It started simply enough in 1999. Jeff Harris, a photographer based in Toronto, took his first self-portrait, something he has since repeated every day. His visual diary now amounts to 4,748 photos and they tell a very personal story. They show the passing of time, some fairly normal moments, but also some difficult ones. In November 2008, Harris was diagnosed with cancer, and his experience with it — his surgery, radiation treatment, eventual paralysis in one leg — all gets visually documented by his project. The video above, originally appearing on TIME’s web site, takes you inside Harris’ project. The clip runs 5 minutes.
Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs (click image below to get a free audio copy) covers a lot of ground in 571 pages. By design, it’s broad and comprehensive, but it doesn’t always go deep. One facet of Steve Jobs’ life that doesn’t get much coverage here was his relationship with Kobun Chino Otogawa (1938–2002), a Buddhist priest who taught Jobs the way of Zen and shared his passion for art and design. The two became close — close enough that Kobun presided over the Steve Jobs-Laurene Powell wedding in 1991. This relationship receives a fuller treatment in The Zen of Steve Jobs, a new 80-page graphic novel that uses stripped down dialogue and bold calligraphic panels to tell this story. The book was authored by Forbes writer Caleb Melby, and the artwork provided by the creative agency JESS3. The video above gives you a good introduction to the imaginative work. h/t BoingBoing
Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.
1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources — short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.
3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.
4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.
In this video created by the Guardian, writer and award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art, and propaganda in photography. He draws examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean War, both cited in his book Believing is Seeing, and he asks the viewer to consider a most fundamental question: how does a photograph relate to the physical world? Unlike a verbal or written statement, a photograph cannot be true or false. It simply is.
Then comes another argument worth considering — the idea that all photographs are posed. By way of example, Morris cites an instance where a photographer (in this case Roger Fenton) omits an elephant standing outside the frame. And it leads Morris to suggest that we shouldn’t take photos at face value. Rather we should do our due diligence to find out whether there isn’t always a metaphorical elephant looming beyond the frame. As Morris states, a photograph decontextualizes everything. It reveals to us a two dimensional reality that’s “been torn out of the fabric of the world.”
This video is part of the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” series, in which the world’s top thinkers, newsmakers, and people with stories to tell are interviewed. For more meditations on photography, give some time to Errol Morris’ speech at the Harvard Bookstore. Find the transcript here.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
Coinciding with the release of Blade Runner in 1982, David Scroggy published the Blade Runner Sketchbook, a book with 100+ production drawings and artwork for Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film. The sketchbook features visual work by Scott himself, artist Mentor Huebner, and costume designer Charles Knode, but most notably a slew of drawings by artist, futurist, and illustrator Syd Mead.
As Comics Alliance notes, this sketchbook has been out of print for years and scant few paper copies remain available for purchase. So digital versions have filled the void online, and now comes this: a version that lets you revel in the Blade Runner artwork in full-screen mode. Enter the sketchbook by clicking the image above or below. (The book itself is hosted at Isuu.com). Once you get there, click the images and they’ll fill your screen.
Enjoy, and while you’re at it, don’t miss some related items:
Like the children in his books, Maurice Sendak, at age 83, is doing the best he can to navigate a frightening and bewildering world. “We all have to find our way,” Sendak says in this revealing little film from the Tate museums. “If I could find my way through picture-making and book illustration, or whatever you want to call it, I’d be okay.”
In books like In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are and Outside, Over There, Sendak has explored the wonders–and terrors–of childhood. “No one,” wrote Dave Eggers recently in Vanity Fair, “has been more uncompromising, more idiosyncratic, and more in touch with the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child.”
Sendak’s own childhood in Brooklyn, New York, was a time of emotional trauma. His parents were Polish immigrants who had trouble adjusting to life in America. On the day of Sendak’s barmitzvah, his father learned that his entire family had been killed in the Holocaust. He remembered the sadness of looking through family scrapbooks. “The shock of thinking I would never know them was terrible,” Sendak told the Guardian earlier this year. “Who were they?”
This early sense of the precariousness of life carried over into his work. As the playwright Tony Kushner wrote of Sendak in 2003:
Maurice, among the best of the best, shocks deeply, touching on the mortal, the insupportably sad or unjust, even on the carnal, on the primal rather than the merely primitive. He pitches children, including aged children, out of the familiar and into mystery, and then into understanding, wisdom even. He pitches children through fantasy into human adulthood, that rare, hard-won and, let’s face it, tragic condition.
In 1968, Terry Gilliam was a young American cartoonist living in London. He was having trouble making a living from magazine work, so his friend John Cleese suggested he get in touch with Humphrey Barclay, who was producing a slightly subversive television show for children called Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Subtitled “The Fairly Pointless Show,” it featured a group of previously unknown actors including Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and attracted a cult following among adults. Barclay looked at Gilliam’s portfolio and decided he would fit right in.
For one early assignment, Gilliam was asked to prepare something for a special show to be broadcast on Christmas day, 1968, called Do Not Adjust Your Stocking. Looking for inspiration, he decided to visit the Tate Gallery. In The Pythons Autobiography of the Pythons, Gilliam remembered the project and how it figured into his emerging artistic style:
I went down to the Tate and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards so I went through the collection and photocopied things and started moving them around. So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved. I never analysed the stuff, I just did it the quickest, easiest way. And I could use images I really loved.
The result (above) is a hilarious free-associational send-up of traditional Christmas card motifs. In addition to being aired on the show, The Christmas Card was incorporated into Gilliam’s short debut film from 1968, Storytime, which is part of our collection of Free Movies Online.
For an update of Gilliam’s twisted take on Christmas–a darker reworking of his Malevolent Santa theme in The Christmas Card–look below for a drawing Gilliam posted a few days ago on his Facebook page. And as the man says, you better watch out!
Russian abstract painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 16, 1866 (December 4 on the Julian calendar), and raised in Odessa, where he took an early interest in music. As a young man he studied economics and law, but in 1895 his life was forever changed when he attended a Moscow exhibition of paintings by the French Impressionists. Kandinsky was deeply struck by one of Monet’s paintings from the series Haystacks at Giverny. He later recalled his epiphany:
That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor.
Kandinsky quit his job as a law professor and dedicated himself to painting. He emigrated, first to France and then to Germany, where he moved further and further away from figurative painting. He was among the first to create works that were completely abstract, or non-objective. In his 1910 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky declares that the elements within a painting should not correspond to any outer object, but only to the artist’s “inner need.”
In observance of the artist’s 145th birthday, we present two videos with different perspectives on his work. Above, actress Helen Mirren talks with the Museum of Modern Art about what Kandinsky, and art, mean to her. Below, a trio of scholars–Beth Harris, Juliana Kreinik and Steven Zucker–discuss Kandinsky’s 1913 masterpiece, “Composition VII,” for the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory series. “Composition VII” was painted by Kandinsky in Munich over a period of four days–but only after he had made more than 30 preparatory sketches, watercolors and oil studies.
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