Take Laurence Olivier. Who else could have made the phrase “Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera” sound like Shakespeare? Seriously. He could’ve tacked the string of superlatives he unleashes against a black background above onto the end of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech and I would have been none the wiser.
(And gentlemen in England now a‑bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day -
Pocket sized, folding, electronically controlled, motor driven…)
Sir Larry was followed in 1979 by actress Liv Ullmann, solemnly praising the SX70 Sonar OneStep’s moment-capturing abilities. Is there a Polaroid somewhere in the Ingmar Bergman Archive of his and Ullmann’s 12-year-old daughter Linn, standing at the sink, washing dishes? Or has YouTube become the sole reliquary for these precious moments?
Christopher Plummer’s 1980 spot seems downright loose by contrast, as he kicks back on a beach, aiming his SX70 Sonar OneStep at a Golden Retriever and a canoe’s worth of kids. (Sir Larry’s subject was a rather fussy porcelain clock.)
In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.
Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. [See the original photo here.] Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts. The visualization draws on numerous historical sources, including the actual cloud pattern on Earth from the ESSA‑7 satellite and dozens of photographs taken by Apollo 8, and it reveals new, historically significant information about the Earthrise photographs. It has not been widely known, for example, that the spacecraft was rolling when the photos were taken, and that it was this roll that brought the Earth into view.
The visualization establishes the precise timing of the roll and, for the first time ever, identifies which window each photograph was taken from. The key to the new work is a set of vertical stereo photographs taken by a camera mounted in the Command Module’s rendezvous window and pointing straight down onto the lunar surface. It automatically photographed the surface every 20 seconds. By registering each photograph to a model of the terrain based on LRO data, the orientation of the spacecraft can be precisely determined.
This video above is public domain and can be downloaded here. In 1972, astronauts took another famous picture of the Earth, known as The Big Blue Marble. You can watch a film (“Overview”) that commemorates that photograph and explores the whole concept of seeing the Earth from afar. And, of course, you should always see the Carl Sagan-narrated film, The Pale Blue Dot, too.
Some of the prints, like the one below, certainly have a foreign quality to them. They feel far away in terms of time and place. But others (like the shot above) feel remarkably close, something we can all relate to today.
According to the PDR, the pictures came to reside in the Dutch National Archive as a result of the centuries-long commercial relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese. More vintage pix can be viewed here.
I believe it was Jacques Derrida, though I don’t recall exactly where, who said that some of the most revealing text of any work can be found in the footnotes. In documentarian Errol Morris’ recent photo-essay series on Lincoln for The New York Times, footnotes, chronologies, snippets of interview, and endlessly recursive references continuously intrude on the stories he tells. In this way, the series, called “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns,” enacts the tension Morris identifies as “the push-pull of history,” a contest between several ways of approaching the past: “Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects—the storyteller vs. the collector.”
The way story after story inevitably nests within each historical artifact seems to be Morris’ overarching theme as he charts the history of Lincoln iconography by reference to a single image, a photo of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner that exists in only one known original print, called O‑118 after collector of Lincoln photography Lloyd Ostendorf (see the retouched version above, the original print below). This print, along with 13 others, was made either four or five days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Morris’ fascination with this photograph is as variously motivated as the number of different views he adopts in examining its provenance, its history, and its meaning. For one thing, O‑118 is supposedly the last photograph taken of Lincoln alive. In 1922, The New York Times published the original print (above) with text by James Young, who wrote:
Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of the picture…. The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death.
The photo’s caption also included information that Morris makes a great deal of: “The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” For one thing, Morris seems to associate the photograph with what Walter Benjamin called “aura”; The print, it seems, was the only one Gardner was able to make before the cracked negative became useless and mass production from the source impossible. Un-retouched, the print shows a “fracture cutting through the top of Lincoln’s head.” For the storyteller, writes Morris, “the crack is the beginning of a legend—the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.” Using the rhetorical term for “a figure of anticipation,” a narrative feature that foreshadows, foretells, or prophesies, Morris calls this “the proleptic crack.”
His winding narrative, replete with the antiquarian minutiae of collectors, moves from the day—February 5, 1865—that Lincoln and his son Tad walked to Gardner’s studio on 7th Street in Washington, DC for the photo session, through the use of photography as an aid to Lincoln painters and sculptors, to the meaning of Lincoln for such diverse people as Leo Tolstoy, Marilyn Monroe, and our current President. Morris’ series ranges far and wide, visiting with historians and collectors along the way, and telling many a story, some freely speculative, some wistful, some tragic, and all somehow circling back to O‑118. Like much of Morris’ documentary work, it’s an exercise in collage—of the methods of the scholar, the essayist, and the archivist—and like its subject, it’s a fractured, but everlastingly fascinating meditation. Follow Morris’ entire series below.
Spare yourself the grim realities of the state fair reunion tour circuit.
On the other hand, it’s deathly hard to control one’s image from beyond the grave. Especially when you’ve got an award-winning PR Agency and a photo manipulation company teaming up to imagine how you might look had you survived!
The twelve unlucky recipients of these posthumous makeovers remain household names (see the gallery here), even though it’s nearly twenty years since the last of their number drew breath. Like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain was but 27 when he passed, though at the time of his birth, the other three were all old enough to be his mommy or daddy. Fitting, then, that he appears to be the baby of the golden group.
Music writer Elijah Wald and popular music scholar Reebee Garofalo offer insights below each portrait in the gallery about where the subjects might now find themselves in their careers. It’s all conjecture, but their experience ensures that their opinions can be taken as educated guesses, at least.
