Simulacrum
Click for Larger Image
Exhibition Information and Background at New York Life.
Two Youths, Coney Island
Bruce Davidson
1958 1958-59
gelatin silver print
From: Eastman House -- America Seen
Saxophonist Dexter Gordon
1948 from Herman Leonard's "Images of Jazz"
"Light. Shadow. Swirling cigarette smoke. These elements of Herman Leonard's photography helped define the "look" of American and European jazz for the last 50 years."
From: HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things
Smoke Break Among Girders
Lewis Hine, American (1874-1940)
From:George Eastman House Lewis Hine - Empire State Building Series
On West 34th Street October, 2001
Photograph by Gerard Van der Leun
This image:
contains this image:
142 levels down.
Polaroid photography by Mark-Steffen Göwecke
All began in 1996 in Bretany, France:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.On a beach I photographed with a the SX-70 a polaroid showing sand and stones. Again the resulting picture was photographed with the Polaroid-camera.
The distances in space and time became greater.
The previous polaroid is allways the basis for the next one and so on ...
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
-- Turtles
Harry Sternberg, Builders (1935-36)
Click image to enlarge.
From:
A Depression Art Gallery
Yellowstone at Evening
Click to enlarge
Andrew Lipson has a special place in his heart for LEGOs. That's a good thing since it leads to these "Works of the Lego Masters":
"Daniel Shiu and I worked on this as a joint project after we finished our rendition of Escher's "Ascending and Descending", making it our fourth Escher picture rendered in LEGO. Once again, no camera tricks, but the picture has to be taken from exactly the right place, and boy did we get tired of trying to find where that place was. The whole thing took five or six evenings spread over two or three weeks. Most of the last evening was taken up with setting up the lighting the way we wanted it and trying to get the camera position just right...
A large 500 watt Mazda C-type lamp, just over 9 inches tall. These were the first coiled tungsten filament lamps (which are still used to this date and have remained largely unchanged), introduced in high wattage types in 1913. A year later these "smaller" (but still impressive) 500 and 200 watt types were introduced. Daylight blue glass was used on some of these for factory lighting- it gives a purer whiter light that is more natural and pleasant to work under. This idea is still used today.From: The Bulb Museum
Click to Enlarge
"Deal me up another future
with some brand new deck of cards."
We seldom have an image of the exact moment when the history of the world changed. But we do have this one from a century ago.
"This is it. This is the moment, and you can see Wilbur. He's caught in mid-stride. You can see Orville on the machine. It's just all_ all right there. it's that moment frozen forever."The following telegram was sent from Kitty Hawk:
Father,
Success. Four flights Thursday morning. Longest fifty-seven seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas.
Orville.
-- From The American Experience -- The Wright Stuff
Click to enlarge
Yet another stunning image from the Hubble
This photograph of the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made. The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. The image shows a fine web of filamentary "bicycle-spoke" features embedded in the colorful red and blue ring of gas. At 650 light-years away, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.
From the archives of Consumers Reports: Instant glue, 1973
Instant glue, 1973
One drop of this instant glue formed a bond between man and hammer in five seconds. We called it an instant hazard--and rated it Not Acceptable.
"You`re gonna walk that endless highway,
Walk that high-way till you die.
All you children goin` my way,
Better tell your home-life sweet goodbye."
Image by Van der Leun. Click to enlarge
Warning: clicking on image loads a very large
but very spectacular image from the NOAA servers.
Under the general heading of the ill wind, file this series of NOAA shots of Isabel as pointed out on:brianstorms
"What's neat about this shot (when you click on the image on the right, note it's a 1280x1200 jpeg from NOAA) is that it was taken in the early morning, and you can literally see dawn's early light shining on the storm, giving it a great 3D feel. Note how the eye is as big as Lake Okeechobee, or the city of Miami. "
Let freedom ring,
Let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know
That today is a day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong,
Let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away,
Let the guilty pay.
It's Independence Day
20th Century Kiva in Southeastern Utah
THROUGH THE SMOKE HOLE
by Gary Snyder
I
There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the way to
it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke goes
through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the
ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have
been a tree or pole; I think it is merely a way.
Fire is at the foot of the ladder. The fire is in the center. The walls are
round. There is also another world below or inside this one.
The way there is down thru smoke. It is not necessary to
think of a series.
Raven and Magpie do not need the ladder. They fly thru the smoke holes
shrieking and stealing. Coyote falls thru; we recognize him
only as a clumsy relative, a father in old clothes we don’t
wish to see with our friends.
It is possible to cultivate the fields of our own world without much thought
for the others. When men emerge from below we see them
as the masked dancers of our magic dreams. When men dis-
appear down, we see them as plain men going somewhere
else. When men disappear up we see them as great heroes
shining through the smoke. When men come back from above
they fall thru and tumble; we don’t really know them; Coyote,
as mentioned before.
"The mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West, spine heights at the world's end, coast of blue Pacific starry night---nobone halfbanana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in the mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards, illuminate." - Jack Kerouac, "Visions of Cody"Reid Stott has maintained a fascinating web site for years at Photodude.com. His weblog is one of those rich and rewarding pages packed to the edges with ideas, insights, opinions and a photo diary. But the real riches are to be found off the main page in Stotts' selection of his own photography around various themes. Chief among these are his hymns to one of the central myths of America: The Road Trip.
