Category Archives: Reviews and Critiques

Never forget the magic of innovation

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It is very easy to sit back in the twenty-first century and view the development of photography and of the transmission of photographs as quaint.  I suppose that you could even argue that the importance of an innovation isn’t truly realized until it becomes quaint.  When I began writing this blog, I said that one of the topics was to be the magic of photography.  And I believe that no matter how technical we become in our discussions we are never very far from the magic.

What a moment it must have been in 1838 to see your own image on the shiny surface of a daguerreotype.    Would you not have imagined that the photographer had somehow magically captured a part of your soul in silver? What a moment it must have been in 1858 to hear the clicks of the telegraph and suddenly realize that these were being made by a fellow being across the great ocean.  What feat of prestidigitation was this?  What a moment it must have been when the first images of faces came across the wires with the belinographs.  The sorcerer was no longer satisfied to just capture the visage and soul of a person, but now transported them across the wires.  What sort of wizardry was this? And, of course, it was not long before even the wires were not necessary.

The photograph, the telegraph, the telephone, and the belinograph all were magical devices as were radios and televisions.  But in these we were mostly observers.  Now we are all Morses, and Bells, and Belins.  And this is the other dimension of the magic.  Today we all can send images and messages across the planet.  We all participate in this great dance of the memes.  In this, photography and the internet assume a huge democratizing role.  Today in any corner of the world there might be repressive violence and it can suddenly be seen worldwide.  It is raw;  it is intense;  and it is intimate.  We can sit in our living rooms wearing a shirt made in Bangladesh, but we cannot escape the image of the suffering.  We cannot escape, not so much culpability, as interconnected responsibility.

The hope, of course, is that connectedness leads to mutual respect and understanding.  We know that these powerful tools can just as easily be misused.  False information and doctored images seem just as real as authentic ones.  This argues for a diligence and critical consumerism that is rarely practiced.  But we must all seek to practice it.  It is as if we are in some epic fantasy, like the” Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars,” where the forces of Evil tilt with the forces of Good.  They are jealous of us, envious of our interconnection, and fearful of an enlightened world.

So, yes I think that all of these quaint inventions were magical.  They affected our world deeply and profoundly and they have made it a better place.  I am reminded again of Mark Twain’s message from “The Mysterious Stranger”, that I spoke about on New Years Day 2013: “Dream other dreams, and better.”

Mark Brodkin – sometimes you just gotta gasp!

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I was taking my lunch break on Friday and skimming the inevitable “photos of the week,” when I cam across something really beautiful.  This photograph by Mark Brodkin shows the “Keyhole Arch on the Big Sur in California,: during the very few minutes of each year when the setting sun is aligned just right, and the tide is just the right height to reflect the sum through the arch.  I think that we are talking high definition, or HD photography.  But, not to the point.  This image is truly amazing!

Fortunately, I was not satisfied and visited Mark’s website.  I was immediately drawn to his beautiful image of the Golden Gate engulfed in fog. And then there’s a shaft of light illuminating a cavern of sandstone, in Brodkin’s image entitled “Revelation.”   It is really worth exploring this site especially the landscape images.  It shows the value of patience in capturing the light.  I should also mention the perfection of high definition and wonderful composition. Gorgeous lighting, naturalistic geometrics, I hardly know where to begin.  A visit to Mark’s site is a must for anyone who loves photography in all its beautiful forms. Sometimes you just gotta gasp!

Death and resurrection in marble

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Figure 1 Death, Delwood Cemetery, Manchester, VT, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Death, Delwood Cemetery, Manchester, VT, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

The other side to Vermont marble is the magnificent monuments carved in it.  In the old cemeteries of Vermont and New Hampshire you see the great skill of New England sculptors.  It was for that reason that I was enticed to explore Manchester Vermont’s Delwood Cemetery, whose entrance is just adjacent to the entrance to Hildene House, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln.

