The Final Frontier

 News reports of the recent flight around the moon talked about the astronauts impressions of seeing the far side, and their adaptations to space travel including toilet repair.  One pictures them jockeying for position at the capsule's window trying to make snapshots of the moon's surface.  Had they taken time for a space walk, we might have seen this scenario:

 What is clear is that for all that money spent  little  real science was accomplished.  Humans are not required for making pictures, or really anything else in space exploration.

Update: 

It turns out my AI-generated image was not as far out as I thought according to a note by radspix on Flickr:

With a nod of appreciation to our current astronauts. 

The original Minolta Hi-Matic (rebranded as the Ansco Autoset) achieved fame for being the first Minolta camera in space, taken by John Glenn on the Friendship 7 mission in 1962. It was the first camera used by the Americans to capture colour photographs from space. So the story goes, John Glenn purchased the camera from a local drug store and NASA modified it to enable it's use by gloved hands. NASA apparently thought the camera was manufactured in the USA. 

You are being watched...

I mentioned in a recent blog post how Artificial Intelligence (AI) may intrude into the practice of commercial image making, likely eliminating the role occupied up to now by photographers. Today I came across an illustrated discussion about how AI might take on the role of the art critic. The centerpiece of the discussion was quite a fine photograph by a fellow I follow on Flickr, Leon Van Kemenade.

What Leon did was to request an AI critique of his photograph of a woman on the street holding an umbrella. The response was appropriate, but lacking in some interesting ways that the photographer describes quite well. The thrust of his argument was that the AI critic made a reasonable but inadequate response which omitted a consideration of how the photographic image might be interpreted.

Several things occurred to me when I considered the photograph and the discussion, starting with the idea that AI is going to intrude on every human endeavor including those activities which may have until now been considered uniquely human. I agreed with Leon's analysis of the inadequacy of the AI critic's evaluation of his photograph.

I also think that the shortcomings of the performance might also be considered due in part to the fact that the prompt was inadequately framed. It seems highly likely that adding some detail as to what was required would have produced something closer to what was wanted.  Also, making some more information available to the AI critic would have produced a learning opportunity which would certainly have altered future responses to similar questions.

Another angle on consideration of the AI response was that there was some value in spite of of the perceived inadequacy.  For instance, it is not hard to see that an AI summary of the issues in question could prove to be a useful time saver. In fact, students at all levels are using the technology in precisely that way now.

Many are understandably nervous and critical about the perceived threats from widespread AI implementation.  However, it is probably also important not to overlook potential benefits. An example of this balancing act is to consider one AI implementation that has now been in place for a considerable period of time -- the application of AI to the game of Chess.  I.E.

GPT-4o mini (via DuckDuckgo):

"A computer first beat a chess grandmaster on May 11, 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. Deep Blue won the match with a score of 2-1, making it a historic moment in artificial intelligence and computer science. This event marked a significant milestone, demonstrating the capabilities of computers in strategic thinking and complex problem solving."

That development seemed to foretell the possible coming supremacy of machines over humans.  That may turn out to be true, but in the meantime AI programming has provided a means for practitioners of the art of Chess to deeply investigate potential strategies.  It also seems very likely that the opportunity AI provides for online chess competition has contributed to the appearance of a great number of youthful chess prodigies from all over the world.

So, it seems important not to jump to conclusions about such a complex issue. Given the billions that are currently being poured into AI development there is likely no way to stop the train.  Better, perhaps, to consider to what ends the technology will be applied and to whose benefit.

Lens Design

 Physicists and mathematicians discovered centuries ago that spherical sections of glass could bend and focus images onto a flat field.  That discovery enabled lens designs well into the Twentieth Century.  For instance, the Sonnar-type lens for my Nikon S from the 1950s has seven elements, all circular in cross section.

The combinations of lens elements provide a high degree of resolution along with minimizing aberrations with the widest possible aperture for each design type. Glass of great purity was essential to the process of sharp image formation. 

The lenses in my Iphone also have seven elements, but they embody complex aspherical shapes made possible by computer aided design and ultra-miniaturazation. It would be physically impossible to form such tiny lenses using the mechanical polishing processes for glass lenses.  