The image above is from his 8-day Red Rock Road Trip. By itself, it is an iconic image of all those roads that connect to all the other roads that let Americans travel at will, without internal passports, across the vast land sea that lies between the coasts. Taking a journey through Stotts' images, from the Grand Canyon to Monument Valley, won't be the same as doing it yourself, but perhaps it will inspire you to do the same the next time the open road calls.
Until then, if you see an image that moves you, and you will, think about dropping by Stotts' online store and ordering an archival print.
Click for much larger image
Funny, this is NASA's most Highly Detailed World Map to date but you still can't see any borders or nations.
This image of the world was generated with data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The SRTM Project has recently released a new global data set called SRTM30, where the original one arcsecond of latitude and longitude resolution (about 30 meters, or 98 feet, at the equator) was reduced to 30 arcseconds (about 928 meters, or 3045 feet.) This image was created from that data set and shows the world between 60 degrees south and 60 degrees north latitude, covering 80% of the Earth's land mass. The image is in the Mercator Projection commonly used for maps of the world.Two visualization methods were combined to produce the image: shading and color coding of topographic height. The shade image was derived by computing topographic slope in the northwest-southeast direction, so that northwest slopes appear bright and southeast slopes appear dark. Color coding is directly related to topographic height, with green at the lower elevations, rising through yellow and tan, to white at the highest elevations.
(Click for larger image)
"For the past several years I have experimented with non-photographic techniques for creating images by utilizing input through a flatbed CCD scanner. No photographs are employed in the process."
Brooklyn Heights, August 2002
Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove -
33 ft. Diam. (Getty Museum)
Carleton E. Watkins
American,
Yosemite, California,
1861Albumen print
Dome-topped: 20 1/2 x 15 5/8 in
The tree was manifestly a very fine one, but we felt disappointed in regard to the apparent size. . . . On looking more attentively and minutely at the photograph, we discovered a group of men at the base of the tree! They were so small that at first, they had escaped notice, but being once seen their effect upon the picture was magical . . . and we felt that we looked indeed upon a grizzly giant.
Hopi Maiden, 1901
by Adam Clark Vroman
The collection of Vroman's work held by the University of California, Riverside's Museum of Photography is well worth exploring.
Taken from the excellent Surfshooter. . The caption assures us that, "This photo is REAL. It's not a Photoshop manipulated image. It IS a Dolphin, NOT a shark."
Hey, no problem. We'll wait for you here on the beach.
Ellen Petro smoking pipe
"Hohenberger was born in Ohio in 1876 and orphaned at five years of age. He spent his boyhood as a printing apprentice and later worked several years on newspapers in Dayton, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally for the Indianapolis Star.
"Composing rooms and newspapers could not hold his attention. In 1917 he left Indianapolis to start a small photography business in Nashville, Indiana, concentrating on the subject matter of Brown County. The next forty-seven years were spent recording the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, of other areas of Indiana, of Kentucky, of South Carolina, and of Mexico."
Photo by Wachendorfia on Fotolog.
We must always be vigilant and patient.
"It's vain to think that you would have any interest in my photos of the places I've been, but vanity is the only excuse I offer. I like my photographs. After all the effort it's comforting to know they are available to others - much more comforting than the thought that, left on the shelf, they may become just another heirloom destined for the trash. If you like them too please let me know." - Bill Hocker
I first became aware of Bill Hocker's photography via a link on Jef Poskanzer's Industrial Archeology, a page I recommend to those with an interest in same as a central resource. In Jef's consistently terse style all he said was: "Bill Hocker's great industrial photos." I trust Jef like I trust few others online so that was enough for me.
Clicking on his link to Hocker's Industrials I was prepared for something excellent and I was not disappointed. I was not, however, prepared for the vast array of pleasures that the rest of his site has to offer.
Elegant and sparse in layout and presentation, Bill Hocker: Photographs is one of those rare sites where the visitor finds himself wandering from page to page and theme to theme with increasing pleasure. Through an all too rare meeting of taste with technical ability, Hocker's images from across many decades and through many countries, all seem as fresh as tomorrow and as solid as yesterday. Marked throughout by a quiet meticulousness and a dedication to visual acuity, this is one site you will not want to leave too soon. And one you'll want to return to as well.
Ellen Petro smoking pipe
by Frank Michael Hohenberger
"Hohenberger was born in Ohio in 1876 and orphaned at five years of age. He spent his boyhood as a printing apprentice and later worked several years on newspapers in Dayton, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally for the Indianapolis Star.
"Composing rooms and newspapers could not hold his attention. In 1917 he left Indianapolis to start a small photography business in Nashville, Indiana, concentrating on the subject matter of Brown County. The next forty-seven years were spent recording the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, of other areas of Indiana, of Kentucky, of South Carolina, and of Mexico."
"Yes, you can play.
ANY NUMBER can play a number,
and that number is always an unknown number.
But if you can play unknown numbers
you can sit in on the session."
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- New York Life: Images After the Fall
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- Building New York
- Beyond Revenge
- "Turtles All the Way Down"
- On the High Steel
- The Wasteland
- All Relative
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- The Iraq Campaign Continues
- We will be flying today at a cruising altitude of 4 feet.
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- Isabel by the Dawn's Early Light
- Let freedom ring, Let