I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and its relationship to photography lately, in particular about Facebook.  It is a marvel of ingenuity, in that it is free to use.  What is more marvelous than free? Hmm, I seem to remember somebody saying that there was no free lunch. No doubt this and sites like Flickr are ideal ways of sharing photographs with your friends, and posting photographs that you will regret twenty years from now.   Buy hey, this is a kind of narcissistic “live for the moment period in history.”  The problem with Facebook is that it is, or should be, a post for the lowest common denominator kind of place.  Those who are keeping score, whoever they may be (I’m not really sure who they are) count up the number of friends that you have.  So in the mad frenzy for “friendship,” which it isn’t really, you friend everyone on site (sic) and then you have a fundamental problem, anything that you post, text or image, must be shared with everyone.  So if your smart you’re only going to post what you want everyone to see.

I will skip the diatribe on all the dumb people, friends of friends, who insist on posting political BS filled with xenophobic prejudice, sexism, and racism, and well, just plain stupidity.  Yes, you are stupid.  please unfriend me!  I believe in a kinder, gentler world. one filled with beauty and photographs. You, my unfriends, are the polluters of the planet!  Oh sorry, I wasn’t going to talk about this…

Which takes me back to the point.  there are several great photo-groups, known as User Groups, on Facebook: “Black and White,” ” Strictly Black and White,” “Worldwide Photography,” and “Life after People,” to name some of my favorites. And I have seen some beautiful pictures on these groups.  I have also seen some poor taste stuff and even pornographic stuff – there is a line, you know.  If I see for instance a woman in a compromising or suggestive position, I am not shocked, but I am saddened that it doesn’t promote my kinder, gentler world.

The plus side to sites like Facebook is visibility.  It is after all a concentration of friends. I get about equal viewings of my blog on Facebook, where it comes in on an RSS feed, as I do directly to subscribers on my own website.

The real difficulty, I shouldn’t say problem, with Facebook groups lies in the fundamental streaming nature of the site.  Things pour in and, as a result, if you don’t dig for them, are intrinsically ephemeral.  You want to belong to a popular group, because you want your art seen.  But your images rapidly disappear from easy viewing; so in a sense popularity is self-consuming. We can have our fifteen minutes of fame, but nothing more.

Facebook serves what Facebook serves, and I am a big fan of it.  I have also seen some beautiful images on Facebook and despite their limitations, I enjoy the photo-groups.  But, as always the case, with e-technology, where there’s a demand there is a solution (albeit never perfect) and that will be the discussion of an upcoming blog.

There was another image from “The best of …” series last week that really caught my attention.  It is by Andy Rain of the EPA and shows an auctioneer for Christie’s posing with the “adamantium” claws worn by Hugh Jackman’s in his role as the Wolverine in the X-Men: The Last Stand film. The image is both amusing and just a bit creepy.  In my mind, I think that its power comes from the dichotomy between the demure look of the pretty auctioneer and her delicate necklace set against the viciousness of the claws themselves.  Then too there is the gesture of peaceful submission of supplication (so too the downward almost eyes closed glance), the arms crossed and held to the chest, which again contrasts with the metallic aggressiveness.

I need to start with an apology for failed notifications, multiple notifications, and extra notifications. Hati and Skoll is now in its third year, and websites tend to run into mail problems at about this point thanks to an army of e-parasites.  I am working on a “permanent” solution and hope to have it in place over the weekend.  But in the meanwhile please bear with me.

Week’s end and I have been going through the usual “Best Photographs of the Week” sections on various sites and there are a few beautiful images to share this week.  There is a wonderful silhouette by Anindito Mukherjee for Reuters showing workers building a rail bridge over the River Yamuna in New Delhi, India.  Silhouette is one of those over done art forms, but when it works, as in this wonderful image, it can be gorgeous, a surrender of grey tones towards a simple geometric statement in black and white. In fact, the man on the right with his blue shirt represents a kind of contrast to the otherwise pure monochrome of the image. Here the appeal is in the vertical geometry of the bars that essentially eclipses the workman.

So much of photography nowadays expands beyond the digital and becomes a web-based affair. I recently came upon a site called “The Swap.” The Swap is an ongoing portrait project, designed and curated by Stuart Pilkington. It is based on a very simple concept. On two separate days two photographers photograph each other and create two portraits. On day one, person one is the photographer and the other is the subject, and on day two they swap roles so that the photographer becomes the subject and visa versa.

This very straightforward concept has two effects. First, it emphasizes the significance of portraiture as an art form, where the creative act is both to reveal how you see the other person combined with how they see themselves. Second, it forces the photographer to step out of his/her comfort zone and to become the subject. For many, I fear, photography is a way of abstracting yourself from life, to become an observer instead of a participant.

