Posts Tagged ‘Mathew Brady’
“The best way to preserve a child’s vision is to let them see things their way rather than yours”*…
Kira Cook contemplates a series of photos taken by kids of their (unaware or surprised) parents…
… somehow, these malevolent images are borne from the tiny fingers and eyes and perspectives of the ones who love us… most?!
Children, of course, know little to nothing about “crafting” a good portrait. They know naught of symmetry, or contrast, or depth of field. They do, however, know the specific power of finally having control over the rectangular device normally glued to their parents’ hands. They pound that round red button at will, capturing images from their abbreviated heights, their lilliputian thumbs obscuring the lens, often blurring the image with their relentless movement.
These pictures remind us that while we study our children, they study us back. Before we speak, we see. For months before spoken language ever enters the relationship, a child gazes upon its mother for hours, every day. The gaze of the child is the least judgmental, the most accepting. When a child takes a portrait of their parent, there is an absence of so many of the elements that inherently exist in the portraits an adult makes. There is no moralizing, for one. No manipulation. They don’t bother to hide or deny the aspects we normally do in photos. In fact, unlike in every other photographic example, there is a total absence of forethought or editorializing…
More (and more on the) unflattering portraits that do what kids do best, wholeheartedly engage with the present moment: “The Humbling Tyranny of the Photos Our Kids Take of Us,” from @kirahesser in @romper.
* Jacob Liberman
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As we say cheese, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that Samuel Morse, a professor of art and painting at the University of the City of New York (now New York University) in Paris to promote his invention of the telegraph, met with Louis Daguerre.
Morse was fascinated by Daguerre’s daguerreotype—the first practical means of photography. Morse wrote a letter to the New York Observer describing the invention, which was published widely in the American press and stoked broad interest in the new technology. On his return to New York, he taught classes in the technique to his colleagues at NYU and others– including Mathew Brady, one of the earliest photographers in American history, famous for his depictions of the Civil War.
Lest we doubt…
While some things stay (surprisingly, gratifyingly, depressingly) the same, there are some things– many things– that really are materially different, both in kind and in degree, from times past.
By way of demonstration, the folks at Globaia have compiled a collection of charts that is stunning (in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word).
to enlarge, click on the image above, or here, and again
And as to the infrastructure that’s abetted all of this change, see Globaia’s Map of Global Transportation Systems.
[TotH to Curiosity Counts]
As we ponder the implications of so many hockey sticks all in a row, we might recall that Samuel Clemens’– Mark Twain’s– route to writing was round-about: In 1861, Clemens’ brother Orion became secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada; the national-treasure-to-be, having worked as a printer in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, jumped at the offer to accompany his sibling West. Clemens spent his first year in Nevada prospecting for a gold or silver mine. Out of money, he took a job as reporter for the Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper Territorial Enterprise; his articles on the booming frontier-mining town began to appear on this date in 1862.
Like many journalists of the day, Clemens adopted a pen name, signing his articles “Mark Twain,” a term from his old river boating days.
In 1864, he traveled farther West to cover the booming state of California, where he wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”– the Tall-Tale success of which catapulted Clemens out of the West to become a globe-trotting journalist.
In 1869, Clemens settled in Buffalo, New York, and later in Hartford, Connecticut. Clemens had spent only about five years in the West, and the majority of his subsequent work focused on the Mississippi River country and the Northeast. Still, his 1872 account of his western adventures, Roughing It, remains one of the most evocative eyewitness accounts of the frontier ever written. And surely more importantly, even his non-western masterpieces like Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884), in their playful rejection of Eastern pretense and genteel literary conventions, reflect a frontier sensibility.
Mark Twain, honorary Westerner, by Mathew Brady (source)
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