About that NYU Prof With the Camera Implanted in His Head...

A few years ago a colleague and I got into a discussion about how soon it would be before people started having camera lenses implanted in their foreheads. This was a fun, light-hearted discussion, mind you, prompted by some news about digital miniaturization or something like that. But even as we joked, I had this unpleasant feeling that we were actually just predicting the real future. And I was right.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that a professor at New York University is having a camera implanted in the back of his head, giving the term "20-20 hindsight" a whole new meaning. The professor, Wafaa Bilal, is an assistant professor in the photography and imaging department of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He's doing this camera-in-the-head thing as part of an art project commissioned by a museum in Qatar, according to the WSJ. For one year, the camera will take pictures at one-minute intervals and feed them to monitors at the museum. The Journal quotes press materials from the museum as saying that the project will  "comment on the inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory and experience."  Bilal's head-camera (as opposed to a camera head, which is entirely different ) is worrying students who worry that they will be snapped every time he turns around. I suppose they could just always try to stay in front of him as he moves.

This sounds weird, and funny, but getting back to the discussion I had with my associate, how long do you think it will be before humans are equipped with visual memory aids in their heads. My cell phone has already completely destroyed my ability to remember a phone number; why not get a third eye that does the visual stuff as well? And a memory-card slot just behind the ear?

How's the Weather Been Out Your Way?

It's everyone's favorite topic, though no one has figured out how to do anything about—besides, apparently, taking pictures. All of a sudden I'm seeing lot's of pictures of severe weather. Are we just preparing psychologically for the effects of climate change, which only a few short years ago was known as global warming? Or maybe we just love looking at big storms...that other people have to live through. (That particular emotional cocktail is one part schadenfreude, two parts whistling past the graveyard. Don't drink too much; it's strong.) How bad is the bad weather this year? I asked an old friend, photographer Jim Reed, who specializes in the severe stuff, how the weather's been out his way. I could have predicted the answer after looking at his photo (above) of  a low-precipitation thunderstorm over  Adams, Colorado last June, and his photo (below) of a landspout in eastern Colorado last May.

"It's been my busiest year yet," he said. From photographing a rare snowstorm in Myrtle Beach, South Caroline and getting legendary TV meteorologist Tom Skilling his first tornado, to shooting record-setting hailstones in Kansas, and supercell thunderstorms in South Dakota, and witnessing record heat in Montana." So there you go. Below are some other weather pictures in the news.

1. South Dakota

Yesterday's New York Times ran a big, big article on how bad the weather's been this year in South Dakota. This struck me at first as a dog-bites-man story, which is to say, isn't the weather always funky in South Dakota? Otherwise everyone would move there and it would be New York. But then I read that a recent storm had brought hail the size of cantaloup to the state. Cantaloup. Accompanying the piece was this remarkable image of a tornado (credited to Chris Collura) that struck near the town of Bowdle, which looks like this on Google maps.

Have you noticed that you never see tornado pictures that don't have a news van or two in them anymore. So many storm chasers, so few storms. Let's face it, we really do love crappy weather.

2. New York City

One of the pleasures of working very late in an office building in New York City is watching what happens with bad, bad weather rolls over the New Jersey and hits town with a fury. You raid someone's office for food, turn the lights out, sit back, and enjoy the show. This photo of lightning hitting the Statue of Liberty was made by Jay Fine, who entered into this year's National Geographic photo contest. Incongruously, Fine wrote in his caption that there was "little wind and no rain, which allowed me to stay safely inside and shoot from an open window." Usually, inside is the place to be when there is lots of wind and rain. But we New Yorkers take no chances when it comes to weather.

3. Montana

I was watching the History Channel the other night about how effed-up Montana is going to be when the super volcano bubbling under Yellowstone National Park finally blows. So perhaps supercell thunderstorms like this one don't count for much out there. (At first I thought this was another tornado, until I noticed there were no news vans in the picture.) This shot, by Sean Heavey, was another National Geographic photo contest entry, and it is indeed an impressive photo. My friend Rich Clarkson, who used to be the director of photography at Geographic and now runs some wonderful photo workshops in Jackson, Wyoming, always tells his students that "bad weather makes good pictures." So this picture must be great.

4. Space

I don't think there's much bad weather up there, unless you count sunspots and micro-meteor showers . But astronauts on the International Space Station get a good view of the ridiculous mayhem we put up with down here on Earth. It seems that one astronaut, Douglas Wheelock, has been Tweeting pictures from up there. This one is a spectacular shot of Hurricane Earl, which formed off the Cape Verde Islands and picked up energy over the Atlantic and went on to become the first Hurricane to threaten New England since Hurricane Bob in 1991. That probably doesn't mean a lot to people in Florida and other Gulf states, who face these things every damn summer. But for us up in the Northeast Corridor, it was attention-getting.

