Category Archives: Reviews and Critiques

Thinking about snow and the Donner party

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Summit Peak, California in 1866 showing the tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in 1846 at the snow line. From the LOC via Wikimedipedia and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Summit Peak, California in 1866 showing the tree stumps cut by the Donner Party in 1846 at the snow line. From the LOC via Wikimedipedia and in the public domain.

It has been snowing like crazy here in Massachusetts today.  So it isn’t surprising that my thoughts today center around the white fluff.  I just made a dash to the mailbox and that was quite sufficient to bring to mind the ill fated Donner Party and some very memorable photographs.

The Donner Party was a group who set out in 1846 for California during the great western migration.  Arguably the hardest part of this journey was the perilous 100 mile trip across the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada mountains contain 500 distinct peaks over 12,000 feet.  But more ominously because they are constantly bathed in the air currents that carry the moist vapors of the nearby Pacific Ocean they receive a huge amount of snow.  This year (2014) is a radical exception.  But for the early wagon trains of the California migration the key was making it to and crossing the Sierras before the snow fell. The Donner Party was delayed by a series of mishaps and didn’t reach the Sierras until early November of 1846.  They were forced to winter in the Sierra Nevada.  Snowbound, their food ran out and some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to the deprivations of a bitter winter.  Their story is legendary and considered to be one of the great tragedies of western history.

Figure 1 is an example of one of the photographs that I was speaking about. It was taken twenty years after the tragedy and shows the “Stumps of trees cut by the Donner Party in Summit Valley, Placer County.”  The cut line towers over the man in the photograph, illustrating just how high the snow pack was in 1846 – just how hopeless the plight of these people was.  The image is a gray-scaled albumen print, half of a stereograph. It is from the Library of Congress and was originally published as “Gems of California scenery, no. 778 (1866).”

I think that it is significant to note that the photograph does not show any of the horrors and deprivations that the Donner Party endured.  Rather it accomplishes the same effect by allusion and association.  You look at the man and then at the tree stumps and the whole story floods back into your mind.  Photographs do not always need to depict terrible events graphically.  Sometimes the associations is enough.

I once saw a British Documentary about the holocaust that followed the return of a woman, who was a physician, to Auschwitz.  The documentary showed nothing graphic.  It didn’t wrench you away with vividness. Rather it was defined by a moment when the woman entered a rooms, started to point out what was what, and then started to cry uncontrollably.  It was that association which made this the most effective such documentary that I have ever seen.

Mars rock is back in the news

Posted on by

When I posted last Wednesday about the now famous Mars rock, I thought that was it.  But, the plot thickens, as they say.  So I could not resist picking up the story.  Astrobiologist, Dr. Rhawn Joseph, is no suing NASA and its administrator Charles Bolden in the hope of compelling them to look into this rock further.  He believes that there is a biological explanation and wants that pursued.

According to NASA’s Principal Investigator on the Rover Mission, Steve Squyres, it is a rock.  But Joseph suggests that the object resembles a “mushroom-like fungus” known as an apothecium. He also presents evidence that far from just appearing mysteriously in the NASA photograph, the object actually was present in the earlier picture and essentially grew in the field of view.  Joseph suggests that:

[S]pores were exposed to moisture due to changing weathering conditions on Mars. Over the next 12 days these spores grew and developed into the structure depicted… The evidence is consistent with biological activity and suggests that life on Mars may have been discovered. However, in the absence of moisture, biological specimens such as Apothecium will dry out, turn brittle and break apart and this appears to be the condition of the structure as depicted.

NASA says that they are continuing to investigate the phenomenon and point out that they would be more excited about finding definitive evidence of life on Mars than just about anyone.  But the evidence would need to be definitive.

I am not quite certain what the photography moral to this story is.  Photography has caused this controversy.  Does it merely tie in with the concept of imagined similarities  aka pareidolia, or is there something more.  Photography invariable presents only limited information and only part of a story. One thing for certain is that NASA has the instrumentation, spectrographs etc, to definitively determine whether this is animal or vegetable

A crazy quilt from space

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Central Russia in winter from the International Space Station, image by Cmdr. Harkings, from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Central Russia in winter from the International Space Station, image by Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, from NASA and in the public domain.

I often visit the galleries on the NASA website for the pure beauty that they offer and the site really never disappoints.  So today I’d like to share with you the image of Figure 1 showing snow-covered farmland in Central Asia looking like a wonderful and complex patchwork, perhaps a blanket.  It was taken last winter on February 25 from the International Space Station by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who calls it “a monochromatic 3-D hallucination in the snow.”

I think that part of the charm here is that it is a black and white photograph.  As a result it connects and is very reminiscent of the first areal photograph taken from a hot air balloon over Boston by John Black in 1858. We seem to never tire of photographs from above, where we essentially watch ourselves.  Perhaps it is an anser to the age old desire to soar like and eagle and look down at the strange inhabitants below , who are forced to cling precariously to the Earth.

