The Photo That Triggered China’s Disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966)

in History, Photography | August 10th, 2022

In 1958, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap For­ward. Eight years lat­er, he announced the begin­ning of the Great Pro­le­tar­i­an Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion. Between those two events, of course, came the Great Chi­nese Famine, and his­to­ri­ans now view all three as being “great” in the same pejo­ra­tive sense. Though Chair­man Mao may not have under­stood the prob­a­ble con­se­quences of poli­cies like agri­cul­tur­al col­lec­tiviza­tion and ide­o­log­i­cal purifi­ca­tion, he did under­stand the impor­tance of his own image in sell­ing those poli­cies to the Chi­nese peo­ple: hence the famous 1966 pho­to of him swim­ming across the Yangtze Riv­er.

By that point, “the Chi­nese leader who had led a peas­ant army to vic­to­ry in the Chi­nese Civ­il War and estab­lished the com­mu­nist Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Chi­na in 1949 was get­ting old.” So says Cole­man Lown­des in the Vox Dark­room video above. Worse, Mao’s Great Leap For­ward had clear­ly proven calami­tous. The Chair­man “need­ed to find a way to seal his lega­cy as the face of Chi­nese com­mu­nism and a new rev­o­lu­tion to lead.” And so he repeat­ed one of his ear­li­er feats, the swim across the Yangtze he’d tak­en in 1956. Spread far and wide by state media, the shot of Mao in the riv­er tak­en by his per­son­al pho­tog­ra­ph­er illus­trat­ed reports that he’d swum fif­teen kilo­me­ters in a bit over an hour.

This meant “the 72-year-old would have shat­tered world speed records,” a claim all in a day’s work for pro­pa­gan­dists in a dic­ta­tor­ship. But those who saw pho­to­graph would­n’t have for­got­ten what hap­pened the last time he took such a well-pub­li­cized dip in the Yangtze. “Experts feared that Mao was on the verge of kick­ing off anoth­er dis­as­trous peri­od of tur­moil in Chi­na. They were right.” The already-declared Great Pro­le­tar­i­an Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, now wide­ly known as the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, saw mil­lions of Chi­nese youth — osten­si­bly rad­i­cal­ized by the image of their beloved leader in the flesh — orga­nize into “the fanat­i­cal Red Guards,” a para­mil­i­tary force bent on extir­pat­ing, by any means nec­es­sary, the “four olds”: old cul­ture, old ide­ol­o­gy, old cus­toms, and old tra­di­tions.

As with most attempts to ush­er in a Year Zero, Mao’s final rev­o­lu­tion wast­ed lit­tle time becom­ing an engine of chaos. Only his death end­ed “a decade of destruc­tion that had ele­vat­ed the leader to god-like lev­els and result­ed in over one mil­lion peo­ple dead.” The Chi­nese Com­mu­nist’s Par­ty has sub­se­quent­ly con­demned the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion but not the Chair­man him­self, and indeed his swim remains an object of year­ly com­mem­o­ra­tion. “Had Mao died in 1956, his achieve­ments would have been immor­tal,” once said CCP offi­cial Chen Yun. “Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?” Per­haps that, had the aging Mao drowned in the Yangtze, Chi­nese his­to­ry might have tak­en a hap­pi­er turn.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Col­or­ful Wood Block Prints from the Chi­nese Rev­o­lu­tion of 1911: A Gallery of Artis­tic Pro­pa­gan­da Posters

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky (June 1910)

in History, Music, Photography | July 25th, 2022

Erik Satie knew his way around not just the piano but the cam­era as well. This is evi­denced by the image above, a 1911 por­trait of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravin­sky. Described by Christie’s as “an out­stand­ing pho­to­graph of the two com­posers in the library at Debussy’s home,” it was tak­en by Satie at the time when Serge Diaghilev’s Bal­lets Russ­es were per­form­ing Debussy’s Jeux and Stravin­sky’s The Rite of Spring. In the back­ground appears what looks like Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The Great Wave Off Kana­gawa, a work of art “used by Debussy on the front cov­er of the first edi­tion of his sym­phon­ic sketch­es La mer.”

Just above appears anoth­er pic­ture cap­tured in Debussy’s home, this one of Debussy and Satie. “The pho­to was tak­en by Stravin­sky, if my mem­o­ry did­n’t go wrong,” says one com­menter on the r/classicalmusic sub­red­dit. Anoth­er express­es con­fu­sion about the sub­jects them­selves: “I thought they did­n’t like each oth­er?”

