It isn’t often that you hear about photography equipment saving lives.  It was a theme in Jurassic Park III when the graduate student and photographer, Billy Brennan, is saved from the raptors by his lucky pack back/camera bag. But in real life not so much.  By the way I love movies where the scientist is the hero! But now we have it stranger than truth … This past week the Johns family from Texas was saved by a selfie stick and the whole event was recorded by the video camera that was attached to the stick.

The Johnses were swimming off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts, when they got caught in a riptide. You probably thought that this was going to be a story about sharks, since sharks have been nibbling on people up and down the East coast this summer.  Derrick Johns used the stick to pull his daughter Erynn 16 towards the shore where a good Samaritan pull her in the rest of the way. Pretty scary stuff!  But as selfie sticks have developed a bad press and are banned from many locations, it may be time to reconsider them as life saving devices. How about a selfie stick defibrillator combination?

A while back, we discussed the importance of the Yosemite Valley as a Mecca for American photographers.  Specifically, I focused on the journey of an intrepid reader of this blog. Now for those of us who are more “arm chair” than real travelers.  Google Earth has sent one of its 360 degree camera up Yosemite’s El Capitan, so that all of us can enjoy the climb without having to suffer the vertigo and high altitude. I guess that I should admit that Google’s imagery is so vivid that I do, in fact, get a bit queasy.

What can it all mean, these cyber journeys? Do they connect us in new ways? Is the planet smaller? Are we better for it?  I guess that as a lover of things robotic, of what we have called robotic eyes, I answer in the affirmative. We are better for the experience. And I hasten to add that it is one thing to see a climbers view of Yosemite, but when we begin to experience in real time robotic images from say a moon of Jupiter it will be something awesome.

Photography continues to stretch us to give us new vision and new ways of interpreting old sites.  It seems totally remarkable that one hundred and seventy-seven years after its invention photography retains that magical sense. And it accomplishes this by forever pushing the envelope of human experience.

It has been brought to my attention by photographer Vincenzo Vitale  that I made an error in attribution in my December 26, 2014 post.  The photograph “Children on a Spiral Staircase” was not taken by Cartier-Besson, but by his second wife photographer Martine Franck. (1938 –  2012). She was a well-known Belgian documentary and portrait photographer and like Cartier-Besson a member of Magnum Photos for over 32 years. She was also co-founder and president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. It is, of course, embarrassing, and I am very grateful to Mr. Vitale for bringing this to my attention.

If you search the web you will find this photograph attributed to Cartier-Besson, all over the place.  That is not a defense but illustrative of just how pervasive the internet can be in diseminating incorrect information. This is why I have gone back to the original posting and added this correction.  It points very clearly to the need to be vigilant of the quality of information that we get from the web.  Our cell phones are ever with us and whenever a question arises we look it up instantly, but are often oblivious to veracity.

In the present case, I believe that it is very important that this beautifully composed and crafted photograph be properly attributed, especially as it draws our attention back to Ms. Franck’s wonderful work. It seems appropriate to quote Martine Franck on photography:

Instead of writing my blog this morning, I find myself endlessly searching the prolific work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004).  Cartier-Bresson is often credited with the “invention” of street photography and he was a founding member of Magnum.  Often associated with Cartier-Bresson is the phrase “the decisive moment.”  It is setting up your camera and then waiting patiently for that moment when the photograph is defined and ready to be snapped with a single press of the (Leica) shutter.  So much of his work is in our collective consciousness as defining the twentieth century – and defining the meaning of “candid photography.” To pause for a few moments in the heart of Cartier-Bressons work is to learn to understand the meaning of phorography.

The image that I have chosen for today’s “Favorite Photographs, 2013” is Cartier-Bresson’s classic and well composed image of children on a spiral staircase.  I believe, but am not sure, that this picture was taken in 1932.  Perhaps a reader can inform me of the correct date and whether it has a title that Cartier-Bresson used.

Cartier-Bresson was a master at using lines, such as the spiral, in defining his pictures.  And even in as static a subject matter as children peering down from a staircase, the spiral creates dynamics.  But of course, with spirals there is something more.  This is, of course, the “Golden Proportion,” the perfect division of a rectangle from an aesthetic point of view, and how by repeatedly dividing progressive rectangles by the “Golden Proportion” one obtains the Fibonacci spiral.  This spiral occurs repeatedly in nature: in, for instance in the shell of the chambered nautilus and the horn of the ram.  It creates a sense of natural perfection.  This is the effect that Cartier-Bresson seeks here. He does not center his spiral at the center of the image but rather so as to divide the image by the Golden Proportion. The position is pretty much perfect* and you wouldn’t really have it any other way.  I suppose that it is best stated in Cartier-Bresson’s own words:

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life.”

