Holiday Gift: Two Worthy Websites That Plumb the Heights (and Depths) of Photo History

Well, I slept through the eclipse last night, wouldn't you know? Even though I promised to watch it. And I gave the wrong time for it in my post yesterday. So, I've got to make it up to everyone with a holiday gift. I thought I'd share a couple of pretty neat photo website I've discrovered recently.
    

The first is called Vintage Nerds, and it is nothing but wonderful pinup photos from the past. In other words, naughty stuff for hipsters. (The site itself uses another word instead of "naughty stuff," but "naughty stuff" is far, far more tasteful if less precise.) When I say the site is nothing but pinups, I mean it--no text, no value-added historical insights...just photographs. Sometimes the names of the models are included (Bettie Page, of course). But the range of imagery is remarkable, and the pictures themselves are often charming examples of old-fashioned barbershop reading. For hipsters who take pictures like this, the site is certainly worth checking out.

      I also recently ran across a site called Iconic Photos, which, as you might expect, features pictures that stunned the world, in one way or another. What I like about the site is the weird range of imagery—everything from Paul Strand's "Wall Street" (above) to Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Queen Elizabeth to Patrick Robert's photo of the body of deposed Liberian ruler Samuel Doe. Be careful if you're skittish--some of pictures, like Robert's view of the naked corpse of Doe and images of the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till—are gruesome. But the texts accompanying the images are very sharp, adding historical perspective and while explaining the significance of each picture. The site is a very good source for finding controversial imagery that made an impact.

Tonight: I Like to Watch Lunar Eclipses...Especially on Winter Solstices

Not that I personally have ever had the chance. Tonight there will be a lunar eclipse of a full moon, and you can bet I'll be out somewhere watching, even though it is eff-ing cold where I live, and the eclipse won't really happen until early Tuesday morning for many people (it occurs at 6:38 Eastern Standard Time). But that's the whole point: This will be the first lunar eclipse of a full moon on the winter solstice since, well, let's see...oohh...1378. (That was also the year that a man named Robert de Geneve, who also happened to be known as the "butcher of Cesena," was crowned as the "anti-pope" Clemens VII. Coincidence? Ummm, maybe not.) You can go here to read all about tonight's events and lunar eclipses in general.
     To celebrate the event, I went searching for lunar eclipse imagery, and found Mr. Eclipse, perhaps the finest eclipse website going. It features pictures by Fred Espenak, who is a physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Above is an example of his work.  Yes, I'm hearing the moon will actually look red, as you see in the sequence here. This could be big.

Does Your Dug Bite? Or Nine Life Lessons from Inspector Clouseau

I like to watch Pink Panther movies. The news of the death of director and writer Blake Edwards prompted me to start re-examining my relationship with Inspector Clouseau. I realized he may have been wiser than I used to think. Here are nine of his best utterances, and what I think they mean:

1. "The greater the uds, the greater the shallange." Lesson: Attack, always. Or,  never argue with a French philosopher.

2. "Does your dug bite?"Forewarned is forearmed. 

3. "How was I to know he had a minkey?" Sometimes, on the other hand,  life simply presents surprises that we cannot anticipate. Accept these, and move on.

4. "If yuv seen one Stradivarius, yuv seen them all." Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff. 

5.  "Do you have a rim? The first rule of survival: find shelter.

6. "I suspect everyone, and I suspect no one."Even paranoids have enemies. 

7. "There is more gooing on here than meets the ear." You must dig to find the truth.

8. "Facts...nothing matters but the facts." Unless you like to watch FOX News. 

9."It's all part of life's rich pageant, you know." Enjoy it while you can.

Facebook as Art

The map here was created by an intern at Facebook, Paul Butler. which shows you how sophisticated the interns at Facebook must be. (Back when I was an intern at a magazine, my boss took me out to lunch one day and I, not being quite sure of place settings, ate her soup. I was not very sophisticated.) Butler's map illustrates the distribution of Facebook's 10 million friendships. This beautiful visual is a work of art in its own right--what about a 3x5-foot print of that for a holiday gift? As this post notes, the Facebook map, like nighttime photographs of the earth from space that show population concentrations and the places where people have access to artificial light, reveals how divided the world is technologically. I was stunned by how the U.S. is essentially divided almost in two in this regards. Perhaps we need to take note of not just the red states and the blue states, but also the Facebook states and the unfriended states when considering the social and political underpinnings of the nation.

Me and Voyager 1

I'm back from a sojourn from one end of California to the other (south to north, that is). That was quite a trip, I thought. Then this morning I read that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is now about 10.8 billion miles from the sun, where, scientists think, it is leaving the solar system and entering interstellar space. (They can tell, because of the direction the particles flowing around the spacecraft. These particles, which originate in the sun, are now not moving outward but sideways.)

