Figure 1 – 1880 ferrotytpe by an unknown artist, portrait Wof Billy the Kid. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

The was a recent posting on the Worldwide Eye Facebook Photography Users Group concerning the world’s most valuable photographs.  Here value is judged by the price collectors are willing and have paid for them.  The important caveat here is that the art and collectables market can be very fickle.

Still this sent me searching. and I was curious to discover that there are several not completely self consistent such lists. Start with Gizmodo, which is basically the list that I saw.  You might expect to see the likes of pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron but her photos fetch number in the mere hundreds of thousands of dollars.  I’m not rushing out to buy one tomorrow.  What about my all time favorite “Moonrise Hernandez, NM” by Ansel Adams.  That can go as high as $600,000 depending, and here’s the key point, upon when it was done.  But these are all lacking from the top ten list anyway.

What Gizmodo gives us as “the most expensive” (which, of course could change tomorrow) Andreas Gurstein’s 1999 image “Rhein II.”  Hmm and very interesting.  A list on Wikipedia is similar, but as mentioned not exactly the same.  Also it takes you beyond the top ten. Here you’ll find “Moonrise…” down at number 19.  What gets really fascinating is number ten a ferrotype from 1880 of “Billy the Kid” by an unknown artist (see Figure 1) which sold for $2.7 M. Going through the list is kind of interesting.  Are we Philistines for looking?  In the end there are many beautiful favorites.  So I’ll just end with Edward Steichen’s 1904 image “Moonlight The Pond” – so very soothing and beautiful.

I was struck today by a great image by Phillipe Merle of the AFP showing a newly opened pedestrian’bicycle/bus tunnel in the city of Lyon, France.  It was unveiled on the eve of the city’s festival of lights. It is certainly going to be the envy of bicyclists everywhere.  There’s no rain, snow, or dodging cars and trucks.  So perfect, and I think as a photograph as well.  The projections(?) pf the city on the walled tunnel create a real fantasy land and the pastels are just gorgeous.  The perspective is also wonderful and are the concentric circles of light that seem to flash and move away from you. These create a marvelous sense of magic and movement.  I also find the geometric balance to be quite interesting. There are two sets of triangle forming lines above the tunnel that are just askew of one another. One flows into infinmity the other out of it.  This makes the balance of thirds seem to resonate back and forth.  Again creating motion.

As I am writing today’s blog the world is mourning, or more accurately, celebrating the life of Nelson Mandella.  Needless-to-say the news media is bombarding us with historic images – some of them very difficult to digest.  They were always difficult to digest, always difficult to understand.  None-the-less they are iconic.

The most striking image is of the Soweto Uprising on 16 June 1976, when over 500 people were shot dead by the security forces of the apartheid state.  It was an uprising of high school students, who were protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in township schools. One of the first to be killed was 12 year old Hector Pieterson.  In a famous image by Sam Nzima he is carried away by a stranger, while his sister screams in combined terror and grief beside him.  How do you relate to such a photographer?  Is it a scene of martyrdom – a last deposition of Christ?  Let me tell you that no mother raises her child to be a martyr.  And it is on that level that we relate to such an image.  It is symbolic of unbridled and intolerable oppression, where the victims are the walking dead, and there is really nothing left to lose.

Beyond that, I am struck by the similarity of the emotions that the Nzima’s photograph evokes in me and the emotion raised by a picture taken almost four years earlier to the day of the Hector Pieterson image (June 8, 1972).  It shows a nine year old girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a road near Trảng Bàng, Vietnam, after a napalm bomb was dropped on the village of Trảng Bàng by a plane of the Vietnam Air Force. That picture was by famous war photographer Nick Ut.

How are we meant to relate to that?  How are we meant to relate to any of this?  We have two pictures from separate wars.  Both depict the suffering of children.  This is why coming of age in the sixties and seventies was so painful.  This is why coming of age today is so painful.  The images are so powerful that they are numbing and drain you completely.

I remember having a dream once, when I was a child that was so happy that when I woke up I wished that I could go back to sleep and reenter the dream.  As a child, I always knew when I was dreaming and usually if I didn’t like where I was, I could “switch” the channel.  So then you grow up and as Joni Mitchell sang in “The Circle Game:” “Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true.”

Dreams and imagination are important.  That’s why we love science fiction or vampire movies.  That’s why we imagine that we could recreate dinosaurs.  Indeed, artists and writers are really dreamers.

This afternoon I was starting to pour through the many “this year’s best photographs” and I was in a mood.  I was looking for something upbeat and happy.  And I came upon this wonderful picture from Rex Features showing showing delighted children, visitors to Blue Planet Aquarium in Cheshire Oaks, UK gleefully waving at a mermaid in the shark tank.  The mermaid in question is aqua-veterinarian (a sturgeon surgeon?) Dr. Daniela Rodler.

This is really a wonderful image on many levels.  It makes us happy, first because of the smiling children and second because of the mermaid that reminds us all of childhood – a time when while we knew there weren’t really merpeople, it didn’t really hurt to believe in them just a little.  We see the incongruity of the picture, but it really doesn’t bother us.  We were all children once.  We still believe just a little.  Oh, and I like the fact that these are English children.  English children are the children of Peter Pan and of the Cottingley Fairies.

A favorite topic for pseudodocumentaries are abandoned cities.  The typical story is one of a great civilization and its striving metropolis and then it disappears – no one really knows why.  The list of such cities is pretty impressive.  There’s Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey; Palenque in Mexico; Cahokia across the Mississippi from modern day St. Louis; Derinkuyu in Turkey; Macchu Pichu in Peru; and Great Zimbabwe in Zimabwe.  And that’s only a partial list.  The stories of these places speaks to many points: the fragility of human memory,  the shortness of the time that we get to spend on the Earth, and the arrogance which is human greatness.

