kinda most of the time. And in reality there is no more frustrating and disgusting moment than to watch players and coaches chew and spit tobacco. Indeed, and much to his credit, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh signed an ordinance on September 9th banning smokeless tobacco like dip, snuff and chewing tobacco at all city sports venues — both professional and amateur.  I am afraid however, that come next season there will be a lot of sunflower seeds flying around Fenway Park.

As an aside here, chewing tobacco has a long and sordid history in the United States. English novelist Charles Dickens derided tobacco spitting in a commentary on his 1842 tour of the United States.  The author ridiculed Washington, D.C., as “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” and observed that the “most offensive and sickening” practice of tobacco spitting was visible in “all the public places of America…”  Signs in hospitals and other public buildings implored chewers to use spittoons, rather than the floors or marble columns.  In some parts of the country, the filthy “custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.”

But back to the other saliva-based sport, namely kissing, after sixty-nine years the Carters have definitely perfected their art and their kiss offered weary American viewers a welcome break not just from the baseball game, but it also trumped the boredom of last Wednesday’s Republican Presidential Debate. There is no greater sport in America than politics, and I am rapidly getting to the point where I would rather they just shut up and chewed tobacco.

Figure 1 -Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, albumen print, 7 October 1863 showing the Rossetti family. Original in the NPG London and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

I spoke on Saturday about Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris. One of his paintings that I described was “Ecce-Ancilla-Domini-the-Annunciation.” You might wonder who the model for the Virgin Mary was. It was his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894). Christina Rossetti was a poet, prominent in Pre-Raphaelite circles, who upon the death of Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861) ascended to the “throne” of leading female English poet.

I got interested in searching for photographs of Christina Rossetti. As it turned out, there are very few, but dominant among these is an 1863 image by none other than Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carol) (1832-1898).  It is shown here as Figure 1. Left to right in the photograph is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Georgina Rossetti, their mother Frances Polidori, (who coincidentally was the sister of Lord Byron‘s friend and physician, John William Polidori), and their father Gabriele Rossetti.

This is not one of Dodgson’s greatest photographic works. But for its age, the photographer, and the subjects it would be easily dismissed. But it offers up one of those captured moments of the nineteenth century that I am so fond of. It is as close as you are going to get to an 1863 “snapshot.” In that respect you feel almost as a voyeur looking at it, intruding on a family’s intimacy on a gorgeous summer’s day – what a mere century and a half ago.

As denizens of the twenty-first century, with our long history of science fiction, you can almost imagine that they have a dim awareness of us. When you take a photograph you commit it by default to posterity. It is meant to be looked at, the subjects remember, ideally with a fondness. Firs it is seen by family and friends, then perhaps descendants, but in the end inevitably by strangers, who you can only hope will view it with respectful tenderness.  Christina Georgina Rossetti herself had these beautiful words to say about remembrance:

Figure 1 – The author with his father, Hyman Wolf, on the lower East Side of Manhattan along the East River in 1954. Digitized black and white print. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Today would have been my father’s birthday – his 103rd birthday to be precise. And I always like to remember him on his birthday. So today I am posting another one those faces from the past images. Here I am with my dad in 1954. Don’t do the math. It’s depressing. We are along the East River in New York City, somewhere South of Fourteenth Street as evidenced by the Con Ed steam plant in the distance. I have said this before. My father loved New York City and everything that it stood for in his day.

This is another one of those contact prints (I believe) from a 2 1/4″ x 2 1/4″  twin lens reflex that my dad took. These were commercially printed and that contributed hugely to the mediocrity of the image quality. I found a lot of dead unused greys at the lower end and the image wasn’t too sharp. So I did some histogram equalization, sharpening, gamma manipulation, and just a touch of sepia toning. The result is almost reasonable except for the bleached out sky. This would have really benefited from a K2 filter or some such.And I find that painting in clouds in Photoshop, just a bit extreme.

Still there we are. Are we preserved for posterity? It had been troubling me that my parents had little or no web presence; so I am happy to say that through the agency of Hati and Skoll and this blog, if you do a search of “Hyman Wolf,” my dad now pops up, along with somewhat more famous Hyman Wolfs. But I must warn you not to look for fame or immortality on the internet. It is a fragile and ephemeral thing. When I die, if the subscription fee for this website isn’t paid, then poof! It will all be gone.

Well, maybe not quite. There are internet archives. That is a relief, not so much for the illusion of immortality but more for the ability of researchers in the future to be able to figure us out. We are rapidly foregoing print for fragile bits of information. There is the value of search ability – I mean amazing and extreme search ability.  You have to wonder what the researchers and librarians of the future will think of all the silly selfies that seem to define our age.

Librarians? Will there be librarians a hundred years from now. I have to think so. In my lifetime, I have seen them adapt. Many have stopped cataloging books but are ever ready to help you with the Boolean complexity of information searching. I have heard many times how all you need to do today is type a plain English question and the search engine answers it. Don’t believe that! There is still an art to searching and hence a need for librarians both to help you find it and on a higher level to keep order to the information.