One respon­der explains that “they were friends at first, for quite some time, but lat­er their rela­tion­ship got worse.” Debussy’s orches­tra­tion of Satie’s Gymno­pe­dies brought those pieces to promi­nence, but, Satie ulti­mate­ly came to feel that Debussy had been stingy with the fruits of his great suc­cess.

Or so, at any rate, goes one inter­pre­ta­tion of the dis­so­lu­tion of Debussy and Satie’s friend­ship. Dif­fer­ent Red­di­tors con­tribute dif­fer­ent details: one that “every time they met, Satie would praise Rav­el’s music to annoy Debussy,” anoth­er that “Debussy kept a bot­tle of the cheap­est table wine for Satie for when he came over.” It can hard­ly have been easy, even in the best of times, for two of the strongest inno­va­tors in ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry music to occu­py the same social space for long stretch­es of time, let alone in com­pa­ny that includ­ed the likes of Rav­el and Stravin­sky. More than a cen­tu­ry lat­er, their artis­tic lega­cies could hard­ly be more assured — as, one faint­ly sens­es when look­ing at these pho­tos, they knew would be the case.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Debussy Play Debussy’s Most Famous Piece, “Clair de lune” (1913)

Hear the Very First Pieces of Ambi­ent Music, Erik Satie’s Fur­ni­ture Music (Cir­ca 1917)

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

The Great Wave Off Kana­gawa by Hoku­sai: An Intro­duc­tion to the Icon­ic Japan­ese Wood­block Print in 17 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon (1840)

in Astronomy, Photography | July 21st, 2022

Every­one has been agog over the first pho­tos from the James Webb tele­scope, and for good rea­son. “These images,” Riv­ka Galchin writes at The New York­er, “car­ry news about the ear­ly uni­verse, the birth and death of stars, the col­li­sion of galax­ies, and the atmos­phere of exo­plan­ets.” They’re also “very, very pret­ty,” she writes, com­par­ing them to Ver­meer.

The clar­i­ty and lev­els of detailed infor­ma­tion about the ear­li­est galax­ies have even aston­ished astronomers, whose work has advanced rapid­ly along­side the growth of the pho­to­graph­ic medi­um. It was an astronomer, in fact – Johann Hein­rich von Madler – who first coined the word “pho­tog­ra­phy” in 1839. “Astronomers quick­ly embraced the use of pho­to­graph­ic plates because of their good res­o­lu­tion and the abil­i­ty to make much larg­er images,” APS Physics News notes.

Astropho­tog­ra­phy prop­er­ly began in 1840, when John William Drap­er, a British-born chemist and doc­tor, took the image above from the roof of the New York Uni­ver­si­ty obser­va­to­ry, cred­it­ed as the first daguerreo­type of the Moon. Daguerre him­self might have tak­en an 1839 image, but it was like­ly destroyed in a fire, as were Draper’s attempts of the pre­vi­ous year, which burned up in a NYU blaze in 1865.

By all accounts, how­ev­er, these ear­li­er attempts at Moon pho­tog­ra­phy were blur­ry and unfo­cused, show­ing lit­tle detail of the Earth’s satel­lite. Draper’s lunar “por­trait,” from 1840, at the top, is large­ly con­sid­ered “the world’s first true astropho­to,” writes Jason Major at Lights in the Dark, for its lev­els of detail and high con­trast, com­par­a­tive­ly speak­ing. As Scott Walk­er writes:

Drap­er set out to try and improve on Daguerre’s break­through by increas­ing plate sen­si­tiv­i­ty and reduc­ing expo­sure times.… His advance­ment in the tech­nique allowed visu­al­iza­tion of craters, moun­tains and val­leys on the moon’s sur­face which pre­vi­ous­ly couldn’t be cap­tured.

Splotched, spot­ted, and heav­i­ly degrad­ed, the image may not look like much now, but a con­tem­po­rary of Drap­er described it then as “the first time that any­thing like a dis­tinct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the moon’s sur­face has been obtained.”

The achieve­ment was inspi­ra­tional, and many bet­ter attempts soon fol­lowed in rapid suc­ces­sion as the medi­um evolved. In 1851, pho­tog­ra­ph­er John Whip­ple and father-and-son astronomers William and George Bond improved on Drap­er’s process and made the Moon daguerreo­type fur­ther up through the Great Refrac­tor Equa­to­r­i­al Mount Tele­scope at the Har­vard Col­lege Obser­va­to­ry. (The year pre­vi­ous, Drap­er him­self col­lab­o­rat­ed with Bond père to make an image of the star Vega). The image caused a “ver­i­ta­ble furor,” Smart His­to­ry notes, at the Great Exhi­bi­tion of 1851.

