Yesterday’s talk about exploitation of native peoples in photography, especially the Chinese raft poler, got me thinking about how this can be done right.  Right here means with a true touch of sensitivity towards the intrinsic nobility of the subject.  So immediately comes to mind, one of my favorite photographers, Linda Butler.

In 2005 I went to see an exhibit of Ms. Butler’s work at the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.  This focused on her work Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake.  The exhibit, and its companion book, documents village life in the Three Gorges region of China, before it was completely inundated to provide hydroelectric power for modern China.  As such it is a tale of two China’s: the old and timeless China and the new modern China.

So consider, and contrast to the picture discussed yesterday, Ms. Butler’s “River Fisherman, Shennong Stream, 2000,” which shows a proud fisherman, with his metculously folded net and the basket in which he stores fish,  at the end of a day’s work.  Then look at “Carpenter’s House, Beishi 2001,” showing a carpenter sitting in front of the house that he built by hand for himself.  He built all the furniture himself as well.  The same carpenter is shown two years later in front of the ruins of his house, cleared to make way for the dam.  There is a sign on the hill above the house, top right, that reads 175 m, which is the eventual water level of the man-made lake.  Six months after Linda Butler took this picture the land was under fifteen feet of water, and the indefatigable carpenter had moved a half mile away and was constructing a new home for his family.  Those two photographs taken together define the meaning of  human pride and perseverance.

I cannot talk about Linda Butler’s work without showing my personal favorite of her photographs.  This is “Pig on a Motorcycle, Niehe, 2001.”  A farmer is taking his pig to market and has stopped at a local restaurant.  The pig sleeps “happily” on the back of the motorcycle.  He is in a stupor because he has been fed fermented mash.

Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake is just part of Ms. Butler wonderful opus.  She is, perhaps, best known for her work “Inner Light, The Shaker Legacy.”  I highly recommend exploring her website and, in particular, her extraordinary photographs of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, “Meditations on an Altered World, 2005-6,” and “Death of a Farm, Georgetown, KY, 1986.”  These series are haunting in their lack of people, but just the same the human presence is so palpable.

I love portfolios like those of Linda Butler.  There is so much to be learned from them.  There is the technical, of course, but most significantly there is the lesson of how to tell an intensely compelling story through the power of the image,

Well, the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue is out and, stirred up by a posting by Dodai Stewart on Jezebel, there is new controversy flying about the web and news media concerning the fashion industry .  Well there’s a mighty surprise.  The goal of Sports Illustrated is to tillilate its clientele and to stir up controversy.  Controversy equals kaching, kaching.

Men being titillated by sexy women is nothing new, nor is the saprophytic exploitation of the models.  The question that Stewart raises is one of culture.  SI is taking you to the seven continents, profiling its models against what it sees as characteristic of the cultural location.  Stewart objects to the use of “natives” as “props.”  She tells us that “people are not props.”  To be accurate I looked up the meaning of “prop” on the Free Online Dictionary.  This is definition 2: “a theatrical property.”  The word property applied to people is problematic, but I would argue that props are inanimate and that while people cannot be props they can certainly be background.  It is done all of the time and quite innocuously.

Let’s take a look at some of the pictures that Ms. Stewart is objecting to.  First we have Emily Didonato in the Namibian desert with a spear carrying tribesman, whose rear end is even more exposed than Ms. Didonato’s.  The photograph  by Kayt Jones is truly wonderfully constructed in terms of composition.  The background is out of focus so as not to steal emphasis.  The balance between sand and sky is perfect.  The tribesman is just sufficiently out of focus that there’s no question about what is foreground and what is background.  The juxtaposition of the spears is beautifully done.  And, of course,  Ms. Didonato is is gorgeous and exotic herself.  I see all of that and then I get a kind of lump in my stomach that says to me: “Ooh, how embarrassing!”  What is the man thinking about this strange creature in his world.  He is scantily clad because he’s hot, she because someone’s selling sex (not really bathing suits).  And as Ms. Stewart points out, no matter how much he was paid, does he really understand that his near naked behind is now in glossy print worldwide?