* I have measured this approximately.  If you divide the vertical length of the image by the longer distance between the center of the spiral and the top of the image, you get a ratio of ~1.68, which is close enough for government work to the Golden Proportion of 1.62.  The actual size of the photograph is 1.5, which, of course bows to the artistic approximation of the Golden Proportion namely the Golden Rule of Thirds.

Figure 1 – Summertime. (c) DE Wolf 2015

Well, it is June, and June is clearly part of summer. So we have arrived and “the living is easy.”  Smug readers who live in America’s desert Southwest, in Arizona and Nevada, have stopped asking me how I can possibly stand living in Massachusetts. They have all retreated from the terrible and scorching heat into their homes in search of drinking water.  In New England it is gentley warm and breezy, just perfect. We have successfully endured our one cruel season. It is time then to ponder weightier issues than the state of the weather – conundrums like the state of the language.

This past Sunday my wife and I went out for brunch – or as they say nowadays “we went brunching.” Is “brunch” a legitimate verb?  I have opened up the Funk and Wagnall “Standard College Dictionary,” that my friend Shari Benson gave me for my 13th birthday.  It has served me for a long while now, all through high school, college, and graduate school.  There is no “brunching” in Funk and Wagnalls. It served me all the way through the nineties, when the tyranny of the word processor began.  Microsoft Word says yes to “brunching.” I guess that it must be so.

Everyday when I blog or when I write papers at work I see Microsoft take incorrect stands on points of grammar. And eventually a general abhorrence of squiggly green or red underlining gives way to better sense and I accept Bill Gates’ spellings and grammar rules. It seems a bit sad, but I recently found myself surrendering to my greatest pet peeve the transformation of a verb into a noun and then into a totally different verb. Venus transits the Sun. It is a transition of, or really by, Venus. But Venus is not transitioning. It is still transiting – no matter what

You know I am going to leave this big gap here in appreciation of the fact that my computer took a unrequested ten minute break to shut down and update Windows. More cyber-tyranny and just the point that I am making!

anyone in Redmond, WA or Cupertino, CA, for that matter, thinks.

Still I capitulate! We have discussed these crossroads before. Digital vs. analog photography. Drones vs. mail-people. Transit vs. transition. Photography, communications, and language all evolve. Just as sexual reproduction functioned as an accelerator of biological evolution, the internet functions as an accelerator of language evolution. So right does not ultimately lie in a yellowing dictionary on my bookshelf, but rather somewhere in cyberspace which I visit now so much more often.

We are quick, too quick in fact, to make the transition. We plunge care-free and carelessly over the abyss forgetting the role that language plays in our shared identity. But in the end it is inevitable.

Figure 1 – Hubble Space Telescope image of the farthest spectroscopically confirmed galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, (inset).P. Oesch / I. Momcheva / Yale / NASA / ESA / 3D-HST / HUDF09 / XDF public domain.

I haven’t done one of these astronomy blogs in a while, but today I came upon the latest Hubble Space Telescope image and frankly, it takes my breath away. Astronomers have identified a galaxy (EGS-zs8-1) that is 13 billion light-years away, which makes it the most distant galaxy ever measured with the precise spectroscopic method known as red shift.

If you detect hemming and hawing in my voice, you are right.  The suspicion is that there are further objects, but this hasn’t been proven yet spectroscopically. And in science proof is what it’s about, especially in a case like this where the distance means that it was around within a hundred million years or so of the birth of the universe.  I’ll give you that the birthdate number may be ultimately revised as farther still objects are found.  But the point is that this is about as early and as far as it gets.

Think about it this way.  The earliest photograph was 1826. But you may view taking a photograph as a cooperation between subject properly ordered, posed and set, and the snapping of the shutter. If you take a photograph of the sun the process light from sun to camera takes about eight minutes to complete.  Here the whole process took about 13 billion years.  The start way predated Niépce.  The end was almost 200 years after him.

A month ago I posted about some wonderful pictures by BBC photographer Richard Fenton-Smith of Street Art in Kathmandu, Nepal. I am haunted and I think that we have to pause today and remember the victims of the monster Earthquake that hit Nepal yesterday. The photographs and videos that will bring this human tragedy to life for us are just beginning to come in. It is not that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is that there are not words enough.