Between 1857 and 1862, astropho­tog­ra­ph­er and ama­teur astronomer War­ren De La Rue made a series of stereo­scop­ic Moon images (lov­ing­ly pre­served online by astro­physi­cist and Queen gui­tarist Bri­an May), one of which you can see fur­ther up. De La Rue had seen Whip­ple’s daguerreo­type at the Great Exhi­bi­tion and began inno­vat­ing his own process for cre­at­ing stereo­scop­ic astropho­tographs. At the same time, Drap­er’s son, Hen­ry, “an accom­plished astropho­tog­ra­ph­er and one of the most famous Amer­i­can astronomers of his day,” Kiona Smith writes at Forbes, had tak­en over his father’s Moon pho­tog­ra­phy project. See an 1863 image tak­en by the younger Drap­er just above.

“Before the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy,” notes APS News, “astronomers had to sketch what they saw in their tele­scopes by hand, often miss­ing cru­cial details.” Daguerre and Drap­er’s inno­va­tions, and those that came soon after­ward, “showed them a far supe­ri­or method was pos­si­ble.” It is aston­ish­ing that these results could be achieved only a few decades after the first pho­to­graph, tak­en in 1826 by NicĂ©phore NiĂ©pce. It is maybe even more aston­ish­ing that only a cen­tu­ry and a half  or so lat­er — a mean­ing­less drop in the cos­mic timescale — astropho­tog­ra­phy would look beyond the moon to the very ori­gins of the uni­verse itself.

via Smart His­to­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

Watch the Orig­i­nal TV Cov­er­age of the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing: Record­ed on July 20, 1969

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The First Pho­tographs Tak­en by the Webb Tele­scope: See Far­away Galax­ies & Neb­u­lae in Unprece­dent­ed Detail

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

in Archives, History, Photography | July 15th, 2022


Image of Charles S.L. Bak­er with his Super­heat­ing Demon­stra­tion

Black His­to­ry Month is Feb­ru­ary in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, and Octo­ber in the Unit­ed King­dom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re inter­est­ed in a sub­ject, there’s no rea­son not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is under­scored by the open­ing, this month, of Get­ty Images’ Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion. As Petapix­el’s Matt Grow­coot writes, it con­tains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black dias­po­ra in the Unit­ed King­dom and the Unit­ed States that date back to the 19th cen­tu­ry,” draw­ing from the domains of “pol­i­tics, sport, music, cul­ture, mil­i­tary, and celebri­ty.”

In the Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion you’ll find pic­tures of cul­tur­al fig­ures like Duke Elling­ton and Jay‑Z, Jack John­son, Venus and Ser­e­na Williams, Sojourn­er Truth, and Bernar­dine Evaris­to. These names only hint at the range of the archive, which you can also browse by cat­e­go­ry tags: “civ­il rights,” “gov­er­nance,” and “sports,” to name a few exam­ples, but also “fam­i­lies,” “fash­ion,” and “hair.”

There are, of course, an enor­mous num­ber of pho­tos filed under “Amer­i­can Cul­ture,” which would itself be unimag­in­able with­out the con­tri­bu­tions of the peo­ple doc­u­ment­ed. But the same could be said of the oth­er side of the pond; hence the inclu­sion of a “Black British Cul­ture” label as well.

Cre­at­ing the Black His­to­ry and Cul­ture Col­lec­tion involved more than just tag­ging pho­tos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voic­es of col­lab­o­ra­tors like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deb­o­rah Willis and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s Tuku­fu Zuberi. The artist Rena­ta Cherlise speaks of the val­ue of the images of famous peo­ple, but also those of every­day life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ball­room in the nine­teen-for­ties. Whether or not your own her­itage is tied into this his­to­ry, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black cul­ture is the orig­i­nal human cul­ture, so there is no cul­ture that is alien to black cul­ture. The future of black cul­ture is the future of human cul­ture. Let’s go.”

via Petapix­el/Colossal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take Free Online Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

The Black Film Archive: A New Site High­lights 200+ Note­wor­thy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

Hear the Voic­es of Amer­i­cans Born in Slav­ery: The Library of Con­gress Fea­tures 23 Audio Inter­views with For­mer­ly Enslaved Peo­ple (1932–75)

Pho­tos of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Black Women Activists Dig­i­tized and Put Online by The Library of Con­gress