In any event, I have no delusions of immortality for either me or my father. It is not to be found on the internet or elsewhere. Still there we are, or rather were.  Happy Birthday, dad!

Figure 1 – “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David” from the Wikipedia and in the public domain in the United States

Socrates, in the Phaedrus, recounts the story of how the god Thamus, ruler of the Thebians reacts to the baboon headed god, Theuth’s, introduction of writing:

“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Hmm! Crank forward 2500 years and we might as well be talking about the internet!

I was thinking the other day about the callous on my right middle finger.  When I was in school this callous, spawned by writing and gripping pencils, was much larger and often painful, from too much or too intense writing.  Today people write less and less, cursive script is evaporating in favor of printing, which is certainly much more user friendly for writing on a Microsoft Surface, if you are seeking character recognition.  The other day I was reading scientific references at work, searching for them.  I leaned back in my chair to relax my eyes and found myself outright annoyed any time that the computer demanded that I lean forward to actually type on my key board.  Of course, the callous on my middle finger only yields to replacement by other maladies of repetitive action, eyestrain and carpels.

Still there is nothing that I like more than the freedom of creativity afforded by digital photography.  The taking is easier.  The processing is easier.  Color is infinitely more accessible than in the film days.  In face, and arguably so, the only thing that seems complex is what to do with, how to index, all these huge files that I am taking.

Photography is an interesting example of technological evolution.  Digital photography arrives and rapidly everything becomes automated and precise.  But consumers rebel and demand a through back. They don’t want to look at flat miniature screens, they want the feel of the single lens reflex back.  And camera designers obliged.  It is a lot like the cell phones.  Miniaturization worked to a point, but now aging eyes are demanding larger formats.

Maybe this last point is important.  The shamans of technology have a hard time creating a need where there isn’t one – at least not for any real length of time.  Technology is driven by demand and by the demand for economy of cost. Nobody in this day and age would put up with a pile of yucky and sticky failed Polaroid instant prints at their feet at a dollar a pop.

Something important happened yesterday, a rare good moment, and I started to wonder which photographs, fifty years from now, will commemorate it. The moment was the publication in the British medical journal “The Lancet” of preliminary results of the successful testing of the VSV-EBOV vaccine against Ebola virus. Development of this vaccine was begun by the Public Health Agency of Canada and then developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck. It was a very long, grueling, and dangerous process.

These are heroes. When I was in high school and college, people who applied to medical school had to write an essay about “Why I want to go to medical school.” Probably they still do. A common answer in those days was “I realized that I wanted to become a doctor when I read Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith in high school. Arrowsmith tells the tale of a bright and scientifically minded Martin Arrowsmith as he makes his way from a small town in the American Midwest to become a leading physician and scientist. Along the way he puts himself in harm’s way, when he faces an outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional Caribbean island. Over the years I’ve wondered how many of these same doctors would live up to the standards of Lews’ hero and put themselves selflessly in harm’s way. And I have to say that I know several medical doctors who do that. These are heroes.

Today when I meet someone who says he or she wants to go to medical school, I ask them if they’ve read Arrowsmith. They look at me blankly and shake their heads. Such is the degradation of American literacy.

I think and hope that the world will long note and long remember these heroes of the Ebola war, who faced not only a deadly disease but in many cases the dangers of armed conflict for the sake of humanity. So I celebrate them.

As for which photographs will become mimetic or iconic, for now I will have to go with one from the the MSP that I saw yesterday on the BBC News.

Figure 1 – First image of Mars taken on July 14, 1965 by Mariner IV. From NAA and in the public domain.

The beautiful images that are still coming in from last week’s New Horizon’s fly-by of Pluto brings us back to some of the earliest satellite images of other planets. To get a real sense of the improvement in image resolution and quality, we should consider Figure 1, which is the very first image sent back to Earth from Mars by Mariner IV. This was taken fifty years ago last week on July 14, 1965. Mariner’s images were taken from 6,200 miles to 10,500 miles above the Martian surface.

A second Martian first, the first image from the surface of Mars, was taken taken by the Viking 1 lander shortly after it touched down on the planet’s surface nineteen years ago tomorrow on on July 20, 1976. This is shown as Figure2.

When you look at these pictures and compare them to the New Horizon images, you see the evolution of digital photography. Indeed, many of the advances that have enabled low-cost digital imagery today, come from the US space program. Think about this about that the next time you take a snap of the kids. I will avoid a discussion of whether the advent of the selfie is a positive or a negative result of space exploration.

My ears perked up last week, when I heard NASA say that the Pluto fly-by marked the end of their initial survey and exploration of the solar system. In that statement lies the promise of the future. I remember vividly studying in elementary school the European sea explorations that ended in the discovery of the Americas. This “event” lasted over two centuries. They called it the “New World,” which is a term that expressed their sense of wonder and the future.

Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” is set in this mysterious New World and speaks to the magical wonder it evoked in the minds of men and women in that day.

“We all were sea-swallow’d, though some cast again,

and by that destiny to perform an act

Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.“

Figure 2 – First image of the surface of Mars, July 19, 2006 from NASA and in the public domain.