And who here thinks the 78-year-old Elvis would traipse around in the sort of short-sleeved poly-blend shirt my late grandfather wore to his weekly men’s prayer breakfast?
For pity’s sake, age does not automatically imply drabness!
(Who’s that I see over there? Could it be Yoko Ono, looking great at 80, in a top hat and tap pants? Even if she were looking less-than-fit, it would still be a bold choice! I doubt she wears that get-up to the grocery store, but the progression of time has not robbed her of the ability to make a deliberate visual impression.)
What is refreshing—though not necessarily believable—is how none of the resurrected icons in these portraits seem to have gone in for plastic surgery.
We live in a fine time for conspiracy theorists, in at least a couple of senses. First and more broadly, given the power of the internet, they’ve never had closer at hand the semi-incriminating, half-hidden pieces of information on which they build and with which they bolster their suspicions. Nor have they ever had a more effective means of gathering and discussing their findings. Second and more specifically, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has come upon us. This has set all those fascinated by that grim historical event, from the soberest of skeptics to the sheerest paranoiacs, evaluating and re-evaluating it even more thoroughly than usual. Above you’ll find the short November 22, 1963by Errol Morris, a clear-eyed documentarian and interviewer fascinated not only with those who conspire and those who theorize about such conspiracies, but also with the grander implicit questions about what we know and what we don’t, what we can know and what we can’t, and whether we even know what we can and can’t know in the first place. (The title of his new feature-length documentary about Donald Rumsfeld: The Unknown Known.)
“The more you investigate a crime, the more it becomes crystal-clear what happened,” says Josiah “Tink” Thompson, scholar of Søren Kierkegaard, private detective, and author of Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (a book with which anyone who has seen Richard Linklater’s Slacker will already feel some familiarity). “I don’t think any other crime I know of in history has been investigated with the kind of intensity that this has. And yet I don’t think we get any closer to knowing what happened now than we were 40, 45 years ago.” This opens a discussion of how all the photographic evidence of 11/22/63, up to and including the awesomely scrutinized Zapruder film, bears on the matter. “Is there a lesson to be learned?” Morris asks. “Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated.” And just as November 22, 1963follows up The Umbrella Man, Morris’ previous piece with Thompson, Thompson has a sequel of his own in the works: a book called Last Seconds in Dallas. JFK assassination nuts — and I mean that in the nicest way — have their reading ahead of them.
Their roof-mounted 15-lens Trekker cameras constantly blunder across less-than-dignified scenes whilst trawling the roads on behalf of Google Maps (a service that is forever linked in my mind to Lazy Sunday, the preposterous rap video starring comedians Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell.)
The cars themselves are totally goofy-looking. I would imagine that spotting one in real life is something akin to a Weinermobile sighting. No wonder the producers of Arrested Development arranged for George Michael Bluth, the hapless innocent played by Michael Cera, to drive one in the series’ fourth season.
I have a hunch that the Street View Trekker’s backpack model will ultimately prove less mockable than its four-wheeled counterpart. It can go where cars can’t, conferring an extreme sports vibe despite the big, ball-shaped camera apparatus sticking up. A limited pilot program has been recruiting volunteers to wear the backpack in such locales as Bulgaria, Indonesia, and South Africa. The Philippines is another destination where volunteers are sought, and all kidding aside, it would be riveting to see how this technology might document the devastation in Tacloban.
For now, the non-automotive Street View’s greatest triumph lies in recording the canals and cobbled walkways of Venice, Italy, a feat impossible to pull off in a car. To accomplish this, a team of backpackers logged over 375 miles on foot and by boat. Their efforts provide tourists with practical information in a format to which they’ve no doubt grown accustomed, as well as presenting armchair travelers with plenty of non-disappointing eye candy.
Cyber visitors can choose to traverse the Floating City much as actual visitors can — on foot, by vaporetta or by gondola. (I’d advise making a trip to the bathroom even if you’re not actually leaving home. At the very least turn the sound down — the paddling noises accompanying the last option could cause a Pavlovian bladder response.)
The Google Cultural Institute has drawn our attention before, with its virtual exhibitions on the rise of the Eiffel Tower, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and many other notable chapters of human history. Today, take a look at a Google Cultural Institute gallery that has a foot in literature as well as in history, Dubliners: the Photographs of J.J. Clarke from the National Library of Ireland. Subtitled “a glimpse of James Joyce’s Dublin,” the online show presents pictures taken by this fellow Clarke at the turn of the 20th century, when he came to the Irish capital to study medicine. His “photojournalistic approach to his subjects allowed him to capture vivid scenes from the daily lives of Dublin’s men, women and children.”
This made Clarke a contemporary of Joyce, and so his “images also show us how the city looked” to the writer “whose best known works — the short story collection Dubliners, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses — are all set around that time, when Joyce too was a young student fascinated by the world around him.”
Both the photographer and the novelist, in their separate forms, set about capturing the city, the era, and the culture around them, and the pictures of Clarke’s featured at the Google Cultural Institute could easily illustrate any of Joyce’s books.
I’ve long enjoyed repeating the observation that, had the real Dublin crumbled, we could rebuild it from the details given in Ulysses — or at least we could rebuild the Dublin of 1904. But I now accept that having on hand Clarke’s photographs, about which you can learn much more at the National Library of Ireland’s site, they would greatly speed the reconstruction process as well. All of the Joycean texts mentioned above can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
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