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How Aladdin Sane Became the Most Expensive Album Cover Ever — and David Bowie’s Defining Image

in Art, History, Music, Photography | March 1st, 2022

If you search for David Bowie on Spo­ti­fy, a famil­iar icon pops up: the man him­self, eyes closed, made up with a death­ly-look­ing pal­lor and a red-and-blue light­ing bolt across his face. This is the pho­to on the front of Bowie’s sixth album, 1973’s Aladdin Sane. “Per­haps more icon­ic than the music inside,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Trash The­o­ry video essay above, “it stands as the Mona Lisa of album cov­ers.” It was also, at the time of pro­duc­tion, the most cost­ly album cov­er of all time: this was at the behest of Bowie’s man­ag­er Tony Defries, who sus­pect­ed that spar­ing no expense on the image would moti­vate RCA, his label, to spare no expense pro­mot­ing the album itself.

One might call this a bold move for an artist like Bowie, who had only just made it big. In the ear­ly years of his career he’d racked up fail­ure after fail­ure: with 1971’s Hunky Dory, a kind of dec­la­ra­tion of com­mit­ment to musi­cal and artis­tic “changes,” he had a suc­cès d’es­time, but not until the fol­low­ing year did he become a bona fide star.

The vehi­cle for that trans­for­ma­tion was the album The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, which intro­duced the lis­ten­ing pub­lic to its title char­ac­ter, an androg­y­nous rock­er from out­er space. Through­out his sub­se­quent year and a half of tour­ing Bowie took the stage in full Zig­gy glam regalia, inhab­it­ing the char­ac­ter so ful­ly that he even­tu­al­ly began to ques­tion his own san­i­ty.

Though young British audi­ences could­n’t get enough of Zig­gy and the Spi­ders, reac­tions across the Unit­ed States were rather less enthu­si­as­tic. There, says the Trash The­o­ry nar­ra­tor, “they were not the type of British rock that rock radio played: hard-hit­ting, riff-heavy behe­moths like Led Zep­pelin or the Rolling Stones. But this indif­fer­ence was shap­ing what Bowie want­ed to do next.” His expe­ri­ence of Amer­i­ca inspired a new, hard­er-edged per­sona, Aladdin Sane. Zig­gy Star­dust “was a vision of the best a rock star could be, an inspi­ra­tional fig­ure, while Aladdin was more about fame’s dark­er under­bel­ly, fil­tered through imag­ined Amer­i­cana and futur­is­tic nos­tal­gia” — and the char­ac­ter need­ed a look to match.

Shot by Bri­an Duffy, described in the San Fran­cis­co Art Exchange vide0 above as “a very eccen­tric and incred­i­ble pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” the Aladdin Sane cov­er was print­ed with a sev­en-col­or sys­tem unprece­dent­ed in the medi­um. (Up to that point, four-col­or had been the stan­dard.) Accord­ing to Trash The­o­ry, Bowie described make­up artist Pierre Laroche’s light­ning bolt “as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of schiz­o­phre­nia, and more specif­i­cal­ly, his split feel­ings about his 1972 Amer­i­can tour.” (The shape came from the logo on a Nation­al Pana­son­ic rice cook­er in Duffy’s stu­dio.) Though the result has become, in the words of cura­tor Vic­to­ria Broack­es, “prob­a­bly the most rec­og­niz­able sym­bol in rock and roll,” Bowie nev­er actu­al­ly assumed this look onstage; ahead of him, there still lay four more decades of changes to go through.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Space Odd­i­ty,” “Heroes,” “Life on Mars” & More

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recre­ate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

50 Years of Chang­ing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Ani­mat­ed GIF

Lego Video Shows How David Bowie Almost Became “Cob­bler Bob,” Not “Aladdin Sane”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Organized Chaos!: Watch 33 Videos Showing How Saturday Night Live Gets Made Each Week

in Comedy, Design, Photography, Television, Video - Arts & Culture | February 16th, 2022

Who do you think of when you think of Sat­ur­day Night Live?

The orig­i­nal cast? 

Cre­ator Lorne Michaels?

Who­ev­er host­ed last week’s episode?

What about the guy who makes and holds the cue cards?

Wal­ly Fer­esten is just one of the back­stage heroes to be cel­e­brat­ed in Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live, a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the long-run­ning tele­vi­sion sketch show comes togeth­er every week.

Like many of those inter­viewed Fer­esten is more or less of a lif­er, hav­ing come aboard in 1990 at the age of 25.