 In my case, about the farthest from anywhere I got was on Saturday, when I was driving along a country highway that runs through an expanse of rice fields in NorCal's Sacramento Valley. On the eastern levee of the Sacramento River there's a hamlet called Butte City, which consists of about five houses, a bar, and a little wood shack with a big sign painted on one side that says, "Ducks Plucked Here." Naturally, I didn't have a camera with me.

Glad to have been there, glad to be back. The photo above show's an artist's rendering of what Voyager 1 looks like in space. The shot below is from NASA's Voyager page. It was taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows what is called a bow shock created from the wind from the star L.L. Orionis  colliding with the Orion Nebula flow. What a universe!

Sinkholes and the Visual Allure of the Abyss

Today's topic: Sinkholes! Are they the perfect visual metaphor for the current strain of American malaise? Or does our fear of them go deeper?

But first, let me start by explaining that as the year comes to an end I start eagerly awaiting the annual "best of" lists that inevitably turn up in magazines and on the Internet. This December, which also marks the end of a decade, sort of,  promises even more wide-ranging reminders of how sh***ty the Bush era was. I mean I lived through the 2000 election once, and now I know I'm gonna have to again.

Websites at least can add some science to their annual news roundups. For instance, in summing up the year in pictures, National Geographic did not rely on the news or artistic judgment of editors, but on the number of hits various pictures received online. You can see the results here, but I will sum up for you. The five most viewed stories on the website this year were:

5. "Iceland Volcano Pictures: Lightning Adds Flash to Ash"

Italian photographer and scientist Marco Fulle shot this image

I particularly admired this shot from the Geographic story. Taken by Italian photographer and scientist Marco Fulle, it shows Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupting.

4. "Strange New Species found off Greenland"

A new species of shark, Photo courtesy Greenland Institute of Natural Resources

This new species of shark  has been found in other oceans as well, but never in Greenland waters. I think it looks like a cartoon fish from my old "Bozo Under the Sea" record when I was a kid.

3. "Stunning Photos from a 10-Year Sea Census"

Mr. Blobby photo courtesy Kerryn Parkingson, NORFANZ

Meet Mr. Blobby, a fathead sculpin fish caught in 2003 off New Zealand as part of a 10-year marine life census. This isn't the first encounter I've had with Mr. Blobby.

2.. "Fish With Hands Identified"

The spotted handfish. Photo courtesy CSIRO

Apparently, some fish use their fins to walk along the ocean bottom. Why these fins are referred to has hands and not feet, I do not know.

At any rate, before we proceed, let's access.  Aside from the flashy pictures of volcanos in Greenland, the other top stories so far all essentially have to do with sea creatures. Weird, unsettling sea creatures. Let's face it, we love to look at 'em and think about the scary things down there. Likewise with the volcano, when you come to think of it: Images of fire and ash must, I think, trigger some deep-rooted notion of hell, at least as hell has been depicted in about a thousand years' worth of art and literature. Which brings me to the number-one most clicked-on  Geographic news story:

1. "Sinhold Pierces Guatamala"

The Guatemala Sinkhole, photo courtesy Paulo Raquec

Last June, the world press, me included, reported the news that a giant sinkhole had appeared in Guatemala City, Guatemala--and not just any sinkhole, but a 30-story sinkhole that "devoured buildings." And if the idea of this sinkhole was bad, the images that accompanied the stories were horrifying: A gaping, sheer drop into absolute blackness that seemed without end. To look at the images was to wonder: What is down there? Not that we necessarily want to know. I submit that there is a part of us--the part that responds to artistic renderings of hell, or the part that wants to watch "The Walking Dead"--that prefers the blackness to knowledge. The lure of the abyss is undeniable, don't you think? Interestingly, National Geographic's number-six most clicked-on story was also about sinkholes. The number-seven story was about new rare species, featuring a bat "with trumpet-like nostrils" that looked in every respect like a effing demon.

The tube-noseed fruit bat. Photo courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International

The list really makes you think twice about modern-man's relationship with the natural world. We know we still have to fear the dark, don't we? We know that despite all our technology there are unknowns out there. Way down on the Geographic list are two stories about this summer's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but that was a man-made disaster, and it just doesn't carry the same fear factor that a sinkhole does.

Art Watch: The Wonderful Holiday Print Sale

 

Photographer and blogger Chase Jarvis has wisely advised readers about Fraction magazine's annual holiday print sale. What a great way to see and perhaps acquire some terrific work by a number of young photographers. And...100 percent of the proceeds from each sale goes to the artist, so it's a good deal all around. This material is priced between $30 and $100, so it's very, very affordable; I mean, there are a lot of other nice holiday gifts out there that cost a lot more, and aren't nearly as nice as these images. The photograph above, titled "Portugese Defenses Essaouira, Morocco," is by Hollis Bennett;  The image below, "KIM SON, New Orleans LA 1998," is by William Greiner.