Instead, the cellphone lenses are made of injection molded plastic with very high light transmission qualities.

At the Museum

 Two big exhibits at either end of the Albuquerque Museum.

Light, Space, and the Shape of Time

April 5 - July 20, 2025

 

Plastic, glass and neon with a '60s vibe.  I am not very moved by these kinds of large, abstract sculpture installations.  The show did not live up to its rather pretentious title.  I thought the most interesting and fun piece was the one featured at the entrance to the gift shop.

 

Focus on Youth

May 3 – June 1, 2025

A big photography show by Albuquerque public school students with lots of polished, inspiring work that is as good or better than what can be found in art gallerys around town.

 

Trevor Martinez, Guitar Highlights, Sandia High School, Grade 12

Fifty Years

 It seemed like the Viet Nam war would never end.  When it finally did I could hardly believe it.

How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America (New York Times)

Kyoichi Sawada/Bettmann/Corbis, via Getty Images

Photo Murals

 Chip Thomas murals at the Albuquerque Museum

Watch his larger than life story in a PBS video.

 Or, watch the talk Chip gave at the University of Colorado at Boulder about his time as a doctor in the Navajo Nation and the development of his photo mural project.

Reflections

I went by my favorite local used bookstore recently and found Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus.  The text seems very familiar, so I'm pretty sure I read it originally just before we went to Greece nearly twenty years ago.

I first became acquainted with Durrell's work through his Alexandria Quartet which I read while in school in the 1960s.  That seemed revolutionary then to me in its style and content.  Looking back on it now I'm thinking maybe the issue was more my own literary naiveté at the time.  Durrell was in the employ of the Foreign Office during his time in the Dodecanese Islands and his views and opinions seem to reflect a now stale colonialist viewpoint.  To be fair I should probably go back and re-read the Quartet which he put together a decade afterward.

Thinking about Durrell and Greece got me thinking about pictures I had made there.  I posted a few on my photography blog over the years, but most were archived on Photonet.  When I looked at them there recently I found that the text of the photo essays I did had disappeared and accessing the photos was a slow process which augurs poorly for their preservation there.  So, I collected the lot and posted them on my Photography & Vintage Cameras blog in three parts labeled Rhodes, Symi and Athens.

Haiku and Photography

Haiku poetry and photography are expressive art forms which share both techniques and effects.  Both have the capacity to evoke an idea or an emotion while using very spare resources.  Both rely on the engagement of the imagination to achieve full appreciation, while also  using a bit of ambiguity to good effect.  The comparison might be extended to include any kind of visual art such as painting or drawing, but it seems to me that photography's capacity to instantaneously capture a very narrow slice of time and distill its essence into two dimensions brings it closer to haiku.  Some of  the old haiku masters sometimes accompanied their poems with simple brush drawings.  It may be possible to similarly combine haiku and photos provided that the connections are not too simplistic or maudlin.

Some techniques shared by haiku and photography include:

Rhythmic patterns
Incongruous or unexpected juxtaposition
Perspective emphasis or distortion
Selective framing
Selective focus
subtle gradations of tone or shading.

The best description and analysis of haiku techniques I have come across is a short article by Jane Reichhold, who with her husband edited a journal of Haiku.  Her explanations have directness and clairty which is often lacking in critical writing about art.  She also is able to use her considerable creative talents to provide illustrative examples of the techniques she identifies.  Here, for instance, is one of my favorites in which she is talking about the "technique of the Sketch or Shiki's Shasei", a focus on reality, simply said:

evening
waves come into the cove
one at a time

Haiku in the English language has a history of somewhat over a century in length.  Quite  a lot of authors have taken a stab at reconciling the major linguistic differences with translations between Japanese and English.  Many different styles of Haiku in many languages have come and gone over the years.  Much of the production in English during the first half-century used the 17-syllable form expressed in three lines of 5,7 and 5.  In recent times, shorter forms are favored and there is less emphasis on natural and seasonal themes.