He esti­mates that he and his team of 8 run through some 1000 14” x 22” cards cards per show. Teleprompters would save trees, but the pos­si­bil­i­ty of tech­ni­cal issues dur­ing the live broad­cast presents too big of a risk.

This means that any last minute changes, includ­ing those made mid-broad­cast, must be han­dled in a very hands on way, with cor­rec­tions writ­ten in all caps over care­ful­ly applied white painter’s tape or, worst case sce­nario, on brand new cards.

(After a show wraps, its cards enjoy a sec­ond act as drop­cloths for the next week’s paint­ed sets.)

Near­ly every sketch requires three sets of cue cards, so that the cast, who are rarely off book due to the fre­quent changes, can steal glances to the left, right and cen­ter.

As the depart­ment head, Fer­esten is part­nered with each week’s guest host, whose lines are the only ones to be writ­ten in black. Bet­ty White, who host­ed in 2010 at the age of 88, thanked him in her 2011 auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

Sure­ly that’s worth his work-relat­ed arthrit­ic shoul­der, and the recur­rent night­mares in which he arrives at Stu­dio 8H just five min­utes before show­time to find that all 1000 cue cards are blank.

Cos­tumes have always been one of Sat­ur­day Night Live’s flashiest plea­sures, run­ning the gamut from Cone­heads and a rap­ping Cup o’Soup to an immac­u­late recre­ation of the white pantsuit in which Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris deliv­ered her vic­to­ry speech a scant 3 hours before the show aired.

“A cos­tume has a job,” wardrobe super­vi­sor Dale Richards explains:

It has to tell a sto­ry before (the actors) open their mouth…as soon as it comes on cam­era, it should give you so much back­sto­ry.

And it has to cleave to some sort of real­i­ty and truth­ful­ness, even in a sketch as out­landish as 2017’s Hen­ri­et­ta & the Fugi­tive, star­ring host Ryan Gosling as a detec­tive in a film noir style romance. The gag is that the dame is a chick­en (cast mem­ber Aidy Bryant.)

Richards cites actress Bette Davis as the inspi­ra­tion for the chick­en’s look:


Because you’re not going to believe it if the detec­tive couldn’t actu­al­ly fall in love with her. She has to be very fem­i­nine, so we gave her Bette Davis bangs and long eye­lash­es and a beau­ti­ful bon­net, so the under­pin­nings were very much like an actress in a movie, although she did have a chick­en cos­tume on.

The num­ber of quick cos­tume changes each per­former must make dur­ing the live broad­cast helps deter­mine the sketch­es’ run­ning order.

Some of the break­neck trans­for­ma­tions are han­dled by Richards’ sis­ter, Don­na, who once beat the clock by pig­gy­back­ing host Jen­nifer Lopez across the stu­dio floor to the chang­ing area where a well-coor­di­nat­ed crew swished her out of her open­ing monologue’s skintight dress and sky­scraper heels and into her first cos­tume.

That’s one exam­ple of the sort of traf­fic the 4‑person crane cam­era crew must bat­tle as they hur­tle across the stu­dio to each new set. Cam­era oper­a­tor John Pin­to com­mands from atop the crane’s coun­ter­bal­anced arm.

Those swoop­ing crane shots of the musi­cal guests, open­ing mono­logue and good­nights (see below) are a Sat­ur­day Night Live tra­di­tion, a part of its icon­ic look since the begin­ning.

Get to know oth­er back­stage work­ers and how they con­tribute to this week­ly high wire act in a 33 episode Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night playlist, all on dis­play below:

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

When John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on SNL, And They Got Banned from the Show: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From Sat­ur­day Night Live

Sat­ur­day Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in Octo­ber, 1975

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Google App Uses Machine Learning to Discover Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Classic Works of Art

in Art, Data, K-12, Museums, Photography | February 15th, 2022


Does your cat fan­cy her­self a 21st-cen­tu­ry incar­na­tion of Bastet, the Egypt­ian God­dess of the Ris­ing Sun, pro­tec­tor of the house­hold, aka The Lady of Slaugh­ter?

If so, you should def­i­nite­ly per­mit her to down­load the Google Arts & Cul­ture app on your phone to take a self­ie using the Pet Por­traits fea­ture.

Remem­ber all the fun you had back in 2018 when the Art Self­ie fea­ture mis­took you for William II, Prince of Orange or the woman in “Jacob Cor­nelisz. van Oost­sa­nen Paint­ing a Por­trait of His Wife”?

