August 5th marks the two year anniversary of the successful landing of NASA’s Mars Roveron Mars; so in celebration toddler Rover took the picture of Figure 1.  Yes, it’s a bona fide selfie.  In actuality the image was taken at 687  days, which is one Martian year. So arguably  Rover is only a one year old. Like  any true selfie the image was taken by extending the robot arm out with the camera.  The image is actually a stitch of a mosaic of images taken from different angles.  As a result the one element of Rover anatomy that you do not see is the arm itself.  Like all good NASA pictures, the image possesses a duality. It is a picture of its intended subject.  But more significantly it is a symbol of what we can achieve and even a glimpse of the future and what is to come.

Figure 1 – The British Camel Corps in action in British Somaliland in 1913. From the Flicker Commons and in the public domain, originally uploaded by Dzlinker.

In searching “The Week In Pictures” feature on BBC News, I was struck by this beautiful violet shaded image by Bernardo Montoya for Reuters of a circus performer in Mexico City “Running with Camels,” or at least a camel.  There is this controversy in Mexico City because the local government has banned the use of circus animal;s, which threatens the livelihood of the performers.

The image is not perfect in many ways.  It is too out of focus for my taste, despite the fact that the photographer has banned with the animal.  It would work as an indication of motion but is not quite successfull here. at least to my taste.  I do hower love the color and I love the glow of the spotlight.  But what I really love is that it triggers in my mind, reference to Eadweard Muybridge‘s ground breaking work on motion in man and animals, which answered once and for all the critical(?) question whether all of a horse’s feet leave the ground at once.  Well, as it turns out horse and camels run differently.  I guess that you could call it the “dromedary dash.”  But the critical point, to me, is the allusion to Muybridge’s work and, of course, to the Kevin Costner film “Dances with Wolves.”

Just to confuse the focus of this post, I could not resist posting as Figure 1 and image of the British Somali Camels Corp in 1913, between Berbera and Odweyne in, what was then, the British Somaliland.  Hut, hut!

For all of you Transformers lovers or parents of Transformers lovers, this week marked the gala opening in Hong Kong of the new transformer movie.  My son was never really into these toys,  But who can resist their very clever metamorphosis. And this was complete with a full size, or at least huge, replica of Optimus Prime.  In this wonderful photograph by Felipe Lopez for the AFP he is shown majestically set against the Hong Kong skyline, with the intended and successful effect of making him look even bigger than he actually is.  Pretty marvelous in my view,  And I love the light and the vaporous atmosphere that mixes with the skyline to create a futuristic other worldliness.  It all is metallic silver on metallic silver.  It is a world where transformers might actually exist.

Well, I guess that after all the fuss that I’ve made about tornado photographs, about tornado hunters, and Helen Hunt, I really don’t think that I can pass up on images taken of Monday’s double tornado in Nebraska.  While not unherad of, such phenomena are very rare, occurring once every ten to twenty years, and dare I say it double trouble – in this case destroying the town od Pilger, Nebraska..  This devastaing storm was photographed by Eric Andersen for the AP.  There is something at once beautiful yet terrifying about such images.  The light is other-worldly, reminiscent of quiet silence before devastation.

We spoken quite a bit about the intrinsic nobility of trees as a photographic subject.  One of the difficulties in photographing them is that they can be quite tall and capturing all that length causes you to tip your camera upwards to the sky often creating distortion.  In this context, I was impressed this week by a photograph by Narendra Shrestha of the EPA showing, well, a tree hugger. And people, there is no shame in being a tree hugger!    The tree-hugger in question is a student celebrating World Environment Day in the forest of Gokarna on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, on June 5. There were, in fact,  2,001 people simultaneously hugging trees for two minutes in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record.  Yes there is a reod for just about everything!  I have to admire both the express way in which the student’s hand portray a tender affection to nature and the way in which the photographer captures our eyes and in breathtaking speed takes them to the top of the forest’s canopy.

Every week the BBC poses a photography theme for submission. Actually, they are kind enough to post them several weeks ahead.  Some of these are intriguing in that you wonder exactly how people are going to interpret the theme.

