Well here is something off the wires that I think is absolutely magnificent and beautiful crafted.  It is an image from AFP/Getty Images showing a statue is St. Peter’s Square silhouetted agasinst the sun.  The image was taken just before Pope Francis’ general audience.  Of course, this is filled with classical allusions.  The disk of the sun is like a saints halo in a renaissance painting and the foreboding clouds are reminiscent of a painting by Michaelangelo, or perhaps of Giorgione’s “The Tempest.” The one incongruity in the scene, which only makes the photograph ever more wonderful is the scaffolding and ropes on the statue.  Here is the sacred and there is the profane.

You will often hear the cliché’ that a photograph freezes a moment in time.  Hmm!  Yesterday I came across a news photo that appears to put this phrase in new light.  On Tuesday what is probably the best preserved mammoth extracted from the Russian tundra went on display in Moscow.  With or without a photograph, here is something truly frozen in time – from 38,000 years ago.

Needless-to-say this mammoth has raised hopes of resurrection of the wooly beast by cloning – shades of Jurassic Park.  I remember quite vividly as a child visiting the skeletons of these prehistoric animals at the American Museum of Natural History and wondering … Is the validity of recalling these victims of extinction simply a matter of wonder, is it science, or is just a collective guilt – probably a little bit of all three. We can debate the ethics and consequences of cloning.

And speaking about ethics… This also raises the important (?) question of whether the Russian Czars actually ate mammoth or the related mastodon meat.  I have it on good authority (The Internet) that these stories are false and apocryphal.  Too bad, I guess.  Most discovered mammoth flesh extracted from the tundra permafrost is kinda putrid and pretty foul smelling.  So for now I’m going to need to be content with a colleague’s father, who discovered thirty year old hamburger at the bottom of a freezer that he had in his barn.  He ate it with great satisfaction.

The Ebola epidemic is tragic, terrible, and ultimately pretty terrifying.  We have all been trying to understand exactly what it means, and trying to remain cool, no panic, and analytical about it.  And it is the kind of thing where photographs can be just two vivid to deal with.  Still we are being bombarded with images constantly, most of which, quite frankly, fail to really tell the story of what is going on in West Africa. Yesterday, I came across a new form of Ebola image from AFP-Getty images which really gave me pause.  It shows a Chinese seamstress in a factory, churning out hundreds of protective suits for healthcare providers. Suddenly one is confronted with the magnitude of the reality of the epidemic. And what makes it doubly poignant, is that my first thought on looking at this photograph was how much it reminded me turn of the twentieth century images of workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.  That tragedy we have discussed before. The point is that human tragedy is universal.  It spans place and it spans time. What I think is most significant here is that when actual events are so horrific, it often proves to be the case that images that essentially allude to reality can be just as, or even more, effective in portraying it than raw and visceral reality.  This alluding image is ever so successful.

I was struck yesterday by some photographs on the BBC.   These images deal essentially with old wars and conflicts and they, perhaps, suggest that with time even the most terrible and seemingly unresolvable conflicts can in end reach some level of closure – unfortunately only to be replaced by other vicious conflicts.

The first of these is an image by Peter MacDiarmid of Getty images showing the reinterrment northern France of fifteen British soldiers who were killed a century ago in battle near the village of Beaucamps-Ligny.  The remains were found in 2009 during drainage work.   This is one of those breath stopping moments.  You wonder about what was and what might have been.

The second is a set of images, a set of photographs of Londonderry taken by French photojournalist Gilles Caron in 1969.These recently donated images will be on display at the Void and City Factory Galleries in Derry from 28 October until 20 December. This was the first battle in what became euphemistically referred to as “The Troubles.”

Back in 1969, most press photographs were in black and white.  Here you realize that they must be in black and white.  Color would be superfluous.  There is such an intense and stark, gritty reality to the use of monochrome.  These images are masterpieces, fantastic in there ability to say all that needs to be said without the encumbrance of words.  Consider the look on the face of the young, stylish woman in heels, clutching her handbag as she stands on a street corner turned battlefield.  She is out of place in her own home. And then there is the man in a gas mask against a wall on which the universal expression is written, “We Want Peace.” Three words and a single photograph that in the end say everything about wars and conflicts past and present.

Figure 1 – An F/A-18 breaking the sound barrier. Image released by the USN with ID 990707-N-6483G-001 and taken by Ensign John Gay.

I was watching a piece on the news the other night about photographing jets breaking the “sound barrier” and in a geekish physicist sort of way I found this really cool.  So I thought I would share one of these images with you.  Figure 1 was taken by Ensign John Gay of the U.S. Navy in 1999 and shows an F/A-18 breaking the sound barrier.  When a plane punches through the sound barrier, that is when it reaches a speed of equal to the speed of sound, or Mach 1, it creates a shock wave perpendicular to its direction of flight.  What you are seeing here is that shock wave and the jet appears to be breaking through it– very cool!