Sure­ly your pet will be just as excit­ed to let a machine-learn­ing algo­rithm trawl tens of thou­sands of art­works from Google Arts & Culture’s part­ner­ing muse­ums’ col­lec­tions, look­ing for dop­pel­gängers.

Or maybe it’ll just view it as one more exam­ple of human fol­ly, if a far less­er evil than our predilec­tion for pet cos­tumes.

Should your pet wish to know more about the art­works it resem­bles, you can tap the results to explore them in depth.

Dogs, fish, birds, rep­tiles, hors­es, and rab­bits can play along too, though any­one hail­ing from the rodent fam­i­ly will find them­selves shut out.

Mash­able reports that “upload­ing a stock image of a mouse returned draw­ings of wolves.”

We can’t blame your pet snake for fum­ing.

Dit­to your Viet­namese Pot-bel­lied pig.

Though your pet fer­ret prob­a­bly doesn’t need an app (or a crys­tal ball) to know what its result would be. Bet­ter than an ermine col­lar, any­way…


If your pet is game and falls with­in Pet Por­traits approved species para­me­ters, here are the steps to fol­low:

  1. Launch the Google Arts & Cul­ture app and select the Cam­era but­ton. Scroll to the Pet Por­traits option.
  2. Have your pet take a self­ie. (Or alter­na­tive­ly, upload a saved image.)
  3. Give the app a few sec­onds (or min­utes) to return mul­ti­ple results with sim­i­lar­i­ty per­cent­ages.

Down­load the Google Arts & Cul­ture app here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Free App Ana­lyzes Your Self­ie and Then Finds Your Dop­pel­ganger in Muse­um Por­traits

Con­struct Your Own Bayeux Tapes­try with This Free Online App

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

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Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Music, Photography | February 7th, 2022

All images by Adri­an Bor­da

“If God had designed the orches­tra,” remarks a char­ac­ter in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North Amer­i­ca, “then the cel­lo was His great­est accom­plish­ment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cel­lo sounds sub­lime, looks state­ly… even the word cel­lo evokes regal poise and grace. If orches­tral instru­ments were chess pieces, the cel­lo would be queen: shape­ly and dig­ni­fied, prime mover on the board, majes­tic in sym­phonies, quar­tets, cham­ber pop ensem­bles, post rock bands….

With all its many son­ic and aes­thet­ic charms, I didn’t imag­ine it was pos­si­ble to love the cel­lo more. Then I saw Roman­ian artist Adri­an Bor­da’s mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos tak­en from inside one. The pho­to above, Bor­da tells us at his Deviant Art page, was tak­en from inside “a very old French cel­lo made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the bel­ly of the HMS Vic­to­ry mat­ed with the nave of Chartres Cathe­dral. The light descend­ing through the f‑holes seems of some divine ori­gin.

Bor­da has also tak­en pho­tos from inside an old dou­ble bass (above), as well as a gui­tar, sax, and piano. The stringed orches­tral instru­ments, he says, yield­ed the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad cam­paign for the Berlin­er Phil­har­moniker that “cap­tured the insides of instru­ments,” writes Twist­ed Sifter, “reveal­ing the hid­den land­scapes with­in.” With­out any sense of how the art direc­tor cre­at­ed the images, Bor­da set about exper­i­ment­ing with meth­ods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthi­er friend who had a con­tra­bass open for repairs. Lat­er he trav­eled to Amiens, where he found the French cel­lo, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twist­ed Sifter notes, “Bor­da fit a Sony NEX‑6 cam­era equipped with a Samyang 8mm fish­eye lens inside the instru­ment and then used a smart remote so he could pre­view the work­flow on his phone.” Depend­ing on the angle and the play of light with­in the instru­ment, the pho­tos can look eerie, somber, omi­nous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expres­sive range.

Bor­da gives the cel­lo inte­ri­or shot above the per­fect title “A Long, Lone­ly Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghost­ly noir. His pho­to below, of the inside of a sax­o­phone, pulls us into a haunt­ed, alien tun­nel. If you want to know what’s on the oth­er side, con­sid­er the strange sur­re­al­ist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a sur­re­al­ist painter of warped fan­tasies and night­mares. Unlike these pho­tos, his paint­ings are full of lurid, vio­lent col­or, but they are also filled with mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal motifs. See more of Bor­da’s inte­ri­or instru­ment pho­tos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Luthi­er Birth a Cel­lo in This Hyp­not­ic Doc­u­men­tary

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Hear the Amati “King” Cel­lo, the Old­est Known Cel­lo in Exis­tence (c. 1560)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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