I was supposed to be sharing more of Portugal today — but as I am in France this weekend, it seemed to be more appropriate to share five from France.
Firstly, France is Freezing! We woke up to snow on Saturday morning — first time I have seen it snowing in over four years.
Many years ago, people scribbled on cave walls — the bison they hunted, and the experiences they shared. Years later the scribblings were made on papyrus, and eventually printed with a printing press, which eventually evolved to include color photographs. What all of these things had in common was that in order for anyone to take part in these shared experiences, they had to go to where the written experiences were or to get a copy of the experience somehow — subscription or otherwise.
The other day, I was riding the PATH Train from New Jersey to Manhattan and the Conductor — he’s the guy who manages opening and closing the doors and making announcements while the Engineers “drives” the train — came up to an Asian couple and demanded the woman delete the photograph of the train she took right before boarding. The woman was confused and embarrassed, but she followed the order and the Conductor watched her remove the photograph from her cellphone. If she’d been using a traditional film camera, would the Conductor have confiscated her entire film roll? The woman’s boyfriend took a more aggressive perch, and said, “There are no signs prohibiting taking pictures.”
The Conductor brusquely retorted, “There are signs everywhere. Look for them.” Then the Conductor left the car. A few minutes passed and the Conductor came running back into our car to retrieve the train keys he’d left dangling in the control panel switchbox so he could bawl out the woman. I thought to myself, “Which is a greater threat to the people riding a PATH train? A tourist taking a photograph, or a Conductor who leaves his keys behind for the taking?”
Irina Werning is a SuperGenius photographer who has found her niche. She looks for old photographs and then updates the images years later by re-staging them with the same people in the images while simultaneously preserving the tone and substance of the original shot.
Images speak a thousand lessons. Certain images have such an innate power that they invoke an entire, dramatic, telling without you needing to know anything about the history of the characters or the provenance of the propagating emotion. Meet twins Willy and Lily. Lily is upside-down. We were sent their photograph over the weekend. They are the newest one-year-old members of our extended family in the Midwest. Willy and Lily are not Siamese Twins. Or are they? I suppose it depends on what you know and who you choose to believe.
Continue reading → The Siamese Twins that Weren’t. Or Were They?
What is it about human beings that cause us to simultaneously seek ways to look up to people while at the same time finding ways to bring those people back down to our own level if we perceive them as getting too high?
Continue reading → The Unimportance of Celebrity Makeup Status
In London, two Austrians were detained because they were taking digital images of buses. The police invoked “fighting terrorism” as the reason they required the deletion of the images from the tourists’ camera.
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