The good news is that Julian Assange is not to be extradited to the USA and seems likely to be freed soon. The bad news is that magistrate Baraitser appears to have conceded some highly dangerous principles in favour of the US:
'The judgement is in fact very concerning, in that it accepted all of the prosecution’s case on the right of the US Government to prosecute publishers worldwide of US official secrets under the Espionage Act. The judge also stated specifically that the UK Extradition Act of 2003 deliberately permits extradition for political offences.'
'While we are extremely disappointed in the court's ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,' the [US] justice department said.
*as per the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement reached on 24 December 2020: 'surrender and replacement arrangements for the European Arrest Warrant'
Those of us of a certain age can recall the early films at our weekly outings to Saturday morning pictures like Flash Gordon and aliens from outer space that depicted those fledgling robots and telekinetic beings with devices that could transport one about the planets, all jaw-dropping for us as children and a portent for things to come.
Ever since those days we have been constantly told that within 5/10/20 years robots would be doing mundane tasks around the house and a life of decadence awaited us as we hailed our robot to bring us more drinks.
As with most predictions it hasn’t happened, certainly not in the way foretold. Robotics are well established in industry, but outside of assembly lines and laboratories they are still a rare commodity.
Is that about to change? In many ways it has already started; the personal robot may still be a long way off but methods to ease the drudgery of life are becoming ever more self evident.
Little by little ever more items are chipped and programmed to automatically do the job for us, from the programming on the now humble washing machine to the touch screen in cars. They are signs of the way things are going; whether much of it is desirable or necessary is another matter.
The automobile has seen a lot of electronic input in recent years. The coming of the EV will see almost total digitalisation of controls and functions, eventually culminating in driverless cars. The problems in achieving the latter are enormous and solutions nowhere near ready, but they are coming down the line in one form.
Yet what of those functions now included in ever growing numbers in such things as automobiles? So much today that is offered electronically is geared towards the young but do even they use all of it? The functions on a modern car's touch screen (apart from being a very unsafe way of communicating in a moving car, another subject) seem to be there because of a race among manufacturers to provide the biggest range of items simply because they can. A friend's recently purchased Mercedes bore that fact out and even he says that he is almost frightened to touch much of it as he has no idea what is there; the handbook is a miniature Encyclopedia Britannica; it is absurd how much is electronically controlled as so little is ever used.
I know only too well in my comparatively simple car that I only use in the range of ten per cent of that in front of me outside of the mandatory speedometer, fuel gauge etc. The rest is not only redundant, I can only guess what lurks beneath the touch screen as I have no known use for it all.
The young today are glued to their mobiles. A mobile phone has become for them a replacement for so much that it is doubtful they have the knowledge to communicate without one, and I read (a sad indictment of our times) that the NHS, 'she who must be revered', is setting up clinics for children who are addicted to the things and show violent tendencies if any one tries to cut their user time down - indeed a child who plays video games for 14 hours a day threatened his mother when she tried to take the phone/tablet away, though one has to ask how does a school kid get to spend that time playing games that long and get away with it.
VW have just announced they are trialling robotic EV chargers, thereby circumventing the need for chargers to be installed at great cost everywhere. They even talk of them being able to connect with the car while the owner is away - sounds good, but we have seen what happens to electric scooters and the like when not supervised; yobs attacking electric chargers could give a whole new meaning to shock tactics!
What the video shows is that the good idea, on paper, has some downsides: you have to park the things somewhere and what if a car hits one or they ignore pedestrians in the street etc.; and do we really want these mobile bins? Remember there are two of them to set out and collect, so rather large objects, hurtling about everywhere on the pavements and crossing roads... nah, once again I don’t think this has been thought through; in an enclosed garage maybe, on the streets, not so much.
The item that prompted this short piece was in the Times and told the story of how LG the South Korean electronics giant want to take white goods a stage further in the innovation stakes.
They are introducing a refrigerator that that opens by voice command. The reasoning is a bit spurious, to put it mildly: “No longer will shoppers have to struggle to open the fridge door with arms full of groceries.” Two things there: I have never known anyone with 'arms full of groceries' even try to open a fridge door; and if the door opened on voice command you would still be standing there with arms full of shopping. There is no way you could put the bloody shopping in the fridge unless you do the sensible thing and put the shopping down.
