We have discussed the technical aspects of pinhole photography in the past as a means of introduction to how the camera works.  But we have not discussed the aesthetics of pinhole photography.  Pinhole cameras create: somewhat distorted images, in many cases soft out-of-focus images, and vignetting – that is a fading of light intensity as you move away from the center of the field.  Overcoming all of these distortions is why camera lenses cost so much.  But in the case of the pinhole image, all of this contributes to a sense of dreaminess and a sense of the antique.  If you want to create a picture that looks like it was taken in the mid-nineteenth century, this is certainly one way to go.

With all of this in mind, I was struck with a recent readers’ series on BBC News, a collection of pinhole camera images.  And to my mind’s eye the most strikingly dreamy of all was a wonderful image of a swan on a lake sent in by Daniel Ramsey.  Because this beautiful color image required a 30 second exposure the swan’s head and neck are blurred out as if captured in several positions, but in none really.  The distortion is four dimensional, encompassing all the dimensions of space and time.  It is truly a vision from a dream.

Unfortunately, The Week in Pictures is all too reminiscent of the movie “Apocalypse Now,” or worse the mythological concept – the Ragnarok  being a favorite theme of Hati and Skoll.  Among this weeks news pictures we’ve got wars (you almost lose track of all the wars), we’ve got fires, we’ve got desperate parents in Nigeria, and we’ve got natural disasters floods and earthquakes. I thought that representative all this misery is a stunningly and therefore, hauntingly beautiful, photograph by Stuart Palley for the EPA.   It is an  extended time exposure showing smoldering remains of overnight fires on the hillsides of San Marcos, California, early on May 16. Firefighters are deparately battling fast-moving wildfires in southern California. The light in this image is amazing.  The blue is an unworldly iridescent shade, perhaps contradictory in that this kind of blue more often depicts water and wetness, not fire, heat, and dryness.  The rocks in the foreground combine with the morning light to evoke the sense of an other worldly lunar landscape – the ultimate in lonely isolation.

Sorry people, I know that I could have chosen the sloth!

BBC News reports the murder of French photojournalist Camille Lepage in the Central African Republic. According to the French presidential government, Ms Lepage’s body was found when a French patrol stopped a car driven by Christian anti-balaka militia in the Bouar region.  She was 26, but already a talented and successful photojournalist, whose work was widely published by news agencies including the BBC.  She had been traveling along the border between the Central African Republic and Cameroon, and apparently gotten caught up in the violence.

The murder of a journalist is ultimately an attack on us all – on our right to know and to see.  Of course, that is the very point.  There are always people who don’t want us to know and to see, and it is only through the bravery of these reporters and photographers that the truth becomes revealed.

Ms. Lepage’s heroic images teach us about life, dignity, and death in today’s Africa. The sensitivity of her work is typified by a 2012 photograph of a seven year old boy named Deng that  she met at the the Rehabilitation Centre of Juba in South Sudan. He had lost his leg at age four after a mine that he was playing with blew up in his house and killed his mother.

This afternoon I was perusing a National Geographic set of images entitled “Wide World of Color,” and I came across this beautiful photograph by Joshi Daniel of a rose peddler in Mumbai.  What is striking about the image is the contrast between the vivid color of the rose and the essential monochrome of the rest of the image as well as the contrast between the fragile youthful beauty of the rose and the gnarled hands of the peddler – and I will add that the hands too possess a natural beauty.

How is one to feel on viewing this image?  There are the contrasts that I have mentioned.  And then there is the beautiful simplicity of the image and the simple life that it portrays.  But it is also reminiscent of John Thompson’s “Street Life in (nineteenth century) London” and in particular the image of the “Flower Girls in Front of Convent Garden, 1877.”  We have spoken of Thompson’s work before.  The lives of the unseen bear little resemblance to that of George Bernard Shaw’s fictionalized “Eliza Doolittle.”   It is from this ambiguity that the power of the image of the Mumbai Flower Peddler emerges.

Figure 1- Mothers Day from the Wikimedia Commons by April 29, 2012 by Alfonsopazphoto at the Badoca Safari Park and place in the public domain under creative commons attribution license.

I found myself this morning scouring the web for an appropriate Mothers’ Day image.  Those of us whose mothers are no longer with them miss them dearly.  Those who still have them should hold them dearly.  The image of mother and child is so iconic as to be cliche. I am offering up as a Mothers Day card for my readers the image of Figure 1 which was taken on Mothers Day April 29, 2012 by Alfonsopazphoto at the Badoca Safari Park.  The unifying theme is someone to look up to, someoneone to care for, and a bond of love.  For me the ultimate Mother and Child image is that of Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair.”  And really with this simple zebra image an identical theme plays out, and yes it is a cute cuddly animal picture.  My very point is the anthropomorphism.   Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Those of us who were brought up watching the “Six Million Dollar Bionic Man” and the “Bionic Woman,” have been waiting patiently for the future, undeterred by Lindsay Wagner being reduced (?) to selling The Sleep Number Bed on television.  Actually, in truth not so patiently.  I am getting pretty imapatient about the promised man Mars landing! Still the future is all around us as we rocket headlong into it, towards what Ray Kurtzweil has called “The Singularity.”

As a result I was delighted, but not really surprised this morning, to read about FDA approval of Dean Kamen’s, the remarkable inventor who brought us the “Segway,” latest invention the DEKA Arm system, which is shown in this stunning photograph by HANDOUT/Reuters.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided more than $40 million for the development of this device.  According to DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez: “It was designed to produce near-natural upper extremity control to injured people who have suffered amputations. This arm system has the same size, weight, shape and grip strength as an adult’s arm would be able to produce.”  The arm can perform complex actions simultaneously and is truly a quantum leap for amputees.

The arm is named for Star Wars character “Luke Skywalker” and is indeed so reminiscent of the prosthetic device that he is fitted with after his arm is cut off with Darth Vader’s light sword.  The photograph is excellent, conveying a beautiful bright translucence.  It is a translucence that enables us to make out the arms inner workings, albeit with a murkiness of vision that belies the cloudiness of the sight with which we must always see the future.

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“In the beginning there was only chaos. Then out of the void appeared Erebus, the unknowable place where death dwells, and Night. All else was empty, silent, endless, darkness. Then somehow Love was born bringing a start of order.”

These words describe the essence of the ancient Greek view of the creation.  They are, of course, much more than faint echos of creation myths from all over the world.  I have always liked the ancient Greek description because it anticipates and antedates our modern scientific concept of the beginning of the universe, the essential evolution of both physical and the biological order out of chaos.  Note too the role played by darkness and its evolution into light.

Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using some of the fastest computers in the world,  have developed a computer program, the Illustris Simulation, that models.  The model inputs the fundamental laws of physics and outputs a simulated image of what the universe looked like at each stage of the thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution.   Be sure to watch some of the videos on the Illustris site. We watch the emergence of both light and matter out of bands of dark matter. What is quite remarkable is the success of Illustris in predicting, for instance, the forms of galaxies and a direct side-by-side comparison of what the universe should now look like and Hubble images of what it does look like. In this image the left hand side is from Hubble, the right hand side from Illustris.  You have to look hard to see the split. Such is the fidelity of the prediction.

We have spoken before about how computers can generate images that never really existed – of imagined worlds.  Placed in this scientific construction the split between reality and the imagined blurs.  What is real becomes imagined.  What is imagined becomes real.