Your correspondent was in New York last week and ducked into Grand Central Station (or more formally, Grand Central Terminal)… to find it transformed. Sarah Cascone has the backstory…
For the first time possibly ever, there is not a single ad to be seen in Grand Central Terminal. “Humans of New York,” Brandon Stanton‘s popular social media art series of photographs of people he’s interviewed on the city’s streets, has taken over each and every one of the 150 video billboards in the grand concourse, as well as the subway ads below in Grand Central Station for “Dear New York.”
“This beautiful art installation transforms the terminal into a photographic display of New Yorkers telling their stories from all walks of life—serving as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity,” MTA director of commercial ventures Mary John said in a statement. “It is the first time an artist has unified digital displays in both the terminal and subway station below, and the MTA coordinated across many corners of our organization to make this happen.”
“If it provides even the slightest amount of joy, solace, beauty, or connection to the 750,000 people who pass through Grand Central every day—we have achieved our goal,” he wrote on Facebook.
The original plan was to use the proceeds from his new book, Dear New York, but Stanton ended up having to dip into his life savings to cover the total cost, which included space rental and covering the station’s lost ad revenue. The artist and journalist, who wrote the best-selling book Humans of New York, declined to provide an exact figure, but told the New York Times that “I no longer have any stocks.”
Stanton has shot portraits of 10,000 people across the five boroughs and beyond since beginning “Humans of New York” in 2010, creating a kind of photographic census of the city. (He has since expanded the project’s scope internationally, to 40 countries and counting.)…
“Humans of New York” founder Brandon Stanton in Grand Central Terminal with his new book, “Dear New York,” at his photography exhibition of the same name
As we see, we might spare a thought for a photographer with a different– but also crucially-important– focus, Edwin Way Teale; he died on this date in 1980. A naturalist, photographer, and writer, his works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930–1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons.
Teale’s Hampton, CT home, “Trail Wood” (chronicled in his A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm and further described in A Walk through the Year) is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society. His papers, housed in the University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, take up 238 feet of shelf space and include field notes and drafts for each of his books, early childhood writings, professional writings for magazines, newspapers and book reviews, correspondence- both personal and professional, personal and family documents, scrapbooks, and memorabilia, as well as his photographs (prints, negatives, and transparencies) and his personal library. But he bequeathed to the Concord (MA) Free Public Library his collection of Henry David Thoreau books, letters, correspondence, mementos and any other material dealing with Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other material relating to Concord, Massachusetts– 12 containers and 108 printed books and pamphlets.
“Athanasius Kircher’s camera obscura,” illustration from Kirscher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1671) reproduced in Josef Maria Eder’s Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie (Detailed handbook of photography, 1905 — Source.
Centuries before photography froze the world into neat frames, scientists, poets, and artists streamed transient images into dark interior spaces with the help of a camera obscura. Julie Park explores the early modern fascination with this quasi-spiritual technology and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced…
The camera obscura, a device known as the photographic camera’s predecessor, was originally the size of a room. As an artist’s aid for rendering perspective, a scientific model for understanding optics, and a source of popular entertainment, it furnished observers with all kinds of information during the early modern period. In the context of pursuing knowledge about the natural world — whether in studying the sun, the light it emits, or the very organ for seeing, the eye — alchemists, astronomers, and mathematicians turned rooms in their homes into camera obscuras for revealing what was previously invisible.
In the most rudimentary terms, the camera obscura (whose Latin name means “dark chamber”) is a dark and enclosed environment with a hole on one side. This aperture allows light to stream into the interior space, casting moving images onto the opposite wall. Because its images of external reality appear reversed, both laterally and vertically — in colors deeper than their original, with movements intact but seemingly exaggerated — the camera obscura’s projections of the world re-envision it as a dream.
One of the very first mentions of the phenomenon behind the camera obscura is tied to the viewing of a solar eclipse. Aristotle, while observing a partial solar eclipse in the fourth century BCE, glimpsed its reflection in the play of light that seeped through the dense canopy of a tree. Here, the “dark chamber” is not a box or a room, but the critical space between solid things. Transposing this phenomenon onto the walls of domestic architecture, early modern natural philosophers made it possible to experience the domain of one’s personal space as a realm of marvelous reversal and illusion.
For Giambattista della Porta, polymath author of Natural Magic (1558), a book of natural philosophy and alchemy filled with magic tricks and scientific experiments, the camera obscura was a space for “see[ing] all things in the dark, that are outwardly done in the Sun, with the colours of them”. This evocative phrasing suggests the metaphysical happenings that the experience of being and peering inside a camera obscura offers. Della Porta’s instructions for engineering this “very pleasant and admirable” experience — among the “great secrets of Nature” — involve managing sources of light and creating the conditions by which it can be strategically channeled: “you must shut all the Chamber windows, and it will do well to shut up all holes besides”, except for one that is as wide and long as your hand. By covering the walls with paper or white cloth to create a viewing screen, the outside world will appear indoors, both familiar and estranged: “so shall you see all that is done without in the Sun, and those that walk in the streets, like to Antipodes, and what is right will be the left, and all things changed.”
