Hmm!  I keep coming back to a photoessay by street photographer Babycakes Romero on the BBC this week entitled The Death of Conversation that shows people not talking to one another,  instead engrossed in their cell phones. Romero believes that “Smartphones have made everyone seriously dull.” We have spoken a lot about this question on this blog as well as the related value, or lack thereof, of the myriad of cell phone images uploaded each day, and Romero’s view certainly has merit.

When I grew up in New York City years ago, if you wanted to survive on the street or the subways the key was learning to look through people indifferently and under no circumstances were you to speak to the crazy person on the train.  I had a summer job with the New York City Department of Revenue and there was this woman who would fight with herself, screaming and yelling, all the way to the Worth Street stop.  To my surprise, I was sent one day to deliver something the the “Eigth Floor” and there she was holding down her day job, while remaining a raving lunatic by night.  So abstraction is certainly a defense.  It may not so much be a rejection of other people as a protection of oneself against being rejected. And at the same time, it is reassuring that should you panic, help is just a phone call away. Your friends, your support are always there with you. My son told me that there are parties now where you leave your phone in a basket at the door and if you come back to it you pay a fine. There’s a way for enterprising hosts to make cash on the side, from friends desparate for that little blast of dopamine that comes with each text or email.

But as we have discussed previously, are we more or less connected?  Look at the people in Romero’s images.  The picture is one of self-imposed isolation.  Sure, but each one of those people is a node on a connectivity network, you know like the Borg Continuum.  If you believe in a world with six degrees of separation, then the network that each of those people are connected to is staggering in size.  In that regard, they are so much more widely connected than they would be if, perish the thought, they put their phones down and spoke to the people next to them.

The other image that Romero’s images bring to my mind is that what was previously a social continuum is now quantized into individual cells.  I keep thinking of the way that convective vortexes separate and create cells on the surface of a cup of coffee.  There are many physical systems that quantize in this way and interestingly the force behind the separation usually requires interaction between the individuals, even if it is a negative one.  A few months back I remember watching a pretty young girl at Starbucks pull out her cellphone and pose for a selfie.  It is as if to say, I am me, I am a quantum unit.  But I ask you, whom is she saying that to?  Would she have taken that selfie, made that assertion if there was no one there?

The isolation in the faces of the people in these photographs is in fact nothing new, it not only predates the cell phone, but it spans all of human history.  We are within ourselves.  There is the inner voice in constant conversation with us.  We assume, but can never be sure, that everyone else has their own inner voice.  So people are both desperately alone and desperate to be connected. Do not be fooled by the isolation.  We all still want to be noticed and loved. We all are still lonely, despite all our IPhones and selfies.

The Victorians were big on postmortem photography – a last memory of the dearly departed, and if you think about it, it was not so unreasonable a use of the newly created magic art that captured just a bit of the person’s soul and placed it “forever” on a silver plate.  Of course, as we have learned from all those long lost daguerreotypes, “forever” is a relative span.

But a bit less forgiving of a person’s last demeanor than postmortem photography is posthumous photography. Last year I posted about the exhumation of Richard III in a English parking lot, and honestly Richard did not look so good, even worse than Shakespeare has him, which is pretty bad:

“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
 Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
 I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
 To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
 I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
 Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
 Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
 Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
 And that so lamely and unfashionable
 That dogs bark at me as I halt by them”

I had thought, perhaps it was hoped, that we had seen the last of posthumous images. But no…..! Forensic scientists in Spain have announced that they have found the 400 year old tomb of Miguel de Cervantes.  They have exhumed a jumble of bones that appear to include Cervantes himself, those of his wife, and other family members buried with him in Madrid’s Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians.  Several pictures have been released of the Cervantes’.   They are, not surprising in much the same state as the last Plantagenet king of England.   Which is perhaps not surprising in light of what Cervantes himself said about death:

“Well, there’s a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or another.”

Figure 1 – Reproduction of a daguerreotype from 1840 of Hannah Stilley Gorby, perhaps the person with the earliest birth date ever photographed. In the public domain because of its age.

Figure 1 is a reproduction of a daguerreotype taken in 1840 of Hannah Stilley Gorby, who was born around 1746.  The around part is important because Mrs. Gorby is believed, by many, to be the earliest born person ever photographed.  This is a controversial point among people like me who worry about such distinction.  So I will not say it with any certainty.

I was thinking about Hannah this morning when I came upon an interesting article on the web from the Archaeological Institute of America  that the world’s oldest pretzel had been unearthed in Bavaria. Indeed, on Thursday this pretzel went on display in Regensburg, Germany.  “The remains of a pretzel, a roll, and a croissant, all dating to some 250 years ago, were found at a site where the remains of a wooden house thought to be 1,200 years old have also been unearthed.”

I am not sure that this truly represents photography news, but it is curious news just the same. And the remains of the deceased are carefully on display wrapped in styrofoam and mounted atop a photograph of a modern pretzel bavariensis.

When we look at the photograph of Hannah Gorby, we invariably wonder what those ancient eyes saw and we are grateful that she and her contemporaries spared the pretzel in question. I echo the comment of Regensburg’s mayor Joachim Wolbergs that “this discovery is really extraordinary, because it depicts a snippet of everyday life.”

I might suggest that it seems possible that the meaning of human life resides in a pretzel.  It is a snippet of life that we are oh so comfortable and familiar with that we can certainly see ourselves sitting down by the fire with Mrs. Stilley Gorby or her contemporary the baker of the Regensburg pretzel, yes to nosh on pretzels and to seek her view of things, her perspective, her feelings about the world and about life.  And all that would interfere with this bucolic if impossible scene, other than the realities of time, would be some artificial distinction of race, nationality, or religion some arcane point of philosophy that nobody truly understands but upon which we have constructed the prejudices of the world.

Have you ever noticed the strange way in which vertical cell phone video is displayed on tv news.  Here’s an example. Obviously the problem that the news stations are trying to address is what to do with all the extra space that the vertical format leaves open.  I did a search this morning and was amazed to learn that it’s a rather heated topic.  Our desktops and laptops cry out for horizontal image formats, and there are even those who are calling for a ban (self-imposed) on vertical formats.  Some even want vertical photographs to be a thing of the past.

The problem of format pops up time and time again.  Even as seemingly simple a task as formatting a webpage becomes complicated when there are so many formats that it is going to be viewed in.  I love HatiandSkoll on my laptop, on my IPhone not so much.

Still when it comes to artistic photography, I think that we still need the freedom to crop to our aesthetic hearts’ desires.  I tend to try to standardize my photographs around common print sizes (aspect ratios): horizontal 6 X 4 or vertical 4 X 6. This makes it easy to order borderless prints.  Occasionally, I will go 10 X 8 or 8 X 10.  And recognize that is in itself a throw-back to the dinosaur ages of film photography.  But I often receive messages from photographer friends, who suggest cutting out a little of this or a little of that.  These people are clearly of the school that aesthetics is the key, that there should be no standardization, and that the subject defines the aspect ratio. Again this is a throw-back, but not necessarily wrongly so, to the cretaceous, when one of the final steps in print production was trimming of the print.

So here’s the point, if you are going to take videos on your IPhone that you might send in to your local tv news station, I recommend yielding to convention and shooting horizontal.  If you are putting all your images up on a webpage, you are likely to be happier with uniformity; so pick a format and try to stick with it.  Few things look sloppier than a set of thumbnails all of different size.  This is why I have tried to standardize my photographs. For your artistic work be prepared to crop to the exceptional format when the image demands.  And note that in all of these cases, the visual trumps.  The issue is what aspect of visual presentation is most important to you.