Ponder the meaning of a cemetery.  Its essential message is dependent upon the religion  that dominates. If it is a Christian cemetery the essential message is one of death and resurrection.  You see a multitude of epitaphs affirming this poignant message.  However, at Delwood I saw something that I thought was truly amazing, the expression of this sentiment strictly in image, an image carved in marble.  It is  part of a plot that is adorned by a wonderful angel carved in the classical style in marble by contemporary artist Fred X. Brownstein. On either side of the angel and close to the ground are two friezes carved in high relief.  One shows great looming clouds and the second a curtain of light rays emerging from the clouds.  I have taken closeups of these two tablets and reinterpreted them as Figure 1 and 2, which I call “Death” and Resurrection.”

Unusual for me is the use a blue tone.  In analogue photography this would have been done with an iron salt.  I experimented with many tonal variants, but concluded that this was just right for emphasizing the emerging light.

I think that there is a tremendous level of understanding and creativity associated with capsulizing the quintessential message of the cemetery in stone without words.  It is a tribute to the power of image as meme.  I think also that the choice of the clouds and the light is all the more powerful because in this Vermont valley, dense clouds hanging over and between the mountains is all around you as are the sudden ephemeral tricks of emergent light.

Figure 2 - Resurrection, Delwood Cemetery, Manchester, VT. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Resurrection, Delwood Cemetery, Manchester, VT. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

When words fail, a picture is worth a thousand words

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Over the last couple of weeks, as I wrote about some pretty awful subjects: terrorism, crushing poverty, devastating fires, I was struck by the fact that words fail. After terrible, horrible, horrific, gruesome, awful, miserable, devastating; where do you go?  Of course, I’m not an award winning writer or reporter.  I say that because I heard some truly amazing reporting by local news last weekend.  It wasn’t cliché, hackneyed, or overwrought; just real, raw, and in your face, by people on the scene.

I am thinking that “in your face” may be key here.  Another important point is that after the age of radio, in the television era and now in the digital era, commentary is a backdrop, a complement if you will, to image.  Even in the radio era and before when all to be had were newspapers with first hand accounts, people clamored for images.  Whenever disaster occurred, people wanted photographs.

This is not to say that photographing terrible events is any easier than describing them or that it is not just as easy to fall into the trap of the cliché.  Indeed, there are special issues associated with photographing the tragic.   Many of us find it difficult enough to photograph random people on the street, how then do you abstract yourself to violating privacy to the point of shoving a camera into the face of someone suffering deeply.  And then there are special moral issues associated with photographing tragedy.  The first, is one that we have discussed previously – isn’t your first human responsibility to give aid rather than to photograph?  The second, is that in a civilized society there are unspoken rules and some things that are beyond the socially acceptable to photograph.

It is in all of this context that when writing yesterday’s blog about the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that I was particularly struck by AFP photographer Munir Uz Zaman’s* image of a woman being rescued by sliding her down a bolt of fabric from the crumbled building.  This single image tells everything that you need to know about the tragic event.  It is a building collapse, the bolts of fabric suggest the building’s purpose, the desperation in the people’s faces defines the situation, and the woman being rescued tells the personal story.  Nothing is cliché.

*If you are interested in this subject it is well worth searching the web for other images by Munir Uz Zaman.  A deeply moving example is his photograph of “Rohingya Muslims, trying to cross the Naf river into Bangladesh to escape sectarian violence in Myanmar.”  This is again photojournalism at its best.

 

“You are not a sketch” – more on body image

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In response to my recent post about the Barbie doll body image, reader Suzy has sent me a very graphic article from the Huffington Post.  The article profiles the Brazilian model agency, Star Model, and its campaign against anorexia.  The campaign is “You are not a Sketch” and shows first a fashion sketch of three models and then photoshopped images of the actual models in the featured fashionwear.  To conform to the sketches the models need to be morphed into an starving and anorexic state.  Some of these images are rivetting in their grotesqueness.  This is significant in two ways.  First, as powerful and vivid images that make an important point.  And second, as an example of how image manipulation can be a powerful and positive tool.