LG claim the feature will make time spent in the kitchen “more productive and convenient”; hmmm.
Naturally it has a Coronavirus slant and benefit as you would touch surfaces less! The phrase 'grasping at straws' comes to mind.
The Japanese just can’t leave anything as it was. With this in the house I imagine many people would never leave the bathroom.
You know and I know that will not stop this type of feature/gimmick gaining traction. I suppose one plus would be if the feature failed to work you could vent your spleen at the fridge door rather than the wife.
It goes without saying that the feature can be linked to that ludicrous Amazon ‘voice assistant’ Alexa so as well having the time told you, the weather report, and who's top of the pops, it will also be able to tell you what is in the fridge without opening the door. This, LG say, 'will save significant amounts of energy'; how is not laid out. As in the normal world you only open the fridge to take things out or put things in, any saving is in the minds of the inventors of this technology.
There are several other plusses added, such as an app for the phone that can receive messages from your fridge when you are shopping suggesting recipes using what is still in the fridge - oh, please! And it can tell you if you left the fridge door open; in that case, surely this oh-so-clever feature would be able to close the same door as it can open... oh no, you are too far away to shout at it.
Fear not, more is to come. Remember the days when you had built-in Hoover pipes in every room so you did not have to carry the machine round, just plug in hose and cleaning head? This was a feature that was going to revolutionise home cleaning and it died a death in the time it took to read the advert. That is just a foretaste of the delights lined up for us: the 'internet of things' is coming to a home near you and soon we are told, household objects (and the body of the house?) will take actions on behalf of the owner without prompts.
This will mean the fridge will order more milk while sensors in the wall will call a plumber if they detect a leak. What could possibly go wrong! With cars the highest incidence of failure today is in the electrical systems; transfer that to a house and the potential for trouble is endless.
Not that all is useless overkill. The phone app that means you can turn on/off your heating or cooker on the way home can make sense if you live alone and work irregular hours, but so much else with time becomes more bother than it’s worth, the internet itself has in some ways become self-defeating.
The convenience of shopping, banking etc. from home is nullified by necessary precautions. In the case of internet banking, there are additional measures because those institutions can’t guarantee safety, so they are putting the onus back on the customer to provide extra levels of security. Instead of clicking on with a password to your banking account you now have also answer a question, add the last four numbers in reply to another question and then add a code number you have asked for on your phone using your ‘unique’ ID. Simples! It would be easier to walk into your bank branch - if they still existed .
These extra levels of security apply now to everything you use on the internet. All passwords are to be remembered and not written down - hundreds of them! Even using a password manager is not the full answer as the very good free ones are prone to lose all your details during a Windows update or crash, as I and others have discovered; that’s when those bits of paper with the details written down that you should not have lying about come into their own as the only way back into the same sites. 'One step forward, two back' comes to mind.
We have become obsessed with digital gadgets, the fascination stemming from items like the 'speak your weight' weighing machine of years gone by and extending to the sat nav and all the other aids to modern living. Some have a place, some think they do; others are, well, shall we say misused? There is the case of the fitness fanatic who as so many do went on a run with his heart monitor on his wrist; he stopped to speak to another runner and they exchanged peak heart rate numbers, and just after he gave his he dropped dead of a heart attack. At least he found his limit.
No, we cannot stop the advance of robotics in their various forms. Much will become the new normal as has been said a lot lately and many features/items will end up in cupboards along with the endless kitchen items beloved by Lakeland customers which are for display only or used once and discarded. Some will survive; I won't.
Why do we do it? Simple really, we enjoy it. We enjoy losing ourselves in conviviality especially after this bad, mad year. For centuries, possibly millenia, it has been an important safety valve for society and a perfect example of this is the medieval Feast of the Fools -
'The Feast of Fools was a festival celebrated annually on January 1st throughout Europe and particularly France. It was a cherished day, for it was the one day where Christian morals were abandoned and replaced with ridiculous rites. Serious Christians were allowed to create parodies of church rituals.
'During the festival, performers wore animal masks and women's clothing, sang obscene and bawdy hymnal songs, drank excessively, hurled manure at bystanders, ran and leaped through the church, rolling dice at the alter, howling through the streets and other scurrilous acts that parodied the liturgy of the church. In addition, people would drive about on carts through the streets to rouse laughter from their fellows through performances that involved indecent gestures and language.'
