World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2021Operation Edelweiss opens with a blast, and as the Wehrmacht closes in on Stalingrad, Stalin issues that famous order. There aren’t just big actions in the East, the Japanese have landed in New Guinea, the Allies try one more offensive at El Alamein, and the Americans have locked in on Guadalcanal.
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August 1, 2021
Not a Step Back! – Wehrmacht Closes in on Stalingrad – WW2 – 153 – July 31, 1942
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Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell
DailyHitchens
Published 22 Jan 2010Aug 7, 2009. Christopher Hitchens talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talks about Orwell’s opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens makes the case for why Orwell matters. For more videos, updates and info on Christopher Hitchens, please visit http://www.dailyhitchens.com
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Gresham’s Law, as applied to photography
In economics, Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives out good”, that may need to be reformulated as it applies to modern standards of photography in a formulation something like: “bad photos drive out good photos“:
“Art is like a joke, either you get it or you don’t.” So it was explained to me in the late 1970s by photographer Randy Eriksen, whose cheeky observation about the importance of context to one’s appreciation of either comedy or art could have been a parenthetical second subtitle for author and educator Kim Beil’s Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography (Stanford University Press, 2020).
Beil’s episodic and highly readable book identifies 50 photographic trends — illustrated by hundreds of vintage and contemporary photographs — that have guided the aesthetics of photography since 1851, when a group of American daguerreotypes made a splash at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Back in 1851, context mostly equaled 1851, as the latest photo technology of the day played a major role in how Victorians decided that one picture was good and another was not.
[…]
Beil’s own context began in Albany, New York, where she grew up. “My mom was into photography,” Beil tells me over the phone. “She was the one who took the pictures in my family. When my parents got me my first camera, a Nikon FE, they made me attend a class offered by the camera store. I remember it was held in this dark ballroom at an Albany hotel. It was me and a bunch of middle-aged men. That’s where I learned about 35mm cameras, f-stops, and shutter speeds.”
“How To Make Good Pictures” (Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Co., 1943).
Source: Collection of the Prelinger Library, via Collectors Weekly.Beil also learned from various “How to Make Good Pictures” manuals published by Kodak, which also hailed from upstate New York. “I’m pretty sure I internalized the advice I read in ‘How to Make Good Pictures’,” Beil says of her early aesthetic indoctrination, “things like avoiding centering your subject in the frame, the rule of thirds, shooting during ‘golden hour’, all that conventional wisdom.”
[…]
“Intention is central to the way I think about art, and maybe even how we define it,” Beil agrees. “Take lens flare: I think the power of lens flare comes from its initial unintentional use by people who were just taking casual pictures without any premeditation, without much intention.” In these sorts of photographs, Beil says, lens flare was an amateur mistake that conferred “a kind of authenticity to an image.” That’s why advertisers find lens flare so appealing. “Because we still associate it with authenticity,” Beil says, “it makes an advertising photo seem more real, maybe even spontaneous.”
Today, lens flare is so widely used, so intentional, that billions of smartphone cameras offer multiple variations of this former failing in the form of filters, which can be activated with a click or a swipe. “Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents,” Beil says of photography in the 2020s, “so photographers look to things that happened before to reinsert some kind of authenticity into their pictures.” Thanks to technology, photographers can now pretend to take pictures as if they lacked the tools to make their pictures, well, good.
The problem, of course, is that technology is intrusive, inserting itself into aesthetics and even cultural paradigms without being invited to do so. “We have a situation today,” Beil says, “in which our smartphone cameras are producing pictures according to the criteria of software designers, who have made a lot of egregious assumptions about the tonality of skin color.” According the Beil, because the sample sets used by software designers have historically included more pictures of light skin tones than dark skin tones, the colors captured by our smartphone cameras do a better job of reproducing the lighter skin tones. “People with darker skin aren’t represented in the way that they want to be,” she says, “or even in the way that’s accurate. Google has promised that the Pixel 6 camera coming out in October 2021 is going to deal with that problem,” she adds, but Beil doesn’t sound like she’s expecting much more than an incremental improvement.
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Crown Colony class – Guide 144
Drachinifel
Published 28 Sep 2019The Crown Colony class cruisers of the Royal Navy, and many others, are today’s subject.
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QotD: Rudolf Gaida’s convoluted military career
Rudolf Gaida, 1882-1948. Born in Montenegro (then a part of Austria-Hungary). Trained as a pharmacist in Bohemia. Conscripted into the army medical corps, July 1914. Deserted to a Montenegrin regiment, pretending to be an officer, 1915. Captured by the Russians, 1917. In May 1918, with the rank of Captain, he served in the Czechoslovak Corps, and favoured fighting the Bolsheviks. Colonel commanding the Czech forces in Central Siberia, July-October 1918. Supported Admiral Kolchak’s seizure of power at Omsk, November 1918. Promoted Major-General by Kolchak, November 1918. Commanded Kolchak’s Northern Army, June-July 1919, with the rank of Lieutenant-General. Dismissed by Kolchak, July 1919. Attempted unsuccessfully to seize power at Vladivostok, November 1919. Returned to Czechoslovakia, 1920. Chief of the Czech General Staff, 1926. Cashiered for trying to take part in a fascist putsch. Imprisoned for “Banditry”, 1931. Headed the Czech Fascist organization, 1939-45. Arrested as a collaborator, 1945, and subsequently shot.
Footnote in Martin Gilbert’s World in Torment: Winston S. Churchill 1917-1922, 1975.
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