It is probably no coincidence that I mostly like photographic work and haiku from roughly the same era which preceded the advent of  the digital age.  The photo books in my possession feature names like Blossfeldt, Weston, Lange, Smith, Mann, and Strand.  My favorite haiku author is Richard Wright, who is best known for his novels, including Native Son.  Wright died at age 52 in 1960; much of the last year of his life was taken up with the production of four thousand haiku.  Wright picked out the 817 he liked best, likely for publication, but he never saw them in print.  His daughter took on the job and got Wright's haiku work published as "Haiku: This Other World", 1998.  The whole collection is also available on line at the Terebess Asia Online site.

Wright might have a hard time getting his haiku published now.  He stuck doggedly to the now-deprecated 5-7-5 format.  I have no prejudice against shorter form work, but it seems to me that Wright's disciplined consistency is a source of strength and that it produces a very agreeable and identifiable voice for his poetry, as well as drawing on the expressive richness of English in the process.  Here is one of my favorites from near the top of the list:

Keep straight down this block,
Then turn right where you will find
A peach tree blooming.

Finally, I found it very interesting that Wright's daughter mentions, I think in her introduction to the haiku book, that Wright early in his European exile was interested in photography and that he processed his own film and made his own prints.  I don't know if any of that photographic work survived, or if Wright ever talked about any connections between his photographs and his poetry.

***************

Chaco, 2005 (Haiku in the Canyon)

Remembering and Forgetting

John Collier Jr.

I went to a lecture recently which was sponsored by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.  The announcements had indicated the presentation would be about the museums photo archives.  As it turned out, the presenter used some photos from the archives, but mostly as illustrations for discussing theories of photography advanced by European philosophers.  At the end of the talk I asked about the museum's holdings related to the work of John Collier Jr.  The lecturer, currently a curator at the museum, replied that the Maxwell had a very large collection of works by Collier, but that no one had worked with the material.  She said she did not know if anyone in the Anthropology or Education departments at UNM was familar with Collier's work or making use of his techniques in regard to photo analysis and education.

The lecturer's answers to my questions left me discouraged about the state of knowledge about one of Twentieth Century America's photo greats.  John Collier Jr. made a lot of great pictures in the early 1940s while working under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration.  Collier continued making photographs in a similar vein for many more years all over the western hemisphere.  At the same time he also began to develop the concepts of Visual Anthropology and applied those concepts to analyzing teaching and learning processes.  Collier taught photography classes as a full professor for many years at San Francisco State.  His accomplishments as a photographer, researcher and teacher seem all the more extraordinary when you consider that he had very limited formal schooling, due in a large part to injuries sustained as a child which left him with physical impairments, dyslexia, hearing loss and impaired speech.

As it turns out, academic engagement with Collier's work was not as dismally scant as the lecturer had averred.  While browsing the web for information about Collier I stumbled on an interactive presentation about Collier's war-time work with the FSA.  The web pages were the product of a grant project conducted under the auspices of the Maxwell Museum and The College of Education's Technology & Education Center (TEC) at UNM in 2006.  The project's director was Catherine Baudoin, who at the time was the Maxwell's Photographic Collections Curator.  The on line presentation was organized as an interactive lesson plan enabling exercises in interpretation of war-time photo uses by the U.S. government using posters, photo archives and video resources.  To support the lesson plan activities, Baudoin uploaded about 400 of Collier's FSA images to the Flickr photo sharing site where they are still available for viewing.

Unfortunately, Baudoin's web pages had become detached from the Maxwell web site over the years; there is no link there now to the Collier work; the Photo Curator position seems to have evaporated, and Baudoin's name is nowhere to be found.  My guess would be that the skimpy and rather disorganized Maxwell web site is symptomatic of budgetary deficiencies which have focused the institution's efforts more on conservation of holdings rather than on sustaining a coherent educational mission incorporating up-to-date technological communications resources.

Luckily, modern search engine technology compensates for a lot of academic entropy.  Here are some useful  links to information I have come across on the web and elsewhere:

Far from Main Street:Three Photographers in Depression-Era New Mexico (link to Amazon)
A very fine collection of photos along with essays about the FSA/OWI work of  Russell Lee, John Collier Jr. and Jack Delano.  The cover photo is by Collier.  "All photographs are selected from the Pinewood Collection of New Mexico FSA Photographs, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico ... Prints were made from original negatives generously loaned by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division."



