Figure 1 – Einstein Ring due to gravitational lensing (lower left) due to LRG 3-757, 2011 from ESA/Hubble & NASA via the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

I’m going to shock many of you today by choosing as my Favorite Photograph 2013, #4 an image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope entitled “A horseshoe Einstein ring from Hubble, 2011.”  I’ve chosen the full field version that shows the surrounding star field (see Figure 1), because it is well so beautiful.  A robot eyes photograph, Wolf? Really?  Yes that’s right and I use it to illustrate an important point.  What is the purpose of photography? It can be many faceted.  To create something beautiful? To create emotion. To inform.  So here we have something that is both beautiful and informs.  It is a scientific triumph that proves something really important, namely Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Let’s not get into the middle of a scientific controversy here. Although Orest Chwolson (1924), Frantisek Klin (1936), and Albert Einstein (1936) all postulated the existence of gravitational lenses.  Einstein’s work is the most famous and it is really a key element of his general theory, according to which light is bent by gravity.

So if there is a massive object such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies between a very distant galaxy it’s light is bent my the massive object so that its image is distorted.  It can be distorted in many ways since the massive object typically acts as a very bad lens; it can be like looking through a soda bottle.

Figure 1 is a particularly perfect example. Here we look at the blue light from a distant galaxy warped by the gravitational field of a luminous red galaxy.  The alignment is essentially perfect so that the distant galaxy is warped into a huge blue horse shoe that surrounds the luminous red galaxy.

I was amazed when I first saw these beautiful images – and they are beautiful, because they show something that I only imagined but never thought that I would see.  This is a wonderful example of the magic of photography, of the gift of expanded vision that robotic eyes can give us.

And speaking of Alice Liddell… I keep finding myself hypnotically drawn to the images of photographic pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).  Despite her overwrought religious images, which really don’t speak to my tastes or sensibilities, I just love both her skills as a photographer and all the allegory in her pictures.  This was a continuation through the new medium of photography of the metaphorical and mystical pictoralism then dominant in painting.  We may consider, as an example, yesterday’s image by Charles Dodgson “Alice Liddell (1852-1934) as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858″ with “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884” by Edward Burne-Jones, from the Tate Gallery, in London. How few today can recite the story of Cophetua, and yet to educated Victorians it was well-known.

Today’s image, Cameron’s “King Lear Allotting his Kingdom to his Three Daughters, 1872 ” shows a mature Alice with her sisters in another allegorical pose.  This time the story is from Shakespeare story, a choice that was rare for Cameron.  The three Liddell sisters pose as Lear’s daughters.  Cameron’s husband poses as Lear.  On the left, daughters Regan (Lorina Liddell) and Goneril (Elizabeth Liddell) whisper flatteries in their father’s ear.  Note the brilliant gesture of Lorina’s pointed finger.  While Alice as Cordelia stands with demure resignation on the right enduring her father’s wrath.

I discussed this photograph on December 1 ago in the context of a current exhibition of Cameron’s works at the Metopolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  At the time I commented that to my mind Lear among Shakespeare’s tragedies comes closest to a pure tragedy in the Greek tradition.  Let me explain this in a bit more detail, and at the risk, I am sure, of inflaming Shakespearean  scholars everywhere.  The other tragedies tend to fall into the category of the “tragic flaw.” Macbeth suffers from ambition, and perhaps from paying too much attention to his wife, who has even more ambition than he. Othello is insecure and too prone to jealousy.  Romeo and Juliet are, well I’m sorry, just plain stupid. Hamlet, well, as Lawrence Olivier tells us in the prelude to his 1948 movie version of Hamlet: “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” I think it a bit more complicated than that.  As a Catholic, living when he did, Hamlet was taught that there were no ghosts since people were not resurrected until the time of the Last Judgment.  So if not a ghost, then his father’s “ghost” must be a demon sent from hell to trick him.  Still Hamlet fails to act and avenge his father’s murder.  In the end he winds up killing King Claudius not because Claudius murdered his father but because he murdered his mother.

Lear on the other hand is very different theatre.  Lear himself suffers from a senile dementia.  It is not his fault.  It derives not from a flaw of character but from a twist of nature.  He is dependent and prone to the flattery of his two evil daughters Regan and Goneril.  But Cordelia recognizes that her duties must be split.  She must at the same time be filial to her husband and to her father.  At the end of the play like a true tragic Greek figure she goes knowingly to her death, because it is her duty and destiny to protect her father.  She is the true epitome of daughter-hood.

All of this is in Cameron’s picture.  And recognize also that it was Cameron’s stated goal to depict the nurturing, motherly, and daughterly role of women in society.  Her choice of Lear is not surprising.  Among Shakespeare’s plays it is the one that studies must closely the contrast between the vices and virtues of women.  The image is soft, masterly to the point, and I think brilliant!