I tried today to share an interesting item with my brother, via a Facebook post; but a robot censor intervened and their complaint system has somehow failed.
Here is what I tried to say the second time, through the electronic muzzle strapped to my face by FB; this too was blocked:
__________________________________
I was going to preface this with an ironic comment* about recent allegations re these two countries but the moronic and totalitarian system of censorship at FB automatically interfered, saying 'Your post couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.'
When I explained, saying 'This is an historical essay showing how Russia prevented the breakup of the USA despite the enmity towards the latter of France and Great Britain. May I say I deeply deplore your system of automatic censorship,' it replied 'Your request couldn't be processed. There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.'
*using the phrase 'Russia collusion'; but what's above was also blocked, so it's the link itself. Presumably FB is actually blocking certain websites or subjects.
It's time high-handed monopolists like Zuckerberg were called to account. They have clearly become publishers rather than mere platforms.
(a) Grant Watson's mother sent him to a newly-established experimental school, Bedales. The headteacher seems to have hung back from imposing the discipline common in standard public schools but unfortunately this merely allowed a culture of bullying to develop among the boys. Attempting to rectify the situation indirectly, the head began to admit girls, but the conventional sexual restraints of the age dominated; the author (who later went through Freudian analysis) thought, harmfully:
'The headmaster, that highly cultured, idealistic and all too pure repressor of desires, was, of course, the father-substitute. He was the 'Old Man', and he, in the unconscious, possessed the girls who were forbidden to us. We, his sons, lived under the almighty power of Taboo. But we were allowed less outlet than were those suppositional sons of the First-father. His sons were driven out into the wilderness to practise homosexuality. But no such relief for us! Smut of any kind, even a hint of it, was the worst of sins, and our naturally developing sexual urges must find other expression: in cruelty, in an inflated idealism, in fantasies of superiority, and every kind of priggishness and prudishness, and in fact in any kind of high-tension absurdities...'(my emphasis)
Does this go some way to explain the rigidity and cruelty of seventeenth century English Puritans, and the modern Islamist Puritans? Perhaps; though human aggression and cruelty seem common anyway. Still, far less dangerous to see ourselves as sinners than as the Elect.
(b) In 1900, he was sent to Heidelberg for the summer/autumn, to learn science because it was not taught well in his English school (perhaps, in many English schools). A German he met on the sea-voyage
'talked with great enthusiasm about the glories of Germany and the inferiority of England. Germany was going to rule the world. He was indeed a prophet of the Herrenvolk...'
In southern Germany he found the people punctiliously polite, friendly and hospitable, yet one day:
'I was in a restaurant with Fräulein Müller and Herr Burn [a Scottish student at Heidelberg University]. A group of German officers came in; there was something not to their liking; discussion and raised voices. A group of peoplewho were sitting at a table nearby got up abruptly and retired. What was the fuss about? I enquired. The officers had objected to the presence of some Jews. That the Jews had had to go set me wondering. I had not been Jew-conscious before, except in so far that I knew that Jews usually got bullied at school.'(my emphasis)
This was long before the little Austrian corporal made himself felt. I haven't read much about anti-Semitism in both countries during the nineteenth century, but clearly there was a deep and very nasty vein of it.
At the end of what can only be described as a horrible year on so many fronts, with pestilence and politicians vying for the top spot on most people's hate list there has been little to raise a smile and less to raise a glass to.
Of all those stories that have been swamped by the endless bad news and prediction one stood out for me; I suppose in a year when man buggered up almost everything he got involved with an animal story was the perfect antidote.
These elephants were originally said to have raided a corn wine store in southern China and got drunk. The story went viral and the picture above of them sleeping it off was shown world wide. Subsequent information claimed they were not drunk but just resting; by then no one cared, it was just such a good story true or otherwise, after all we have lived through a year of disinformation and all of it was doom and despair, this story was not.
So sleeping it off or just resting, either way the elephants showed the best way to beat the blues: find a nice spot lay down and forget about it all.
London, c. 1890: having lost her two-year-old second son, the wife of a successful barrister has been sent on a long sea-voyage with her toddler first son to Australia to recuperate. While there she learns of the death of her husband from typhoid fever, leaving her with no savings and only a modest life insurance payout. She returns to England and the house lease and furniture have to be sold. What to do next?