Second let’s consider Derek Kettela’s photograph taken in Guilin, Guangxi Province, China of model Emily V reposing on a raft as she is poled about by a “native” with serious dental issues and complete with “coolie hat.”  Yikes!  I mean somebody please help me.  Why don’t we just bring back the “black-face minstrel shows?”  A white women relaxing as a “native” poles her along or across the river is such a throwback to an imperial age.  I know a lot of modern Chinese, who would go ballistic over this photograph.  It is not the image that they have of their country – even with all its problems.  Yet SI has chosen this image as representative of China.

The issue here is not the right of an industry to take the photographs that they want, exploit whom they want, and to make as much money as they want.  The issue here is the subliminal messages that come across, that the photographs convey.  I am not a supporter of the concept that one must always speak or photograph politically correctly.  To me the question of what you are thinking, what’s in your heart, is much more important than what comes out of your mouth.  However, when your pictures are going out to 3.5 million subscribers, 23 million readers (of whom over 18 million are men BTW) there is a very serious issue of social responsibility.

My colleague and I were oohing and ahing over the videos of a meteor crashing to Earth in the Chelyabinsk region of the Russian Urals last Friday.  We are told that this is a once in a century event; so certainly worthy of being the “iconic image of the week.”  People will likely still be watching it a hundred years from now..

It got me thinking of meteors and photographs of meteors and meteorites.  Of course, my first thought was a blog on “The first photograph of a meteor.”   I was able to learn that the first meteor photograph was taken on a glass plate negative by Ladislaus Weinek director of the Klementinum observatory in Prague on Nov. 27, 1885.  However, I was unable to find a copy of this image on the web.

Figure 1 – Tunkuska tree fall, 1908, from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

So I combed the cobwebs of my memory for thoughts and visions of meteors.  The first is obvious.  On June 30, 1908 near the  Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia there was a great meteor fall and blast generally referred to as the “Tunguska event.”  It is now believed that the meteoroid actually exploded in the air rather than striking the ground.  It probably had the force of a ten to fifteen megatons of TNT and  knocked down an estimated 80 million trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).  That is a circular diameter of 52km.  While there were no “robotic eyes” or surveillance cameras to photograph the event, there are many amazing post blast photographs of the tree fall made by subsequent expeditions.

Figure 2 – Robert Peary and tthe Ahnighito Meteorite, 1897, from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

My strongest memory association with meteorites is as a child being taken by my father to see the great meteorite collection at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.  In 1818, British arctic explorer Sir John Ross was astonished to find that a tribe of Eskimos along Greenland’s western coast possessed spear heads of iron.  The Eskimos smartly refused to reveal the source saying only that they came from a mountain of iron, in their language saviksoah.  A number of subsequent explorers tried, but failed to find the saviksoah.

By the the turn of the twentieth century Eskimos were actively trading for iron and no longer had the same need for their magic source.  An Eskimo named Tallakoteah told explorer Robert Peary that there were three irons: “the woman,” “the dog,” and “the tent. The legend was that there once had been a sewing woman and her dog, who lived together in a tent in the sky.  An evil spirit hurled them to the Earth and they landed as great lumps of iron.  Tallakoteah led Peary to these stones and, true to imperialist form, he decided to cart them away to New York. This was a Herculean task which ultimately took him several attempts and years.  As a child I remember looking with amazement at the tent, or Ahnighito, (also referred to as the Cape York meteorite) where Peary brought it for permanent exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

There are many classic images of Peary collecting this colossal stone in Greenland, transporting it to New York, and then carting it up from the peer to the American Museum.  Figure 2 is a example of these images.  For a complete telling of the saga of meteorite collection and Peary’s efforts see Douglas Preston’s book, “Dinosaurs in the Attic.”