Monday, February 25, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Instantaneous
My cousin called to say our great-aunts Ursula and Francis had died and would I like a digital copy of the many photos and hours of 8mm film footage they'd left behind? I hadn't heard from this particular cousin in more than a decade and he'd tracked us down through Taylor's twitter account and his gesture was kind given its relative difficulty and the many years that had passed acrimoniously between his mother and mine.
I put the CD on my desk and it's been sitting there for days, but my boss's wife had a baby today and with all the mazel tov'ing going back and forth (also, Mazel!), I had a few minutes to finally take a look. From my office window on the 42nd floor, I can see the steam rising from the roofs of skyscrapers and some days it seems unreal, or, more accurately, uncanny- it's an image I've seen in photos and movies and commercials so often that to see it in real life creates a cognitive dissonance. So watching these little movies from my rooftop perch was neat and strange and sad.
I think my favorite one is this first communion footage .
All the little boys and girls and then look out for the nuns!
Because I was born in the era of video tape, all the jumps and scratches seem to me an affect- like something from a music video. I'm sure that to my sister these seem like instagram photos come to life.
Coincidentally, I'm reading The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball. Props to the publisher for attaching the super soapy subtitle "A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures" and designing the cover to look pretty much exactly like Devil in the White City to ensure that I would definitely be buying this. Anyway, my point here is that the book tells the story of Eadweard Muybridge and "instantaneous photography" - things like freezing the motion of a waterfall, or the movement of a galloping horse.
Ball argues that Muybridge's photos ushered in the era of the moving picture (there is also the story of his friendship with a railroad tycoon, the murder of his wife's lover, and the dangerous infancy of California - pretty good stuff). So while the idea of watching images of a horse's gallop projected from a gas powered zoetrope seems delightfully quaint to our modern sensibilities, it's no different from our fascination with film and image in all its many contemporary mediums.
It's a weird juxtaposition to be reading this book and watching these home videos and feeling nostalgic for a time, place, and format that I never experienced. But I do like those little girls in their frilly white dresses marching down the church steps. And I'm grateful that Ursula and Francis held onto these images for so long.
I put the CD on my desk and it's been sitting there for days, but my boss's wife had a baby today and with all the mazel tov'ing going back and forth (also, Mazel!), I had a few minutes to finally take a look. From my office window on the 42nd floor, I can see the steam rising from the roofs of skyscrapers and some days it seems unreal, or, more accurately, uncanny- it's an image I've seen in photos and movies and commercials so often that to see it in real life creates a cognitive dissonance. So watching these little movies from my rooftop perch was neat and strange and sad.
I think my favorite one is this first communion footage .
All the little boys and girls and then look out for the nuns!
Because I was born in the era of video tape, all the jumps and scratches seem to me an affect- like something from a music video. I'm sure that to my sister these seem like instagram photos come to life.
Coincidentally, I'm reading The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball. Props to the publisher for attaching the super soapy subtitle "A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures" and designing the cover to look pretty much exactly like Devil in the White City to ensure that I would definitely be buying this. Anyway, my point here is that the book tells the story of Eadweard Muybridge and "instantaneous photography" - things like freezing the motion of a waterfall, or the movement of a galloping horse.
Ball argues that Muybridge's photos ushered in the era of the moving picture (there is also the story of his friendship with a railroad tycoon, the murder of his wife's lover, and the dangerous infancy of California - pretty good stuff). So while the idea of watching images of a horse's gallop projected from a gas powered zoetrope seems delightfully quaint to our modern sensibilities, it's no different from our fascination with film and image in all its many contemporary mediums.
It's a weird juxtaposition to be reading this book and watching these home videos and feeling nostalgic for a time, place, and format that I never experienced. But I do like those little girls in their frilly white dresses marching down the church steps. And I'm grateful that Ursula and Francis held onto these images for so long.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Last night I had a dream that my friend Alexandra gave birth to a single gray kitten (everyone in the delivery room was really surprised she had only one and not a litter). Then I brought the kitten home and it kept getting lost in the folds of the duvet and I was so worried it was going to be squished. I also had to feed it "alternative" formula which I realize now is a mental callback to Sybil's baby on Downton Abbey being wet-nursed. R.I.P. Sybil.
"With his series ‘Skeletons in the Closet’, photographer Klaus Pichler takes a look behind the scenes of the Museum of Natural History Vienna. Pichler went to explore the vast area of 45.000 square metres with his camera, finding the exhibits in unusual scenes in the basement of the Museum. A shark crosses our way, seemingly lost in the corridors, a bear is waiting in the elevator and a pterosaur is spreading his wings under some silver pipes. ‘Skeletons in the Closet’ is exhibited until the 3rd of February in the Museum of Natural History."
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