A spiritual dimension inheres in this experience: the notion of illumination via obscuration that surrounds the early modern camera obscura carries remnants of the medieval period’s approach to darkness as the medium for perceiving the glorious light of God. Elina Gertsman explains how nowhere was this more evident than in windows through which light, both colored and clear, flooded into the darkness of cathedrals. Without the dimly lit cathedral space, this transmission of light as an expression of God’s splendor would not be so keenly felt. Both cathedrals and camera obscuras share the principle that dark places form the critical environment through which transformative light and its effects can be channeled. Yet in the case of camera obscuras, it was not just light alone, but ever more wondrous projections of the world that illuminated enclosed spaces…
[Park describes the camera obscuras of Johannes Kepler, Alexander Pope, Joshia Reynolds, and others…]
… While one might draw parallels with photographic technologies (both still and motion) — regarding how images are conjured by controlling an aperture — a key difference lies in the ephemerality of the viewing experience offered by the camera obscura. It captures life and its happenings as they take place, rather than preserving their images for the future. In other words, the moving images of the world it brings into its dark room are as transient as the dream state it appears to summon. And like dreams, the camera obscura could offer a new perspective on the world, to reveal things that might otherwise remain invisible. In 1764, the author of a dictionary entry on the camera obscura reflected on the ways in which the device underscores the motion of “the object itself”, such as a man walking, so that he appears to “have an undulating motion, or to rise up and down every step he takes”, in a way that could never be “observed in the man himself, as viewed by the naked eye”.
Despite their delight, the beguiled eighteenth-century viewers and inhabitants of the camera obscura’s worlds ineluctably expressed a sense of melancholy over the ephemerality of its projected scenes. Such sentiments are apparent in the numerous poems that appeared in the period conveying regret over the eventual disappearance of its pleasing phantoms. Yet, for a brief time, the camera obscura, especially when experienced as a room, gave individuals a sense of owning their own moving images of the world, in ways that might have felt far more vivid and evocative of one’s dream life than our own experiences with cinema are felt today. The moving images it mediates come from the viewer’s immediate environment, not from a world created by a scriptwriter and producer. This aspect of the camera obscura encouraged viewers to see reality in an unreal guise, both as an inner reality and a dream world, an elsewhere that is in fact quite nearby.
Paying attention to the historical role that the camera obscura played — allowing humans a safe and enclosed environment for accessing their imaginations, the sun, and many things in between — might transform the ways we look at our own spaces of solitude. Its visual effects can make us see that our emotional and mental landscapes are inseparable from the spaces in which we live and organize our lives. The very walls that provide us with shelter can also transform the world into scenes from a passing dream. By showing the world “with all things changed”, the camera obscura reveals just how clearly we can see in dark places…
As we marvel, we might send birthday greetings to a modern photgrapher who has resurrected the technique, Abelardo Morell; he was born on this date in 1948. While his work is wide-ranging, he is perhaps best known for turning rooms into camera obscuras and then capturing the marriage of interior and exterior in large format photographs, for example:
The once ubiquitous mechanical calculator were engineering marvels… and as Kevin Twomey‘s photos also demonstrate, things of beauty…
More stunning photos of calculators (and typewriters and more) on Twomey’s site.
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673
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As we sum it up, we might send snappy birthday greetings to Nicéphore Niépce; he was born on this date in 1765. An inventor, he was a pioneer of photography…
The very first photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who aimed a camera obscura, which held a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), out the window of the upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras. After a day-long exposure, the plate was removed and the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum, which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light. The result was this permanent direct positive picture– a one-of-a-kind photograph on pewter:
(For more on Niépce and the story of his pioneering accomplishment [and a larger version of this inagural image], visit the source of this photo, the site of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.)
As Josh Begley elegantly demonstrates, silence may be nigh…
The New York Times published its first issue on September 18, 1851, but the first photos wouldn’t appear on the cover until the early 1900s over 60 years later. This visual timeline by self-described data artist Josh Begley captures the storied newspaper’s approach to layout and photography by incorporating every NY Times front page ever published into a single one-minute video. The timelapse captures decades text-only front pages before the newspaper began to incorporate illustrated maps and wood engravings. The liberal usage of black and white photography begins a century later and finally the first color photo appears in 1997. What a fascinating way to view history through image, over 60,000 front pages in all…
As we ponder the prevalence of pictures, we might spare a thought for a man who made powerful– and beautiful– use of images, John James Audubon; he died on this date in 1851. An ornithologist, naturalist, and artist, Audubon documented all types of American birds with detailed illustrations depicting the birds in their natural habitats. His The Birds of America (1827–1839), in which he identified 25 new species, is considered one of the most important– and finest– ornithological works ever completed.
Book plate featuring Audubon’s print of the Greater Prairie Chicken
Harvesting muscatel grapes on the slopes of Montaña Diama, Finca La Geria, owned by Familia Hernández for at least five generations. Lanzarote, Spain…
That sentiment dates for the middle of the 19th century. The business of feeding humans (and our livestock) has changed a good bit since. George Steinmetz has traveled the globe documenting current practices. While (on the evidence of his remarkable photos) the process is still beautiful, it does raise some important questions…
Since the domestication of plants began some 11,000 years ago, humans have converted 40% of the earth’s surface into farmland. With the global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, combined with the rising standard of living in rapidly developing nations, it is estimated that we will have to increase the global food supply by 60%. The Feed the Planet project is an examination of how the world can meet the rapidly expanding challenge of feeding humanity without putting more natural lands under the plow. Most of us only come into contact with raw food in the supermarket, and are unaware of the methods used to raise it. In many cases, the food industry goes to significant lengths to prevent us from seeing how our food is produced. Access to this information is central to the personal decisions we make about what we eat, which cumulatively have huge environmental impact. This project seeks to show how our food is produced, so that we can make more informed decisions…
Herding 145,000 sheep and goats onto a livestock carrier in the port of Berbera, Somaliland for shipment to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where 2.6 million animals will be ritually sacrificed on the third day of the Hajj pilgrimage...
CP Group’s chicken facility processes 120 million chickens per year (today 200,000, pre-holiday periods up to 400,000) with over 2,000 employees working a single eight-hour shift...
Artisanal fishing boats offloading their catch on the beach of Kayar, Senegal. Most of the fish appeared to be small pelagic fish such as sardinelle and mackerel...
Many more striking photos, and their illuminating stories, at: “Feed the Planet.”
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