Well, this week it was “Gardening” and I found myself wondering exactly what were people going to send in besides brightly colored and boring flower pictures or other hackneyed images.  Well in the end I was blown away by a photograph by Ela Fraczkowska, which shows her 83 year old grandmother in her garden in Poland. It is, well, simply stunning. And most  captivating is the fact that Ms. Fraczkowska’s grandmother refuses to wear garden gloves.  Her hands and eyes and wisps of hair in disarray all betray an intimacy with the Earth.

There is a lot to be said for thematic photography, which appears to come in two flavors.  First, there is the situation where you fall in love with a photograph that you have taken and then decide to expand upon the subject with a series.  I have several such projects ongoing including: neoclassical American sculpture and frog ornamental garden decorations to name just two.  The other is the random theme, like the ones the BBC poses.  There is no surer way to cure yourself of the image blahs – aka “I have nothing to photograph!”  Such themes are a means of refocusing your art.

No discussion about photos of the past week would be complete without considering this insanely terrifying little video from the AP taken by Dan Yorgason as a tornado moved through an oil drilling rig camp near Watford City, ND.   This is really a far cry  from A. A. Adams’ first tornado photograph of 1884, which bears a certain nineteenth century after the fact abstraction.  A profounder reality comes from the fact that it is video and in color, not to mention that it is about as intimately close as one can get to a tornado without dying. The reddish brown is where the twister meets the ground churning up dust and debris and the white area further up into the pristine funnel cloud.  These images essentially look straight up into the vortex of the tornado.  It is a modern day Charybdis.  Odysseus had to choose consciously between Scylla and Charybdis.  It all happened so fast that Yorgason had no choice.  But having the presence of mind to grab his camera and photograph is pretty amazing.

Although they have appeared in this blog, I am not usually an admirer of sports photographs.  However, I must make an exception again this week.  On the BBC I came across this incredible image by Miguel Medina for the AFP of Italian tennis player Camila Giorgi returning the ball to Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova (not pictured) during a second round match at this year’s  French Open.

The lines in this photograph are beautifully composed.  There is a complex construction of the rule of thirds between Ms. Giorgi and the lines on the clay court that act visually as a puzzle that creates an enigmatic dynamic tension appropriate to the a sense of power and motion.  The grim determined look on Giorgi’s face is riveting, and the relative positions of her legs and arms are perfect.  This photograph is oh so reminiscent of the fifth century B.C.E. statue by Myron the “Discobolus” or the “Discuss Thrower.”  The Discobolus is the ultimate sports image.  It celebrates the perfection of the human body of youth, as does Mr. Medina’s wonderful photograph.

I am thinking pleasantly back to the sweet time of childhood when in addition to a favorite color (red) and a favorite television star (Fess Parker) I also had a favorite animal (the hippopotamus).  Yes the “river horse” was my favorite, and nothing delighted me more than seeing him at the Central Park Zoo dine upon copious quantities of cabbage.

Maturity has led to a more studied respect for the hippo and an appreciation of his ambiguity as a gentle giant.  Yes, there were the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” – pure fantasy.  And there was the National Geographic Magazine showing photographs of a hippopotamus rescuing a disemboweled antelope from the jaws of an alligator and pushing the mortally wounded beast up unto the shore – I suppose to be devoured by jackals. 8<( And my favorite was an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” where they attempted to photograph hippos with their young underwater.  Finally, they resorted to using a very expensive remote camera.  All goes well until momma hippo is alarmed by the sounds of the camera’s mechanism.  She leaps out of the water and crashes down on the very expensive camera, flattening it like a pancake – Momma Hippo meets Paparazzi.”

All of these cobweb memories ran through my head yesterday as I was looking at Pictures of the Week on BBC News and came upon this lovely image by Mel Evans for the AP showing a little girl named Audrey Bruben at The Camden, New Jersey Adventure Aquarium posing with Genny a 4000 lb hippopotamus – all grins – or so it seems.  Wonderful, cute little girl and equally cute, albeit of ambiguous cuddliness, animal.

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.”

Ogden Nash, “The Hippopotamus”