I think that the best way to approach “The Swap” is to click on pairings and then to go through each one by one. At first, I was struck by how many photographers are trying way too hard to be clever and unique. Their portraits at best seem quirky. But then as I went through more and more of the images, I started to see some beautiful images and every once in a while the concept of a pairing struck a deep chord of resonance. The photographer had succeeded in a wonderful way.

I recommend a slow perusal of this site, and if you and a friend are truly adventurous, sign up and create a pair of images.

Figure 1 – a colorful photograph by Infrogmation (from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain under GNU attribution license) from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon. decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

Yesterday I talked about how we are going to hell in a handbasket and this led to one of my tangents on space travel.  Sorry.  But I did want to return to the very curious phrase, “going to hell in a handbasket,” itself.  To make this photographic, I include, as Figure 1, a colorful photograph by Infrogmation, from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

I did some searching of the phrase, and the origin seems clouded in obscurity and there are many proposed possibilities.  I have a favorite that appeals to the antiquarian in me, but first want to point out that therein lies a major problem with the internet.  Misinformation is self-propagating on the worldwide web; so if this is wrong, well…

You may remember from world history Charlemagne (748-814), who founded, in what is now Germany, the Carolingian Empire.   Charlemagne fought a guerilla war (an affront to true guerillas for sure) with the teutonic goth tribes.  He was suspicious that his generals were exaggerating the enemy casualties (like this has never been done before or since). So he ordered that the right hand of his enemies be chopped off and sent to him as a kind of census.  It was an early form of digital counting.  They were sent in what came to be known as “handbaskets.” Yuck! The obvious result was that his generals also started sending the hands of their own fallen soldiers to inflate the numbers.  Isn’t this a lovely story?  And so much for the term “handbasket.”

Now as for “going to hell in a handbasket” it is said that the goths believed that if you were not buried intact, in particular if you did not have a hand, that the gate of Heaven would not open for you, and you would go to the other place with all due haste.  Hence, the expression.

I promise to return to the topic of photography for my next post.

I thought rather poignant was a photograph on the BBC by Guillermo Legaria of the AFP showing a crane carrying weapons that had been seized from Farc and ELN guerrillas in Colombia. The crane is being used to transport nearly ten thousand weapons for disposed. They will be melted down and reforged as rods to reinforce the foundations and columns of schools and hospitals in areas of armed conflict.

The image is both incongruous and reminiscent of the biblical verse from Isaiah 2:4 “They will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor train for war anymore.”

Figure1 – Image of Jovian moon Europa, reprocessed and released on November 21. Credit NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute

Last week NASA released the stunning reprocessed image of Figure 1 from 1990’s photographs taken  by the Galileo spacecraft in orbit around the planet Jupiter.  This was reprocessed because of new image processing techniques developed since the image was first released in 2001. So we may now stare down at the moon of ice and wonder.

What we are wondering about is whether beneath the surface of Europa there is liquid water, and we imagine extrapolating the rule on Earth that where there is water, there is life.  Wonder?  Extrapolate? These are key functions of photography, and key functions of science.

Since men and women first pondered the sky, we have sought to understand what Thomas Huxley called “Man’s Place in Nature,” which we may extend to Man’s Place in the Universe.  There are moments of great epiphany: the discovery of the origin of species, the discovery of the Higgs boson.  They are often unheard against the cacophony of human stupidity, but they are there just the same. And this beautiful picture reminds us of our capacity to marvel.

Back in the seventies, I attended a lecture by Cornell physicist Edwin Salpeter on Jovian life.  This was pure fantasy.  But I remember being captivated and wondering.  And more recently I have become haunted by the quote from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park  – yes more fantasy! “… the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.“

You might well ask whether I am a bit touched. How is it possible that such a cold and far away place as Europa could possibly have liquid water?  Europa, it seems, gets its energy not from the sun but from Jupiter.  The gravitational field of Jupiter is emense and this can be expected huge tidal friction on Europa.  Enough to create liquid water and life?  I wonder.

There is a fun photograph by Marsel van Oosten that won “The People’s Choice” wildlife photography award from the Natural History Museum.  It was taken at the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan and shows a Snow Monkey “chillin’” out in his hot spring and surfing with an IPhone. Thanks to a reader for alerting me to this.

The story, according to van Oosten is that a tourist was photographing the macaque and just kept getting closer and closer until the monkey suddenly snapped the phone away, headed out to deeper water, and begin playing with it.  He even managed to fire off the flash a couple of times and tried some underwater photography.  But, of course, Oosten knew what was coming and snapped the primate at this most human of moments.  The award is not without some controversy however.  Because the “People’s Choice” award involved internet voting, there is some concern that the monkey may have voted for himself, indeed perhaps multiple times.  This, which, of course, brings into question whether the vote should still be called “People’s Choice.”

The other awards are really worth looking at as well and can be found at the NHM website.