5. Earth

This photo (credited to Lou Dematteis/AP /Spectral Q), doesn't show bad weather, but it's climate-related, and it's pretty super, so I decided to include it here. I found it on The Big Picture, in a portfolio of images of protests around the world. The people on this tiny island in the barrier reef of Belize City, Belize, where the Belize Reef Summit was being held a week or so ago. The demonstrators were making a none-too-subtle point about the environmental health of the planet. Call it climate change, or global warming, or whatever, no one like bad weather. Except photographers.

Photo of the Day: Medal of Honor

Sergeant Giunta receives the Medal of Honor. Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP

This photo, which I saw in yesterday's New York Daily News, shows Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta receiving the Medal of Honor from President Obama on November 16. Giunta became the first living soldier since the Vietnam War to receive the medal (seven soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have received the medal postumously) for action in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, during which he saved the lives of two friends. But that isn't the whole story. Pictures invite us to study emotion--that's the information they deliver as no other medium can, and it's the basis of their power. In this picture, by J. Scott Applewhite for AP, Giunta appears...let's say solemn, and the reason can be found in this video clip, which comes from photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger, who made the documentary Restrepo, about a company of U.S soldiers in Afghanistan.  Giunta was one of those soldiers, and in the clip he tells the story behind his medal. (Hetherington also has a short interview with Giunta in the December issue of Vanity Fair.) If this photo doesn't tell the facts of the story, it tells the meaning. It's all there on Sergeant Giunta's face.

Craving Retro Tech: Why We Still Want Our MTV

A few months ago, I ran across these retro-ads, which of course aren't real, though I wish they were. In my fantasy, they created by Don Draper, who knows about the power of technological nostalgia, but in fact they were done by an ad agency in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and were meant to be used at seminars by a company that wanted to let its employees know about the importance of social media. Let's agree that they're brilliant.

I thought of them recently when I was reading this essay. The writer, Claire Gordon, waxes on a bit about how good she felt when she learned that a friend was still collecting movies on VHS cassettes...not because VHS quality is superior to DVDs (no analogies to audiophiles who prefer vinyl, please), but because her misty memories of the old analog world made her feel...good. That leads her to a bigger point:

So it's no wonder that digital natives, born into the greatest social revolution since the invention of the printing press, would get nostalgic so prematurely. In the last three decades, change has been so quick that technology -- the agent of chaos -- has itself become an object of nostalgia, whether VHS or dial-up, brick cell phones or Casio keyboards, Walkmans or Tamagotchi.

New technologies make everything faster, more efficient -- and we get nostalgic faster and more efficiently too -- for Sim City or the first generation iPod or the Facebook interface of four years ago (it appeared briefly on screen in The Social Network and my heart swelled). It's a pattern: A new technology is introduced to the market, becomes the reservoir for all society's anxieties, and then gets domesticated, becomes obsolete and is transformed into the totem of a quainter time.

I'm a little older than the age group Gordon is talking about. I am old enough to remember going to work one day and being very excited to learn from my boss that I was being upgraded to an IBM Selectric typewriter, so I'm not a "digital native." But I did use my Selectric to work on a story about this new thing called the personal computer, and a decade or so later I was working on my own personal computer. After that, I seemed to get upgrades about every year.

I certainly don't miss my typewriting days--I could never figure out how to change a ribbon--but I do remember the day when I realized that it had been years since I'd seen a slide, and maybe it was time to move the light table out of my office. It felt...weird, but good. I hated slides, and the ever-present threat that I might lose some and get sued. (Luckily, photographers were and remain early adopters.) My daughter, who is 20, did however spend a great deal of her high school years glued to those VH1 nostalgia fests for the '90s. An old cell phone brings a lump to her throat.

Which digital gadgets are you already sentimental about? While considering that question, you might also want to look at this article, about current technologies doomed by smartphones. (Hint: digital point-and-shoot cameras.)

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: The News in Color

Last night I scanned a number of my favorite photo websites to see which news pictures showed up most often. Below are of some of the images that received the seal of approval of photo editors the world over. I was particularly interested in how color was used to tell stories.

 1. Green Day

Among the visual wonders of the opening ceremony of the Asian Games on November 12, these dancers wearing illuminated hats were a favorite of almost every photo blog this week. And with good reason. This was my favorite shot. Photo by Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.

2.  White Night

Another favorite of photo editors around the world was this shot of a farmer walking through his cornfield,  covered in volcanic ash from Mount Merapi's eruption in Muntilan, central Java, Indonesia, on November 8. Look closely—it's a color picture. Photo credited to AP.  