Oral History Interview with John Collier, 1965 January 18 Conducted by Richard K. Doud
Amazing insights into the personalities and operations of the FSA/OWI under Stryker.  The first part of the interview is accessible as an on line audio clip, and it gives a good idea of the expressive challenge which Collier over-came and even turned to an advantage during his long career as a photographer, researcher and educator.

John Collier, Jr.: Anthropology, Education and the Quest for Diversity
by Ray Barnhardt, Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
An authoritative, first-person appreciation of Collier's work with Eskimo and Navajo students and teachers as well as with a diverse urban school system in San Francisco.

Photographing Navajos: John Collier Jr. on the Reservation, 1948-1953
by C. Stewart Doty, Dale Sperry Mudge, and Herbert John Benally Photographs by John Collier Jr.
(link to Amazon)

The authors tracked down photo archives of Collier's Navajo work in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia and then interviewed family members of the people depicted by Collier in the Four Corners area.  The photos in the book illustrate the techniques developed by Collier to elicit social and cultural information by showing photographs to informants depicting their own social and physical environments.  The text and illustrations provide a nice followup to the study of the Navajo conducted by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton in the 1930s and 1940s.  Right after the publication of Photographing Navajos the Collier family made the decision to donate their collection of Collier's work to the Maxwell Museum.  The book's introduction notes that "The collection includes fifty years of photographs, film and video, field notes, daybooks, and correspondence."

* * *

John Collier Jr., Bureau with Portraits and Mementos
(and self portrait), Picuris Pueblo, NM, ca. 1945

Photography as speech

New Mexico has taken a leading position in the advancement of the rights of gay couples to marry.  Recently, the state's Supreme Court also ruled that an Albuquerque photo studio, Elane Photography, could not refuse services to a gay couple wanting pictures of their wedding.  Elane Photography's owners had contended that they had a right to refuse services based on their religious beliefs regarding homosexual behavior.  The NM Supreme Court decision affirmed the principle that goods and services cannot be denied based on such discrimination.

A couple lawyers weighed in on the case recently in a letter reproduced in the Wall Street Journal.  Eugene Volokh and Ilya Shapiro asserted that the New Mexico ruling impinges on the company owner's right to freedom of expression or choice not to express some idea as represented by their photographic products.  The U.S. Supreme Court will soon make a decision whether or not to take up the case, and Volokh and Shapiro's point of view would no doubt play a role the proposed proceedings.

The problem I see with the position advanced by Volokh and Shapiro is that it equates the work of a commercial studio portraitist with that of a photojournalist, based primarily it seems on the use of similar image making technology.  That seems to me a pretty tenuous connection.  A photojournalist is clearly using the technology to express ideas in a manner that is constitutionally protected.  A commercial photo studio is doing no such thing; they are not expressing ideas about truth and justice, but rather producing a product designed to make their clients look as good as possible according to conventional social norms.  That is essentially the same objective sought by businesses selling toothpaste and beauty products.

There is a long history in the U.S. of efforts by the religious right to buttress discriminatory practices with appeals to ideas of religious freedom.  Racial segregationists, for instance, asserted it was God's will that the races should live separately, and for a time they were able to get tax exemptions for private segregated schools.  Richard Nixon, a Republican, did away with that exemption.  His party has since shifted further rightward, supporting an endless series of challenges chipping away at the idea of equal rights under law.  There is a good over-view of this history in a recent interview with Columbia Law School professor, Katherine Franke, at the Salon.com site.

Update:
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court declined Monday to decide if a New Mexico wedding photographer was within her rights when she refused to work at a same-sex ceremony.

The denial leaves standing a decision by the state's highest court that went against the photo studio...

   - Richard Wolf, USA TODAY 9:52 a.m. EDT April 7, 2014

recycling through repurposing

Richard is the expert.

35mm

The first 35mm film was conceived of as a motion picture format in the labs of Thomas Edison. The format was put to use in a large number of miniature still cameras in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, including the Leica. The pre-loaded 35mm cassette was the invention of Dr. Ernest Nagel of Stuttgart who devised it for his Retina line of compact folding cameras. Kodak acquired the Nagel factory in 1931 and began marketing the Retina cameras and the film, which was designated as Kodak 135, in 1934.

The interactive 3D model is at the Warehouse.