Figure 1 – Charles Dodgson’s “Charles Dodgson “Alice Liddell as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858,” from the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

Today’s favorite photograph is Charles Dodgson‘s (1832-1898) ” Alice Liddell (1852-1934) as a beggar-maid from the story of Cophetua, 1858.”  It contrasts, so similar yet so different, from the image of yesterday, Roman Vishniac’s “The only flowers of her youth, 1938.” One is imagined the other real.

Dodgson is, of course, the real name of Lewis Carroll the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.”  And Alice Liddell is the namesake of the stories.  They were written for and dedicated to her.

It is difficult to look at one of Dodgson’s photographs of young girls without the more sordid aspects of these relationships coming to mind.  And, as I have said before, such too is the case for Dodgson’s contemporary Oscar Reijlander (1813-1875).  However, to my mind this is really a wonderfully playful and sensitive image.

It is an image of emergent beauty and coming of age into womanhood.  So what about this Cophetua person? Cophetua was a mythical  African king who lacked sexual attraction to women. One day he is looking out his palace window, when he sees a young beggar, named Penelophon, who is suffering for her lack of clothes.  It is “love at first sight!”   Oy! So Cophetua vows that he will have this beggar as his wife or he will commit suicide.  Cophetua scatters a path of coins to attract Penelophon and when she approaches he informs her that she is to be his wife.  Now how can she refuse this offer? Uhh! The details of this story, unfortunately, make it even harder to ignore the more sordid side of Dodgson’s attraction.  Did I mention that Alice Liddell was six at the time of this photograph?

Needless-to-say a key appealing element of this image is its historic association, who the photographer is and who the subject is.  Beyond that the enigmatic expression on Alice’s face is charming, as is the three quarter view with her eyes towards the camera.  The way in which her hand is cupped to tell the story of Penelophon is such a simple yet compelling gesture.  The smudges of dirt on her legs add detail, and finally the lighting is wonderfully dramatic.  This picture reaches out to us across time from what was only the second decade of photography.

I’d like to begin this year’s list of favorite photographs with Roman Vishniac’s (1897-1990) photograph “The Only Flowers of Her Youth, Warsaw, 1938.“  Vishniac photographically documented the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe on the verge of the holocaust.  Many of these were assembled in his 1983 book “A Vanished World.” The story associated with this picture is that the little girl depicted was confined to her bed all winter because she had no shoes. She was kept company only by the flowers on her wall, which were painted  painted by her father who was an artist.  And these flowers were the only ones that she had ever seen.  Today Roman Vishniac, a Russian American photographer is best known for his work on shtetl life.  However, he later in life turned, actually returned, his attention to his first great passion biology and photomicroscopy.

The archives of Vishniac’ work is at the International Center for Photography in New York City.  The archives are significant because they enable viewers to see not only the works that Vishniac chose to publish in his book but all of them.  The world of the Jews in Eastern Europe was complex. like that of all societies.

As the rest of the twentieth century unfolded and now the twenty-first begins to unfold, we are struck by a fundamental sadness.  We had hoped that the end of World War II would bring the end of world genocide.  But this was not the case. The little girl in the picture becomes a kind of “poster child” for all these victims.  She speaks to us of universal despair.

On a photographic level “The only flowers of her youth” resonates with to this despair.  We see her face, take note of her surroundings, and we know that there is something wrong.  By now we have seen enough images to immediately recognize and relate to them.  But, and I think this important, we need the title or caption to really and fully understand it.  I have come to realize that there are two types of great portraits: those that need no context and those that do.  This is a powerful and moving example of the second type.

Last year at this time I started to post a series of blogs and images that I entitled “Ten favorite photographs.”  I’d like to continue that tradition.  So starting today and then each day until the end of the year, I am going to present ten of my favorite photographs, one each day.  It is my holiday gift to you, or maybe to myself, because each time I revisit a crowning work by one of the great photographers it is a special and inspiring moment.  It is a moment to relearn the power of image.

So just a few rules of the game.

1. I am only allowed one image per photographer.  I have to choose.
2. I have to respect copyrights.  This means that most of the time you are going to have to click on the title to see the image.
3. I’m allowed to talk about photographers that I have previously discussed in this blog, but I’m not allowed to repost a picture from last year’s list..
4. I’m not going to try to order the images on a scale of one to ten, except perhaps the last.  They’re pretty much in random order.

There are two points that I find interesting about the process.  First, my list from last year stands.  These are still my top ten favorites.  But second, there is a world of fabulous images and these enrich our lives every day.  They make us laugh and they make us cry, but most of all “they give us pause.”This is because they evoke what is fundamentally common and therefore human inside us.  Such is truly the magic of photography.

I very much hope that you enjoy these photographs and I invite you to send a link to your favorites for possible inclusion on the blog.