3.  The Red and the Black, Part I

Photographer Finbarr O'Reilly scored two big news photos this month. This one, which showed up on several weekly photo roundups on the web, shows an Afghan man being held by Marines from the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, Bravo Company. The man was taken prisoner after a battle against Taliban in southern Afghanistan on November 7. Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

4. Beige Rage

O'Reilly also made this photo of graffiti left behind by Taliban fighters on the walls of a compound now used as a U.S. Marine Corps command center in Musa Qala, Afghanistan. Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

5.  White Line Fever

It's not a still from the final sequence of  2001: A Space Odyssey. This glowing line is an unusually slender galaxy, named NGC 4452, seen edge-on by the Hubble Space Telescope, which may be the greatest photographic instrument ever invented. Image credited to ESA/NASA

 6. The Red and the Black, Part II

Antonio Margarito (left) and Manny Pacquiao literally go head to head in their title fight on Saturday. Pacquiao won in a decision. This photo wins my decision as a favorite of the fight.

7. Blue Heat

A spectator takes in the scene as a Shanghai high-rise apartment building burns. The photo turns the event, in which more tha 40 people died, into a eerie spectacle of smoke and shadow. Photo by Aly Song/Reuters. 

 8. Red, White, and Blue

Of all the images up on websites documenting this year's Veteran's Day ceremonies, I picked this one. Can you guess why? Air Force vet Bill Ross and Boy Scout Liam Gallagher raise one of 50 casket flags honoring local veterans  in Freeport, Maine. Photo by Robert F. Bukat/ AP

Money, Money, Money: Madoff and the Art Market

Fungible Art: Madoff's Slippers

A couple of weeks ago I tried to connect the dots between the photography auction market and the mood swings of the national economy. Yesterday I found this piece by Marion Maneker, which does a really tremendous job of discussing the economics of art. Glenn Beck might be interested in this excerpt, for instance:

The low interest rates being used to heal the world economy after the debt crisis have created a thriving art market as a by-product. Blue-chip art is no different from gold. It’s equally useless and almost as universally valued. So with gold making new highs at $1400, it should surprise no one that art prices for recognized and fairly fungible artists like Andy Warhol are back at the levels (or beyond) of the art boom of 2007-2008.

Maneker is working with big prices paid for big paintings, but her general points are probably valid for the broad range of art markets. The piece is very, very interesting.



And speaking of art, how could I not include the very nice picture (above) of Bernie Madoff's monogramed velveteen slippers? They were featured Saturday in an auction of the disgraced financier's personal effects, which were sold to help pay back the victims he defrauded. The auction didn't come close to repaying the $65 million he looted. But one lucky man paid $6,000 for the lot that included the slippers. (Alas, the buyer wears size 13 shoe, while Madoff was a size 8.) I'd settle for a big print of the slippers.

This Day in History: Eugene Ely Makes First Shipboard Takeoff

Eugene Ely heads down before heading up

 On November 14, 1910, Eugene Ely flew a Curtiss pusher aircraft off of a platform that had been built over the deck of the light cruiser U.S.S. Birmingham. It was the first time anyone had done that, and, I suppose if you were a philosophical sort of person, you could say that the occasion marked the beginning of the Battle of Midway. But that would be stretching history a little too far, probably.

In any case, we are lucky that Ely, or the Navy, had someone with a camera positioned off the port side of the ship. Whoever it was had great timing, because the photo taken that day shows Ely's plane just as it plunged off the ship's bow and headed down toward the water. Apparently, the plane's wheels actually dipped into the water of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard before starting to climb. Ely shortly thereafter landed his flying machine on a nearby beach.

Because of the picture that was taken, the moment has become a piece of our collective memory, another piece of evidence of man's intrepid nature. And Ely was certainly intrepid. Perhaps a bit too much so.

Ely the intrepid

He'd only been flying for about seven months before his experiment on the Birmingham, which took place at the suggestion of the Navy. He was an enthusiast of fast cars and thought flying would be pretty much like driving. He was proven wrong when he crashed during his first flight. A couple of months after his historic takeoff, he performed the world's first shipboard landing, putting his Curtiss airplane down on a platform laid over the deck of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay on January 18. 1911. The picture below show's Ely wearing a state-of-the-art life preserver—some inner tubes—slung around his neck.

Note life preserver

Ely wouldn't enjoy his fame for long. On October 19, 1911, while flying in an exhibition in Macon, Georgia, he crashed and died sometime later from a broken neck. Naturally, there was a photographer on hand to document the scene.

The fatal crash

Epilogue: In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt awarded Ely the Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously. There are probably some intrepid sorts around who will mark Ely's feat by trying to duplicate it. Good luck to them.