Marcelo Del Pozo – An image with alternate realities

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As I have mentioned before, I routinely scan the feature “The Week in Pictures” from a variety of websites.  It strikes me how many images we are being bombarded with, so many that we have “The Week in Pictures” as opposed to “The Year in Pictures.”

In any event, in this past week’s NBC News “The Week in Pictures, April 4-April 11, 2013” there is a wonderful picture from Marcelo Del Pozo  of Reuters showing a woman taking photographs of the art installation “Alice” by Spanish artist Cristina Lucas in the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art in Seville, Spain, on April 10.

It is a wonderful juxtaposition.  First you see Alice with her hand sticking out one window of the house and her head out another and you’re thinking that you’re looking at a woman adjusting a doll’s house.  Then you suddenly see the woman photographer and you say to yourself: “What the heck, what’s going on?”  It’s only then that you realize that Alice is not quite truly human, and reality returns.

But remember that one of the goals of this blog is to discuss the magic of photography.  And for that interim moment the illusion is complete.

Robert G. Edwards and the degrees of image recognition

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There are degrees to image recognition.  The meaning of some images is so crystal clear to us that we understand them on first viewing.  An example would be the Madonna and Child.  They appeal instantly to a  collective consciousness, to common mythology, and common  associations.  Arguably, they are culturally read, but as long as you share the cultural context you know what they connote.  I here offer as an example of these some of  of the images of Annie Brigman that we have discussed in previous blogs.  Then there are images that require some level of explanation – footnotes that can be contained within the image so that they become self explanatory.  Consider, for instance, the Barbie Doll image that we spoke about yesterday.  Take an image of an attractive nude woman holding a Barbie Doll and you just about get the point.  Draw lines on her body to show where fantasy ends and reality begins and the whole point comes across.  These lines are your footnotes.  Finally, there are some images that require a historical or otherwise elaborate explanation.  Show me a daguerreotype of a man in a stove pipe hat, and I start to get interested.  Convince me, through facial feature, that it is indeed Abraham Lincoln, and the picture suddenly takes on a greater meaning picture.

A few months ago I discussed an image of Lesley and Louise Brown, a Madonna and Child.  Louise Brown was the world’s first test tube baby and Lesley Brown her mother.  Sadly, the recent publication of the image was to mark the early death of Lesley Brown.  The image appeals to us in the sense of instant recognition, as mother and child.  But, put in its historic context, it takes on a renewed and invigorated meaning.  There is a whole generation of mothers, who could never have been mothers, and children, who could never have been born, without the development by Robert G. Edwards and Patrick Steptoe of in vitro fertilization.

This week there was another image.  It seems to be a family portrait, like a million other family snapshots.  Perhaps, one thinks, it shows a grandfather and grandmother with their daughter and infant granddaughter.  We need the historic context to understand this image fully.  It shows Robert G. Edwards, Lesley Brown, test-tube baby Louise Brown, and  Louise’s own child.  The image was taken to mark the occasion of Edwards being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2010.  Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards, CBE, FRS (1925-2013) died this past Wednesday.

The Barbie Doll body image

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As a scientist I’m always interested in the question of how to best present data visually.  That is, how does one most effectively get one’s point across?  So whenever I see an image that says it all, it is bound to get my attention.

Case in point, today I came across an image, which appears to have originated in Australia and has been making the round on Twitter and other social media.  Here it is at the french website “24 Matins.”   The photographs makes the very important point that real women don’t have bodies like Barbie.  The image shows an attractive woman holding a Barbie, and drawn on the woman’s body is Barbie’s figure, illustrating what needs to be removed, which happens to be most of the woman, and what needs to be augmented.  Well you know…  As an example of “a picture is worth a thousand words” this is a gem.  As always it’s all about the power of the image.