The term “sound barrier” is a misnomer.  Early on as planes approached this speed pilots had trouble controlling the aircraft against the turbulence and instabilities that the physics demands and thought that ity might be a physical barrier, forbidden by the laws of physics.  This, of course, turned out not to be the case. And hence we dream of traveling faster than “warp 1” or the speed of light.  We shall see, or someone may.

The history of “breaking the sound barrier” is intriguing.  However, on October 14, 1947 in the Bell X-1 Chuck Yeager (of “The Right Stuff” fame) was credited with being the first man to break the sound barrier in level flight at an altitude of 45,000ft.

Interestingly, when you crack a bullwhip.  The snapping sound that you hear is the shock wave created as the tip reaches the speed of sound. But let’s not stop there.  It is, in fact believed based on computer models of biomechanics, that as early as 150 million years ago certain long tailed dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus and Diplodocus may have been able to flick their tails at supersonic velocities.  Now that would have been an intimidating sound!

The 2014 CBRE Urban Photography Awards have been announced.  As one might expect, the awards carry with them all of the ambiguity that the word “urban” carries with it.  Cities are brilliant monuments to human achievement and creativity.  On the other hand they often grow at the expense of the “unseen,” of the crawlers.

This year’s top winner is Marius Vieth for his image “Mask of Society,” so beautifully composed.  The chaos of a modern city, how they verge on being unlivable, is captured in Carlos da Costa Branco’s picture of a traffic policeman dancing in the street in Lisbon.  I love the vague expression on the face of the woman in the car behind him.This was the winner of the Europe, Middle East and Africa prize.

The Asia Pacific award went to Ly Hoang Long for his picture of workers mending nets in a factory in Bac Lieu in Vietnam.  Here the ambiguity begins.  It is my favorite.  The dominance of the cobalt blue and the composition are just stunning.  But the immensity of the task at hand seems daunting, and the faces of the workers buried beneath their hats are hidden.  They are nameless. And speaking of hidden, a disturbingly gorgeous work is that of Sarah Scarborough winner of the 13 to 15 year old category.  It was taken in Venice and is  called “A Distant Silhouette.”

Ms. Scarborough’s picture completes the path to ambiguity for us.  It is truly and richly in the tradition of Jacob Riis’ “Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street.” and John Thompson’s “The Crawlers.”  The descent into Hades is completed by Sujan Sarkar’s image of an Indian sewer worker.  In the end the words that come to mind: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.“*

* (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.“) Durante degli Alighieri (1265-1321)  La divina commedia, Canto III, line 9.

This past Sunday I was studying the week’s best pictures features on various news media- always a fun pastime. But I found myself over and over again returning to this image by Greg Baker for the AFP showing Switzerland’s Ilaria Kaeslin captured in midair as she competed on the uneven bars at the Gymnastics World Championships in Nanning, China. The thing about it is – well, how can anyone do that?  How can anyone bend that way? I keep checking that if I were to jump up in the air and kick my feet backwards – doesn’t paint a very pretty picture does it – would my feet really be oriented the way Ms. Kaeslin’s feet are oriented.  I have concluded, well, yes, kinda maybe!  It is just amazing. And note that in anticipation of the next microsecond of action she has one palm down and one palm up.  It is a beautiful photograph and a testament to the flexibility of youth.

The news media were all abuzz this morning with images and videos about the latest adventures of the Google Trekker Camera.  This is the 360 degree view camera that Google sends around the world to create the street view images for Google Earth.  You might see this strange looking camera in your neighborhood.  And of course, legends of the strange things photographed by the Trekker Camera abound.  But now it seems that Google has gone one step further and strapped its camera to the hump of a camel named Raffia to drag the camera around through the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis, and these are beautiful images.

According to Google spokeswoman Monica Baz the camel was an apt way of documenting the desert. “With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment…In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way.” Ironically for the camel the only thing that it does not photograph is itself. As a result, and if you exclude shadows, there are no selfies in Camelot.

Shades of Lawrence of Arabia, shades of the Three Wisemen, shades of Marco Polo’s expedition to the orient.  I am reminded of a limerick taught to me by a reader and friend forty years ago. AB knows who he is. But that is too risque to repeat here. So we will have to settle for Ogden Nash here:

“The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary , two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?”

I spent yesterday in transit, as they say; so I need something pretty simple and amusing photographically today.  So I thought that I would pick up on the “October is pumpkins” theme and record the fact that the world’s largest pumpkin record as been smashed (sic).  Swiss Gardner, Beni Meier, went to great lengths to transport the behemoth to Germany.  The big orange puppy weighed in at 2,096.6 lbs. This breaks the previous record held by Tim and Susan Mathison from California.

The pumpkin will remain on display in Klaistow, Germany, according to spokeswoman, Maika Ziehl when it will be “slaughtered” (Gulp!) made into soup and its seeds auctioned off by those with dreams of giant pumpkins.  Well, Oktoberfest is over; so time to move on to something else…