Involuntary time warps

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Hiroo Onoda in 1944 as a young Imperial Japanese officer. Image from the Wikipedia, originally taken by the governement of Japan and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Hiroo Onoda in 1944 as a young Imperial Japanese officer. Image from the Wikipedia, originally taken by the governement of Japan and in the public domain.

We have been talking at length about photography and time travel.  First, we discussed how photography gives us a glimpse into the lives of people from the past and how they almost seem to know that we are watching them.  Then we discussed how a set of snapshots of the same person from different points in their lives all laid out on a table unsticks that person in time, just like Kurt Vonnegut‘s “Billy Pilgrim.”  Then we considered people who voluntarily time  warp themselves.  All are favorite subjects for photographers: people who like the Amish or Hasidim prefer to live in isolated communities framed in anachronistic settings, or for that matter Revolutionary and Civil War reenactors and Renaissance Fare People. And yes we have the Up Helly Aa Vikings as well!

Well, today I’d like to tell the story of Hiroo Onoda who died on January 17th at age 91. Onoda was a Japanese soldier who spent 29 years “time-warped” in the Philippine jungle, refusing to believe that World War II had ended. In 1944, Onoda was sent to the  island of Lubang to spy on U.S. troops on the island.   For 29 years, he and a few companions survived by collecting food from the jungle or stealing it from local farmers.  It wasn’t until 1974 after all his companions had died was Onoda finally persuaded to come out from hiding.  But before he would do so his commanding officer had to travel to Lubang and release him from the orders he had given Onoda nearly three decades before.

This story of involuntary time-warp is reminiscent of so many old Twilight Zone episodes that still haunt my dreams.  The big issue, I suppose, is whether such people are truly involuntarily time-warped, or is it more a failure to accept reality and the truth.  We have to ask whether it isn’t just denial in the extreme.  Is there truly honor in slavish adherence to a superiors command against all reason?  I really don’t have an answer to these questions, but I do know that the answer certainly lies in The Twilight Zone.

 

The Year of the Horse

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The Year of the Horse, 2004 celebration in Belmore Park, Sydney, Australia. Picture by J Bar from the Wikimedia Commons and published under Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Figure 1 – The Year of the Horse, 2004 celebration in Belmore Park, Sydney, Australia. Picture by J Bar from the Wikimedia Commons and published under  GNU Free Documentation License.

I want to wish all of our friends and readers who celebrate Chinese New Year, Happy Year of the Horse.  If you have the opportunity to visit a Chinese New Year celebration, I recommend that you bring camera in hand.  These are exciting, color, and motion filled events.  A number of places on the web are offering up stunning photoessays of New Year celebrations around the world, see for instance this one from the BBC.  I am particularly taken by an AP image of the underwater festivities at Singapore’s South East Asia Aquarium.

Back in the sixties my father was a popular science teacher at Charles Sumner Junior Hight School (JHS 65) in New York City, which served New York’s Chinatown area.  On Chinese New Year, we would go down and watch the parades and dancing dragons.  It was insane.  Firecrackers were everywhere, and a particular sport was exploding them within inches of Mr. Wolf’s face.  Ah, those were the days.  I always think of that on the Fourth of July during our local parade, when the staff of our neighborhood restaurant “Lotus Blossom” come by dressed as a giant dragon.

So Happy New Year everyone!

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Ann Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Figure 1 – Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Anne Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Enough with the bad weather already, he exclaimed.  Most of the United States is currently suffering from some sort of miserable weather difficulties, and I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, R3, to the cognoscenti,

“Now is the winter of our discontent…”

So, I was looking for inspiration this afternoon and found this great portfolio of pictures from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands.  The Shetland Islands are described as being a subarctic archipelago of Scotland.  Subarctic archipelago?  Doesn’t that sound cold?

And you would expect the people that live there to know how to deal with winter’s rude bite.  And they do.  Hence, The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival.  Check these pictures from the BBC out.  The videos at this site are worth watch as well. Yes, you’re seeing correctly.  Everyone is dressed as a Viking and, yes, they are setting a Viking longboat on fire.  Puts winter in a whole new perspective.  I want to be there!  I want to be a Viking! “Pillaging hours 9 am to 5 pm M-F.”

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival began in the 1880s. The current Lerwick festival evolved from a Christmas tradition of dragging burning tar barrels through the town on sledges.  Doesn’t everyone do that?  When this was banned the festival slowly evolved into a Viking theme and also moved into January.  Yes, you guessed it when everyone is miserable and fed up with the dark and cold and really need a lift.  So grab you ski parkas, put on your  Viking “quize,” and head to Lerwick.  You are sure to find your inner Viking not to mention some wonderful photo opps.  Yes, of course, there is a website.

The mystery of the mill girl

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Unknown spinner, Lewis Hine, c1908, from the LOC and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Unknown spinner, Lewis Hine, c1908, from the LOC and in the public domain.