Almost before my mother had become aware that she might be regarded as a poor, and consequently unwelcome relative, she had called on one of her elder brothers for advice and help. She was told that he was out; her sister-in-law did not ask her to come in, but sent her a verbal message to the door reminding her that her brother was a busy man. This was the only snub that my mother laid herself open to. From that time, she fought her battles alone.
From the autobiography of E. L. Grant Watson, 'But To What Purpose'
It is very easy to tip over from photojournalists to photographers, and I have tried not to do that. Especially where the press is concerned, photographers can often be photojournalists by accident but not by a general desire to follow a particular subject and record it.
The press photographer has been hit a lot harder than the photojournalist in this digital age. 'Citizen journalists' as the press now likes to call them (horrible term, conjures up images of Robespierre), who record on their mobile phones do have a role to play as mentioned earlier - the immediacy of someone on the spot is impossible to replicate; but two problems emerge: one is quality, a snatched shot which the majority are, with a poor quality mobile phone, may well have the immediacy but will lack all that a professional photographer can extract from the same scene; also many of these citizen journalists are attached to and travel with causes which means the view of whatever is recorded will be biased towards that cause.
The endless video recordings taken of protests etc, from the top of buildings and out of windows are not exactly front line journalism. Even if it is all that is available, we are losing something with this rush to save money and have the public supply all the images.
Back to photojournalists: some specialise in a subject all their working life, they become immersed in it as a daily task and build up significant and important portfolios over time. One such was Walker Evans who was not alone covering the great Depression in the USA but was probably the most prominent.
He is best known for his work with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the great Depression and much of his work is in museums' permanent collections as well as being in retrospectives.
This image of Allie May Burroughs taken in 1936 became a symbol of the depression and was widely distributed.
Several other also became symbols of this period including this family group:
Bud Fields and his family Hale County, Alabama ‘36-37.
When people today talk today about deprivation and ‘food poverty’ they should be made to take a good look at this image.
Evans spent some time in Havana before the depression and during this time met Ernest Hemingway. He gave Hemingway some 40 prints to smuggle out because he thought that the Customs would not allow what could be construed to be ‘negative’ images out of the country, but he had no difficulty taking his own prints out of the country. The prints he gave to Hemingway were found in Havana in 2002 and later exhibited; Hemingway had never taken them with him when he left.
From what is here you could be forgiven for thinking that Evans was very much a ‘human interest’ photographer, but that is not totally accurate. He took some stunning shots of buildings in the deep South and more than one series of retail shop fronts, cafes and the like, plus a fascinating series using a concealed camera on the NY subway, but the Depression and those faces are his abiding legacy. This last one is not from the Depression but was taken in New York's 42nd Street in 1929.
Larry Burrows was an English photojournalist who started in the art department of the Daily Express in 1942. After learning photography there, they were probably the premier newspaper for their photographic output at the time, he moved to an agency, Keystone, and Life magazine.
His break came with Associated Press when he flew in a De Havilland Rapide at an illegal low level, to witness the destruction of the Heligoland U-boat pens in ‘47. It earned him a spread in Life magazine and launched his career.
After spells including covering Suez he then covered the war in Vietnam from ‘62 until his death in a helicopter there in ‘71 when he along with other photojournalists were shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Burrows was known as 'the equipment man' as he travelled with a copious amount of camera gear.
Burrows could never be accused of not getting up close and personal to the horrors of war at great personal risk, a risk that finally took his life.
The work of Diane Arbus could easily be and often was categorised as the photographing of the freaks, the sub-normal of this world. On the face of it that is exactly what she did, but many of those in the marginalised groups she photographed were selected by her for different reasons.
She was the daughter of immigrant Russian Jews who owned a Fifth Avenue department store so she never went without as a child but that did not stop her recording those less fortunate during her photographic years. The Wiki entry for Arbus is long and interesting and needs reading to appreciate what was behind her photographs, some of which even today gave one an uneasy feeling when viewing, but that was the point of them. Her career started in fashion photography and celebrity portraits before her first foray into a different kind of street photography.
Suffering from depression and hepatitis she had huge mood swings and eventually took her own life at the age of 48; she left a note in her diary: ‘Last Supper.’
Woman in a mask
Another English photojournalist that covered the Vietnam war, as so many did, also had a portfolio of work from the streets and a large number of stars of the day and other illuminators. I shall stick with the others here as there is only so much of war chronicles we can take in one sitting, however good, .
