lost photos from a lost city

Design Observer (online magazine?) reports on an exciting discovery - lost photos from Hiroshima. There were previously very few due to the clampdown on photography and any reports on the bombings.

But the War Department created a Physical Damage Division to go over and record the details for official purposes. They did, but even their evidence has been largely unknown for decades... until somebody found a huge stockpile of them in a surburban garbage bin. The story of their recovery is interesting enough in itself, and can be found here. The photos themselves, of course, are awe-inspiring.

image and reality

More on the Atlantic cover controversy, plus Newsweek's horrible evil non-retouching of Sarah Palin on their cover. "Politics of the Retouched Headshot" in The Atlantic.

Consider a recent political controversy involuntarily involving this magazine. After taking a series of shots for a conventional cover portrait of John McCain, Jill Greenberg tricked the candidate into having a picture taken in which she lit him from below, a classic technique to make the subject look evil. Neither the candidate nor his staff noticed that the photographer had literally cast McCain in a bad light. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she told the online magazine PDN, boasting further that she hadn’t retouched the neutral shot she sold The Atlantic. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she said.

As this story illustrates, having a portrait taken for publication demands a great deal of trust in the competence and good will of the photographer and photo editor. Greenberg deceived not only McCain but The Atlantic, which objected strenuously to the abuse of trust. But suppose the magazine had been in on the ruse. Does a portrait subject have a reasonable expectation of normal lighting?

Maybe. What's funny is when Fox starts to whine about things NOT being retouched. So honesty is now dishonesty - the epitome of Bush-Rove!! Woo!

textual associations

AS presents a visual chart of textual links within the Bible. Works out to look like a pretty rainbow.

Would be useful to show students to remind them of the coherency of a work over time, consistency of themes, etc. And then to suggest to them that they can apply this as an analytical tool to any text we read: How internally consistent is it? What are the common themes?

China's "Manufactured Landscapes"

I saw a review of this a while ago but forgot to link. A new photography book and film survey China's landscapes of manufacturing: junk-yards of electronics goods, vast factories like human beehives. Could be a good last-week or China-week assignment. Digby reviews here.

The Commissar Vanishes

Cool site from the Newseum with a bunch of different examples of Soviet photo editing. Mostly Trotsky of course. Somewhat marred by the use of present tense... makes it read like a freshman paper. But oh well, the photos are good.

Last paragraph has some ideas on a thing I've wondered: why the doctoring is sometimes so obvious:

Why do the communists do such a rough job retouching Soviet books and journals? Did they hope such eliminations will be noticed, and thus send an ominous warning?

Hmmm, could be!

photo juxtapositions

Cool "convergence contest" at McSweeney's -- lining up two photos from different historical eras, which makes an implicit link between the two. The best one, and saddest, is the anti-Nazi poster describing the Lidice massacre ("this is Nazi brutality") with one of the Abu Ghraib hooded inmates.

There's also this cool one of a brain and a subdivision. A lot of these are convergences of natural and man-made forms. How man mimics nature without even realizing it. These might also be good for an early lecture about building and man's alteration of environment.

UPDATE: I just can't stop with these! Contrast Goya's Saturn devouring one of his sons with a picture of Bush kissing a baby in the same position. Hilarious!

Another one converging a row of Iraqi prisoners being led away for questioning with Singer Sergeant's Gassed, one of my favorite paintings of all time. Could use this in the last lecture, as students will have seen Gassed in the WWI lecture.

Time magazine's deliberate convergence of their "X-ed out Hitler" cover of May 1945 with al-Zawahiri... As the editor notes:

The design of the more recent cover raises some interesting sets of questions:

1. Are they really comparing al-Zarqawi to Hitler? As nasty a character as he was, it seems like a bit of an overstatement to compare his death in terms of significance to that of the architect of the Holocaust, the man who sent the whole world to war. Plus, the death of Hitler, announced by the first cover, brought about Germany's surrender and the end of the war in Europe. Is Time, therefore, declaring the war in Iraq over, and victory for al-Zarqawi's opponents? Doesn't seem likely.

2. For whom was the second cover designed? Hardly anyone alive today would remember the Hitler cover, so the "historical resonance" factor is virtually nil. Only unusually dedicated followers of Time covers (Timeheads?) or Time employees—and even in that case only Time employees who have poked around the archives or who have made studies of past cover designs for their own work—would "get" this reference.

So it seems like an internal wink, then: a deliberate convergence by Time magazine for Time magazine. They would have had to wait this long, as anyone who remembered the first cover would also be pretty outraged at the comparison. It will be interesting to see who Time decides to X out 60 years from now.

This one comparing devastation in Beruit and Warsaw could be good for the lecture on cyclical theory of history (as could all of these - would be a good addition).

The works of man mirror nature -- Swedish logging site looks like a tree itself, from the air.

Trippy.

AP picture "shows" soldier flipping bird

The latest in the wingnut/moonbat photoshop wars. Contrast with Soviet and other historical modifying of photography. Now people are more sophisticated, both in the techniques to edit photos or to detect the modification. But it's still just as effective if people only get the first photo and never see the debunking.

http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/223905.php