My goal with these photos was simply to document the various ways I saw people in New York City expressing themselves with respect to the 2016 presidential race. I don't intend these photos to express any of my own views about the candidates depicted or referenced in these images.
Click the link for all 17 photos — here's a sampling:
To see the artist, title, and year, click on the slideshow. This will open a Flickr webpage with the information.
All the artworks are from the 20th and 21st centuries. The artists include Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Warhol, and Rothko. (Link to the museum.)
Here they are. [broken link removed]
The link is from Ann Althouse (my mom), who says:
Fascinating to see those who were always great looking, those who were always bad looking, and — most interestingly — those who looked awful in high school and got much, much better, the most extreme example of which is [George Clooney.]I'd say the most extreme example is Russell Brand.
Here they are.
And #18 has brought back a flood of memories.
This afternoon, a Walgreens in Manhattan was selling small bottles of water for $5.49 each:
(Photo by me.)
IN THE COMMENTS: We discuss whether price-gouging is good or bad.
This is the best third-party Flickr tool I've ever seen.
Just click one (or more) of the colors in the palette to the right. They're all Creative Commons-licensed.
A writer for the Atlantic is rummaging through the magazine's archives of old articles about then-emerging technologies (via).
Here is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), writing in 1859 about photography (I've corrected a few errors in the Atlantic's text scans without indicating this):
This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,—the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a Laputan, who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time when a man should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and a multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, that one may creep over the surface of the picture with his microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant signs, and see what was the play at the "Variétés" or the "Victoria," on the evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains. . . .He also goes into great detail about the physical process of photography. Here's an excerpt of his much longer description of the photographic negative:
We were just now stereographed, ourselves, at a moment's warning, as if we were fugitives from justice. A skeleton shape, of about a man's height, its head covered with a black veil, glided across the floor, faced us, lifted its veil, and took a preliminary look. When we had grown sufficiently rigid in our attitude of studied ease, and got our umbrella into a position of thoughtful carelessness, and put our features with much effort into an unconstrained aspect of cheerfulness tempered with dignity, of manly firmness blended with womanly sensibility, of courtesy, as much as to imply,—"You honor me, Sir," toned or sized, as one may say, with something of the self-assertion of a human soul which reflects proudly, "I am superior to all this,"—when, I say, we were all right, the spectral Mokanna dropped his long veil, and his waiting-slave put a sensitive tablet under its folds. The veil was then again lifted, and the two great glassy eyes stared at us once more for some thirty seconds. The veil then dropped again; but in the mean time, the shrouded sorcerer had stolen our double image; we were immortal.
[T]he picture is reversed, just as in every camera-obscura where the image is received on a screen direct from the lens. Thus the glass plate has the right part of the object on the left side of its picture, and the left part on its right side; its light is darkness, and its darkness is light. Everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image. This is a negative picture.His next thought verges on science fiction:
Extremes meet. Every given point of the picture is as far from truth as a lie can be. But in travelling away from the pattern it has gone round a complete circle, and is at once as remote from Nature and as near it as possible. . . .
Out of the perverse and totally depraved negative,—where it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest glare,—is to come the true end of all this series of operations, a copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and harmonies and contrasts.
[P]erhaps this world is only the negative of that better one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows into light, but all harmonized, so that we shall see why these ugly patches, these misplaced gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary arrangements of our planetary life.
1. Unphotographable. Descriptions of photographs not taken.
2. The Rosa Parks of Blogs. Keeping track of a ridiculously overused idiom.
3. Derek's Big Archive of WalMart Purchase Receipts. A long-defunct site by a guy who posted every one of his WalMart receipts from 1997 to 2002. The comments sections were surprisingly active.
Just a note: I don't expect to be blogging in the next few days, as I'll be traveling for a job interview.
Wow.
IN THE COMMENTS: Some object to the focus on this sign. I held back from defending it because, well, you know what they say about explaining a joke. But I'm glad that my dad responded with a cogent explanation of the humor and importance of the photo.
I'd just like to reiterate that I find the protester's sign not only funny but profoundly significant; there is a lot more that could be said about this. I certainly don't think it should be considered out of bounds to publicly criticize obscure, non-powerful individuals who have chosen to thrust themselves into the public spotlight, especially when they do so with malice toward others. The way to respect an adult is not to try to place him or her beyond intellectual scrutiny.
This New York Times piece on war photographers taking photos of dead or mortally wounded American soldiers ends with a "wholly unexpected" comment from photographer Don McCullin:
“I feel I totally wasted a large part of my life following war. I get more pleasure photographing the landscape around my house in my twilight years.But is that last statement true? Steven Pinker wrote this essay saying it's actually the opposite:
"Have we learned any lessons from the countless pictures of pain and suffering? I don't think we’ve learned anything. Every year, there’s more war and suffering."
Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. ...Since McCullin purported to base his view that war photography is futile or counterproductive on empirical evidence, I hope he'd change his view if presented with this contrary evidence. But it wouldn't be surprising if he didn't. People reflexively refer to any kind of social problem as an "increasing" problem, and this tendency seems to be more powerful than statistics. Pinker lists a few factors that cause people to make this mistake:
Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution -- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. ...
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. ...
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.So, ironically, war photography itself feeds into the belief that war photography is ineffectual.
Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.Pinker's essay only observes that there has been a decline; he doesn't try to explain it. He ends by saying:
With the knowledge that something has driven [violence] dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.There's no way war photography could be the main answer to Pinker's question, since he's talking about a trend that's been underway since long before photography existed. But the fact that people are willing to look at the reality of war in vivid detail might have played a small role in the progress we've made.
"Burned poster remains" (cropped), by Stewart Butterfield, who thoughtfully made his photos "some rights reserved." (You don't set your Flickr photos to the creativity-thwarting "all rights reserved," do you?)
It's from his "Roman Textures" set. Any of these would also make a great background image for your computer's desktop. (If you want to do so, click on a photos thumbnail, click the "all sizes" button above the photo, click "original" size, download the photo to your computer, and go into your control panels to set the desktop photo using the downloaded file.)
How do you like the new banner? Would you prefer one of the other Roman textures instead?
By the way, thanks to three AskMetafilter users for helping me edit my template to make the linked text the right color to stand out from the background. One of them was so nice as to send me a follow-up email to give me a completely unsolicited tip about how to spice up all the links on this blog. OK, so it's not as awe-inspiring as using AskMetafilter to find where your grandfather lived in Vienna before fleeing the Nazis, but it reaffirmed my confidence in the internet as a machine that fosters people helping other people.
So, do you see what I did to the links?
I've had a cropped version of this photo at the top of this blog for a while:
You know, if this were anywhere else in the world, this would be the center of the city. But here, it's just a relatively obscure suburb. This is what makes Paris so amazing.
Happy 4th of July!
Here are some of the more patriotic photos I've taken over the years...
1. An American barbershop in Austin, Texas.
2. An American fire hydrant and lamppost in Brooklyn.
3. An American display case in a charming thrift store called the Rainbow Shoppe in Portage, Wisconsin. (If by some chance you're ever in Portage, make sure to stop by this place. The owner has lots of stories to tell about her eclectic collection of stuff.)