All of these thoughts flashed through my mind when I considered a brilliant portfolio by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre entitled “The Ruins of Detroit.”  Detroit was the great American automobile city that rose to see the nation covered in asphalt roads and then fell victim to globalization.  I have spent enough time in Brooklyn these past few years to have learned that it would be a mistake to say that it will never rise again.  But for now the portfolio is stunning.  It captures that strange world between striving and “in ruins.”  Several images stand out in my mind’s eye for the stories that they tell.  First there is “18th Floor Dentist’s Cabinet, David Broderick Tower.”  Then there is “Room 1504, Lee Plaza Hotel.”  Particularly interesting to me are the images that show people in the distance, an example being “Packard Motor Plant.”  Who are these people?  Are they real?  They seem more like ghosts than real people and I am reminded of the great post apocalyptic science ficton movie “Omega Man, 1971,” where the world is inhabited by mutant zombie like people.

Like a visit real or virtual to other abandoned cities, a trip through this portfolio leaves many questions unanswered.  Of course, Detroit is not fully abandoned.  So we are left to wonder what is next.  And of course, our throats are left dry and we are haunted by Shelly’s words in his poem Ozymandias,

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Figure 1 – Alice Liddell as Pomona the Roman Goddess of gardens and fruit. Image (1872) by Julia Margaret Cameron from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

I have just returned from a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with my son and his girlfriend in New York City.  All through the year, I follow the photography exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum and after discovering that the are not coming to Boston, I tend exhale a mournful sigh.  Well, I am happy to say that I did make it on Friday to a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of the “Work of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879),” which runs through January 5, 2014.  So there is still time for you to get there.

Needless-to-say, this takes us back to a time when photography was new and image makers strived for the metaphorical and mystical.  For Cameron it tended to be a Christian mythology like her “Daughters of Jerulsalem, 1865”  or mythic themes drawing either on classic Greco-roman myths, such as “Casseopeia, 1866,” or those of the English Isles, such as “The Parting of Lancelot and Guineveirre, 1874.”  Almost always Cameron sought to portray the unique world of women.

I want to say that the space that the Metropolitan Museum has allotted to special exhibits, especially intimate ones like the Cameron exhibit is truly magnificent.  As you walk down the corridor to this exhibit space, past the ubiquitous special exhibits’ gift shop, your mind is suddenly flooded with memorizes of all of the previous exhibits that you have seen there.  The light is perfectly subdued to highlight what are mostly silver albumin prints.  Cameron was a perfectionist, and she worked hard for every iota of effect.  This included the choice of size for her pictures.  When commissioned by Tennyson to illustrate a book of his poems, she privately financed a folio size edition that would properly highlight her work.  Such was, and remains, the difficult translation from photograph to printed page.

What first grabbed me as I entered the exhibit was a photograph not by Cameron but by Oscar Reijlander(1813-1875) entitled “Mr. and MIss Constable, 1866.” It depicts the Constable children in a touching and fond embrace.  It ingeniously poses them obliquely staring into a fire.  Reijlander was a master of pose and he built a special studio behind his home with five oddly shaped, judiciously placed windows.  These gave him complete control over illumination.  This image is striking in its theatricality and even seems to be a still promo for a movie.  Of course, movies were thirty years away.  What is most striking to me, the element that makes the image so human and special is the freckles on Miss Constable’s face.

There is also a truly wonderful portrait by Reijlander of “Cicely Hamiltion, 1863-1867.”  The way in which the girl wraps her arms self consciously around herself an the upward stare of her eyes are both enigmatically and defining of this great photograph. Unfortunately it also evokes the darker and controversial side of Victorian photographs of young girls.

Studying the exhibit was like a visit to so see so many old friends. And with photography, it is invariably significant to see the prints the way the photographer mean them to be seen.  Neither digital display on a computer or printing in the best photography books ever truly captures the image.

Among the “old friends” was Cameron’s portrait of astronomer “Sir John Herschel, 1867,” which we have had the opportunity to speak about before.  And there was Cameron’s portrait of Alice Liddell (1852-1934) the inspiration of Sir Charles Dodgson’s “Alice in Wondereland.”  This is shown in Figure 1, where Liddell is posed (1872) as Pomona the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees.  But then I came upon something really striking that I had never seen before, or more likely had seen before my mind was ready to see it.  This is Cameron’s allegorical image of “King Lear Allotting his Kingdom to his Three Daughters, 1872.” A Shakespeare story was rare for Cameron.  And I have to say that to my mind King Lear is the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy.  I comes closest to a Greek tragedy in that daughter Cordelia knows full well both her familial and her marital responsibilities and, in the end, she goes to her fate knowing it full well and facing it because it is her destiny to face it.  This image shows what a true master craftswoman Cameron was.  The entire story is told in a single picture.  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.

“What shall Cordelia do?
Love, and be silent…

Then poor Cordelia!
And yet not so; since, I am sure, my love’s
More richer than my tongue.”

Sometimes you come across an image, which speaks for itself, and anything that you can say diminishes it.  Such is the case with this very remarkable image by Mark Wilson for Getty Images showing Sarah Stancyzk curling up in a blanket on Veterans Day, November 11 at the Arlington National Cemetery gravesite of her husband, Pfc. David Metzger, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2009.