Posts Tagged ‘art’
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light”*…
There are myriad ways to understand photography and its history: by content, by style, by technique, by use, by creator…
Luminous-Lint is used worldwide by curators, educators, photography students, photohistorians, collectors and photographers to better understand the many histories of photography.
Luminous-Lint uses 125,613 photographs from 4,030 different collections around the world to create detailed and well structured histories of photography.
Luminous-Lint includes 1,032 distinct, but interlinked, histories of photography that are evolving on a regular basis.
The connections between photographs are critical to understanding and Luminous-Lint includes 14,701 visual indexes to assist.
Explore the histories of photography: Luminous-Lint.
* John Berger
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As we consider the framing, we might send thoughtfully-composed birthday greetings to Ansel Adams; he was born on this date in 1902. A photographer who specialized in landscapes, especially in black-and-white photos of the American West, he was hugely influential both in photography and in environmentalsim.
Adams helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph; was a key advisor in establishing the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a founder of the photography journal Aperture.
His love of photography was born when, at age 12, he visited Yosemite and took his first shots. He became a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, a commitment deeply intertwined with his photographic practice. At one point, he contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
“I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.”*…
As Niels Bohr said, “prediciton is hard, especially about the future.” Still, we can try…
While the future cannot be predicted with certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which studies how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which studies how life evolves over time; plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia; and sociology, which examines how human societies and cultures evolve.
The far future begins after the current millennium comes to an end, starting with the 4th millennium in 3001 CE, and continues until the furthest reaches of future time. These timelines include alternative future events that address unresolved scientific questions, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant and whether proton decay will be the eventual end of all matter in the Universe…
A new pole star, the end of Niagara Falls, the wearing away of the Canadian Rockies– and these are just highlights from the first 50-60 million years. Read on for an extraordinary outline of what current science suggests is in store over the long haul: “Timeline of the far future,” a remarkable Wikipedia page.
Related pages: List of future astronomical events, Far future in fiction, and Far future in religion.
* Steven Wright
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As we take the long view, we might send grateful birthday greetings to the man who “wrote the book” on perspective (a capacity analogically handy in the endeavor featured above), Leon Battista Alberti; he was born on this date in 1404. The archetypical Renaissance humanist polymath, Alberti was an author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cartographer, and cryptographer. He collaborated with Toscanelli on the maps used by Columbus on his first voyage, and he published the the first book on cryptography that contained a frequency table.
But he is surely best remembered as the author of the first general treatise– De Pictura (1434)– on the the laws of perspective, which built on and extended Brunelleschi’s work to describe the approach and technique that established the science of projective geometry… and fueled the progress of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Greek- and Arabic-influenced formalism of the High Middle Ages to the more naturalistic (and Latinate) styles of Renaissance.
“The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen”*…
… and used. Consider, for example, this affecting example of literary collage from Jez Burrows…
The valley was enclosed by rugged peaks, security fencing and annihilative firepower—a state secret. Nothing for miles around. They sat opposite one another they sat in the shade of a tree.
“Repeat the words after me: A fish is an animal.”
“A fish is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.” She nodded in affirmation.
“Very good.”
“Very good.” She looked up with an absent smile and burst out laughing. Its mouth snapped into a tight, straight line and there was a fraught silence. Her body tensed up.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you!” She leaned forward to take its hand and a cross-current of electricity seemed to flow between them. She felt guilty now, and a little uneasy. She looked at it warily, this naive, simple creature, with its straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances—a shimmering evanescent bubble of cycloid scales and yellow fur agleam in the sun. Circuitry that Karen could not begin to comprehend. Since Parker’s research did not pan out too well, now she was the linchpin of the experiment. Her voice wobbled dangerously, but she brought it under control.
“I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
To her astonishment, it smiled and emitted a sound like laughter. She felt an inward sense of relief.
“I want an apple.”
“When you ask for something you should say, ‘Please.’”
“Please give me an apple.” It rolled the word around its mouth. She smiled distantly.
“I’ll think about it, amigo.”
Collins COBUILD Primary Learner’s Dictionary
Collins English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
My First Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
More very short stories composed of example sentences from dictionaries: “Dictionary Stories” from @jezburrows.
Apposite: Austin Kleon‘s newspaper blackout poetry. For example…
(Image at top: source)
* Charles Simic
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As we juxtapose, we might send carefully constructed birthday greetings to Gertrude Stein; she was born on this date in 1874. An American ex-pat in Paris, Stein was an author, poet, and memoirist (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But she is probably best remembered as the host of a Paris salon where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art– including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse– regularly met.
Hemingway described her role as both a host and a mentor to a generation of artists in in A Moveable Feast. The Mother of Us All was the title of a Virgil Thomson opera for which Stein wrote the libretto. While the subject of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, certainly deserves the epithet, so, many have observed, did its author.
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money”*…
Further to yesterday’s post (about the relevance of Edith Wharton’s observations of her Gilded Age to ours), Dorinda Evans takes a look at rough contemporary of Wharton’s, and at his (similarly relevant) work…
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks [are nowconsidered] unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time…
The fascinating story of Victor Dubreuil’s cryptic currencies and the questions they raise about value and values: “Illusory Wealth,” in @PublicDomainRev.
For an illuminating look at Dubreuil’s spiritual successor, see Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful Boggs: A Comedy of Values.
For a loosely analogous artist: “Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for… what the hell are they? What do they do? How do they do it?”
And for an appreciation of trompe l’oeil (and its influence on Cubism), see “Feinting Spells.”
* H.L. Mencken
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As we contemplate currency, we might pour a cup of birthday tea for English mathematician, logician, photographer, and Anglican cleric, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson– better known as the author Lewis Carroll– born on this date in 1832.
“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Alice in Wonderland (nee “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” then “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”)
Oh, and… Happy Mozart’s Birthday!
“Dada is ‘nothing'”*…
Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Beatrice Wood, 1917
Working from Marcel Duchamp’s concept of anti-art, Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball conjured “Dada” in Europe in the early 20th century; it gestated in France, then it found it’s footing in New York in 1915, and ignited in Paris in 1920… Key figures in the movement included Duchamp, Tzara, Ball, and the likes of Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Max Ernst, Richard Huelsenbeck, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters… and Beatrice Wood.
We need to talk about Beatrice Wood. The last surviving member of the Dada movement, the ceramicist, the artist, the writer, the actress, the lover, and let’s not leave out, the inspiration behind the headstrong character of “Rose” in the movie Titanic. Beatrice was born at the end of the 19th century, and died at the end of the 20th, and in between she lived an incredible life. The sign on her ceramics studio read “Reasonable and Unreasonable”, and was a pretty spot-on description of her life…
The remarkable story: “Meet The Mama of Dada” in @MessyNessyChic
See also: “Beatrice Wood” @Artforum
* Marcel Duchamp
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As we appreciate art, we might send carefully-composed birthday greetings to a very different kind of artist (one against whom the Dadaists were rebelling), John Singer Sargent; he was born on this date in 1856. One of the leading portrait painters of his time, he moved in the same social circles as his subjects (Presidents [e.g., Teddy Roosevelt), nobility (e.g., Lady Agnew), tycoons and their heirs [e.g., numerous Vanderbilts, Isabella Stewart Gardner), celebrity authors (e.g, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame), even other artists (e.g., Claude Monet), and so was admired in his time for his evocation of Edwardian luxury. He was prodigiously prolific: he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings.
Sargent in his studio with his personal favorite of his works, Portrait of Madame X, c. 1885 (source)
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