March 7th, 1965 was a Sunday, and when police attacked a peaceful group marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama it became known as  “Bloody Sunday.”  That was fifty years ago today and the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York has assembled a remarkable retrospective by three contemporary photographers: Spider Martin, Charles Moore and James Barker.  An excellent web view can be found on the CBS News site.

This, I believe, is really one of those instances when the images truly speak for themselves and tell the whole story without words.  The public attention raised by these images at the time led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 19654.. The irony however, remains tat we are still a half century later conflicted by race and we may reflect on what Martin Luther King said on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on March 25, 1965. Twenty five thousand people marched to the capitol to hear the speech.

“The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. … I know you are asking today, How long will it take? I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long.”

When I was growing up I had a friend who had a collection of NASA photographs and pamphlets.  These were the days of the original “Right Stuff,” and all you had to do to get these items was write to NASA, and they would send them to you for free.  I mention this, because yesterday I read on CNN that there was an auction at Bloomsbury Auctions in London on February 26 of vintage NASA memorabilia; so my mind came naturally back to my friend, whose name, btw, I have quite forgotten.  Such are the tricks and vagaries of of time.

The photographs from this sale brought back a lot of memories, conjuring up the same excitement as when I first saw them forty or fifty years ago.  But what really struck me were the ones that I had not seen.  Let me mention in particular the photograph of Buzz Aldrin taken on the Gemini 12 mission.  This image may well be the first selfie taken in space.    And then I contemplated in amazement a photograph of the Earth taken from a V2 rocket on October 24, 1946.  This was the first photograph taken of from space.  And how is space defined.  Glad you asked, space begins at the so-called Karmin line, which lies 100 km or 62.5 miles above the Earth.

There is, I believe, an important lesson here.  Look at these photographs and notice how many feature the Earth as either subject or background.  As human inhabitants we are defined by our planet.  We are of it, and as hard as we may try to leave it, we must ever remain nostalgic for it.

Remarkably Monday was the seventieth anniversary of the taking of what is widely viewed as the most famous and iconic World War II photograph, the raising of the American Flag on Iwo Jima.  The image was taken on February 23, 1945 by war photographer Joe Rosenthal.  It carries with it the story that it was posed. Thom Patterson for CNN has set the record straight on this.  As it turns out a first flag was raised, but then it was decided that a larger one should replace it so that it could be seen by fighters below.  It was this second flag-raising that Rosenthal photographed – a rare second chance in the world of missed phot opportunities.  As Patterson aptly points out this image “went viral” by 1945 standards and raised the hopes of a nation that the war might eventually end.

For us, it is the ultimate meme of Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” And as all good meme images it takes on a much greater life and much deeper meaning.  It signifies ultimate sacrifice and supreme bravery.  But most significantly it signifies the selfless gift of one generation at one moment in time tosubsequent generations.

It was exactly what Thomas Paine was talking about nearly two centuries earlier (1775-1783):

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

Figure 1 – Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum by Hugh Welch Diamond, 1850 – 1858, Albumen silver print from glass negative 19.1 × 14 cm (7.5 × 5.5 in). From the En Wikimepedia and in the public domain because of its age.

A curious recurring photographic theme is “The face of madness,” which tend to be a series of portraits of inmates at asylums, hospitals, and half-way houses.  I have seen several of these.  But they all have their roots in the 19^th century and began with the, then, ground breaking, work of Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 – 1886). He was an early specialist in the new science of psychiatry and was appointed to Brookwood Hospital, the second Surrey County Asylum. Diamond was also a founding member of the Photographic Society, ultimately becoming its Secretary and editor of the Photographic Journal. For a series of his images see.

It was common belief at the time that “madness” could be read in the faces of a person, which was, of course, an offshoot of the field of phrenology.  Perhaps, this is an early form of “profiling,” now so common in world airports.  Our faces are to be read and assessed by digital cameras and computers. We have to ask who is mad now?

In terms of photographic opus the results of Diamond’s efforts form a revealing and not unsympathetic step backwards into the world of the poor souls condemned to these places.  This is the world of “Blackwell’s Island” and “Bedlam,” of 19^th century “it runs in the family.”  We have spoken of the way in which we seem to communicate mutely with the subjects of old photographs and here it is even more profound, because you wonder exactly what was in the minds of these people.  An image such as that of Figure 1 demands the question whether the smiling face is that of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s wife imprisoned in the attic in the novel Jane Eyre.

Figure 1 – Big Pink Heart postcard Valentine’s from ~ 1910. From the Wikimedia Commmons and in the public domain because it was first published before 1923.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.  I thought that we should celebrate with this early twentieth century photographic postcard image from circa 1910 – a Big Pink Heart Valentine’s.  There is not enough information available; so we have to guess that the original was perhaps an autochrome.  They definitely had a great love for redheads in those days.  The image has some very classic pictorialist features, the toga, the hair style, the headband, and the sense of fecundity that the figure portrays.  In this last regard I am reminded of the bride in “The Arnolfini Wedding 1434,” a painting where every little detail signifies something.

The nice thing about the image and about Valentines Day, in general, is the theme of love.  The world could use a whole lot of love about now, and the fact that our grand and great grand parents would have sighed and said the same thing a century ago as we say now about the need for love is really kind of pathetic.

So my recommendation is that we all hold our loved ones tight this Valentines Day! Spread the love, people.<3

Figure 1 – “LRO Tycho Central Peak” by NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – LRO. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LRO_Tycho_Central_Peak.jpg#mediaviewer/File:LRO_Tycho_Central_Peak.jpg

A few days ago I wrote about NASA’s new photomontage of the Andromeda Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space telescope. At 4.3 Gb this is by today’s standards actually a pretty modest image. But it did get me wondering what exactly was the current record holder for world’s largest digital photograph.  Well Wikipedia to the rescue! Wikipedia claims that when it comes to digital the largest image is also from NASA but is a high resolution map of the moon.  It is 681 gigapixels, was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter over four years (2010 to 2013) and is composed of 10,581 images.  This image of the lunar surface has its own website where you can zoom in and out and navigate to specific features.  Figure 1 is a spectacular image a part of the composite of Tycho crater’s central peak complex casting  a long, dark shadow at local sunrise.  And the best part is that part of the mission’s purpose is to reconnoiter the dimensions of potential landing sites.

Hmm!  It is a veritable winter wonderland outside. The snow is falling fast.  The great thing about snowstorms on a Saturday morning is that you can drink your coffee and conemplate how beautiful it is, withput any concern about having to drive in it. 8<)  And, of course, your mind is free to wander to colder and snowier places.

 So it is very much to the point or on my mind that The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust has announced the discovery of a cache of 100 year old negatives from the hut at Cape Evans built by Captain Robert Falcon Scott but used by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Transanarctic Expedition which wintered there in 1915-1916.  This is the other side of the story of the Worst Journey in the World.

The trust has found, and painstakingly restored and conserved a box of cellulose nitrate negatives found in the huts long abandoned darkroo,century-old photographic negatives found in a hut that served as base camp for the earliest Antarctic expeditions – literally frozen in time for a century. The cellulose nitrate negatives were clumped together in a small box in the hut’s long-abandoned darkroom.

The images are just a bit haunting in that they speak to us from isolation.  Yes they are a time capsule.  But even a century ago these explorers were isolate from the world, a world at the time exploding in the grip of the First World War.

From Reuters, January 11, 2015, Paris, France.