I’d like to start today with the image of Figure 1.  Taken between 1908-1912 it shows a young girl, who at age eleven had already been working for a year in a mill owned by the  Rhodes Manufacturing Company in Lincolnton, North Carolina.  The picture was taken by social reformer and photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who documented mill life and child labor in the mills.  It was one of five thousand photographs taken by Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, documenting abuses of child labor laws in textiles and other industries.  These photographs are now housed as an important social record in the Library of Congress.

Children were prized as laborers in the mills, since their small hands and bodies enabled them to reach inside the intricate machines.  The results were often disastrous.  Hine’s photographs were three decades later instrumental in the establishment of the Federal regulation of child labor began with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which for the first time set minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children. We can pat ourselves on the back, until we realize that all that has really happened is that child labor of this sort has mere been exported.

The picture itself is compositionally wonderful.  The girl stands gazing out the window, symbolic perhaps of lost childhood.  At any rate there is an outside, but pushing up and ready to devour her are the huge looms.  And these stretch on infinitely in the photograph. The picture not only represents the life of the little girl and her loss of innocence, but also of the greater loss of national innocence brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

For over a century the name of that young girl has remained a mystery, as if industrialism had swallowed up her identity.  She was identified in the picture as only as a “spinner” at the Rhodes Manufacturing Co.

Now, according to the Charlotte Observer, author and historian Joe Manning used the photograph to find her descendants and give her back her name.  He feels confident that the girl was named Lalar Blanton and is the grandmother of Myra “Carol” Cook of Louisville, Ky. Thus, this image has served two powerful purposes: first, as a tool to bring about social change, and second, a hundred years later, to resurrect the life of the subject.  Such is the power of the image.

 

Eyes on the homeless

Posted on by

We have spoken before about the unseen crawlers – the people all around us, the poor, the homeless, the people we don’t want to see.  The people that we look through.  There is a very powerful recent  image by the Jae C. Hong for the Associated Press that puts all of this in a new and very poignant perspective.  It shows a homeless person in Los Angeles on January 14, 2014 sleeping beneath a mural painted by artist Ruben Soto.  In Los Angeles homelessness has increased 15 percent from 2011 to 2013.

The picture functions on so many different levels.  First there is the sense of seeing the unseen.  But then you realize that the eyes themselves are really only a masquerade.  It is as if we are faking the seeing.  And for me there is just something strange about the face.  I cannot quite place it. Maybe it’s because it is looking at us not the sleeping man. I also believe that there is a sense of imbalance.  The face is huge, the man small.  The figure of the man and his bundle of earthly possesions also is not quite dynamically balanced.  All of this creates a wonderful sense of imbalance and of foreground-background switch.  This is a wonderful and very telling image.

John F. Kennedy and the Mars rock

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearnce and right after the mysterious appearance of the "Jelly doughnut" rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearance and right after the mysterious appearance of the “Jelly doughnut” rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Ten years ago NASA sent Mars Rover for a three month “robotic eyes” mission to the Red Planet, and now ten years later Rover is still sending back beautiful images and data.  This past week it has spawned a great mystery.  Comparing two images (see

As I write this, my cat has just knocked a container of bath salts into the bath tub – just sayin’… Also in New England each spring thaw brings a new crop of rocks to the surface of our lawns.  We speak of our gardens growing stones.  But this frost heave effect, does not appear to be at play in this case, and we are going to have to leave NASA scientists to figure it all out, which I am sure they will.  I am reminded of a famous quote from physicist Sir Isaac Newton:

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The amusing part of the Mars rock story is, of course, its supposed resemblance to a jelly doughty. It’s a  pareidolia for sure.  Honestly, I see it, but not so much!  Fortunately, the Mars image did not cause me to run out and seek the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts.  I don’t need that, for sure.  It did get me thinking however, funny how the mind works, of John F. Kennedy:

“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

 

Now it has been reported that what Kennedy actually meant to say was ‘Ich bin Berliner,’ meaning ‘I am from Berlin’ and what he actually said was “I am a jelly doughnut” – hence my brain’s connection with the Mars rock.  However, and much to my relief, Wikipedia sets us straight on all of this.  First of all, we learn that in Berlin a jelly doughnut is a “Pfannkuchen” (“pancake”).  Only in northern ans western Germany is a jelly doughnut a “berliner.” The situation gets grammatically stickier, indeed,  if Kennedy wanted to say “I am a person from Berlin”, he would have omitted the definite article. (I know this is getting complicated)  But Kennedy meant that he was a Berliner in a figurative sense; so the statement is literally correct. Phew! Hopefully some of my German speaking readers will tell me that I am completely wrong and that Kennedy was indeed a jelly doughnut.

In the end neither Kennedy, who launched NASA and the American space program, nor the Mars rock are true jelly doughnuts.  The speech and the video images are iconic and they still raise the Gänsehaut on the back of my neck.