Terry Fincher won an unbeaten number of Press Photographer of the Year awards. His career took off after accompanying British forces during the Suez crisis and later when with the Daily Express he did five tours of Vietnam and after that several Middle East and African trouble spots.
This image below of John Surtees on the MV Augusta stands out as a motor racing photo, as the face of concentration of Surtees is so well etched. Of course this was before full face helmets hid the face entirely, but none the less it is an outstanding image by someone not known for his capturing of sports.
The one below of James Stewart has a personal angle: we lived a mile from this airfield and I took gliding lessons there, something I always wanted to do but never got round to, and then never completed! The airfield is owned by the Norfolk Gliding Club who rescued it from development and put out an appeal for funds at the time.
Stewart served with the Army Air Force and flew B-26 bombers from the base and when he heard about the appeal gave generously to save the airfield for posterity and the crews who lost their lives flying from it. The photo is from 1975 when he revisited the site; the renovated control buildings contain a bar with a large picture of Stewart above it from his days serving there.
The next one prompts the question, did ’The Greatest’ Muhammad Ali ever take a bad photo? Probably not yet this one has a different angle and is still instantly Ali.
The image above was taken in 1966, it shows children playing outside the former home of John Christie the murderer, at No 10 Rillington Place. If ever a place lived up to its placement in history this one does, not exactly inviting; yet the children are obviously oblivious to its past.
It would have been easy to put up hundreds of images from those featured above never mind those left out, but I have tried as said earlier to keep it to photojournalists and not photographers, there is a difference in the way they operate.
German would-be world-reshaper Klaus Schwab has been making waves via his World Economic Forum, on the subject of 'The Great Reset', allegedly an appropriate response to a panoply of global systemic problems though to me it looks more like another example of centralising power-seekers 'not wasting a crisis.' Sky News Australia's Rowan Dean gives Schwab and the WEF's motley crew a once-over here:
'I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes...
'When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don't really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.'
Question: what exactly will you think about? Or create? Or develop? This velvet-lined dystopia is designed so that you will change nothing of any importance; the first priority of a successful revolution is to ensure that there will not be another one. Auken's tamed human says:
'Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.'
So, no dreams; they could get you into trouble.
With a certain brutal clarity, US-Mex billionaire Hugo Salinas Price has envisaged a different but parallel scenario: turning the clock back a century or more, to a time when even lowly suburban bank clerks like Charles Pooter had domestic servants.
'If it were not for US government subsidies to unemployment, in the numerous ways in which they are offered, those in more comfortable circumstances in the US might be relieving poverty by taking on numbers of quasi-slaves into their households – to do the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, the gardening, the driving, the taking care of the children...
'If there weren’t so many rules that make hiring quasi-slaves for domestic work so expensive, no doubt a large number of unemployed Americans, amenable to accepting the facts of life, would find working in homes more agreeable than eating in food-kitchens...
'As the century wears on, realities will undoubtedly bring back slavery, at first in the very mild version of the present, but as life becomes harsher, out-and-out slavery will make its reappearance in the world. The imperatives of life will have their way: food, clothing and lodging in return for total obedience and work. This is an aspect of “Peak Prosperity” that has not been examined so far...
'The Democracy of Athens at the time of its greatness, when it became the impossible model for our times, consisted of all of 21,000 Athenians who were free citizens. It did not include 400,000 slaves of said democratic Athenians.
The French Revolution was a welter of blood, a suicidal revolt by middle-class lawyers against an elite that pushed its foreign war-making and demands for money too far; but the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to defeat Napoleon made history look as though it had a direction without swords and guillotines, a path towards increasing prosperity and individual freedom for the lower classes.
This accelerated with the century of super-cheap energy in the form of oil; and in the aftermath of two world wars, the massive transfers of wealth from the British Empire to the United States plus the yet-to-be-developed markets in the East made it possible to believe the Fred Flintstone model of civic life: a working-class (Americans would say 'middle class') man able to support his family on his industrial wage, own a car and a detached house in the suburbs, have evenings and weekends off, join a Rotarian-type club, go bowling and so on.
But then the rich and powerful sucked up the increases in wealth by giving away the economy to foreigners; and despite attempts to reverse the flow, much of the 're-onshored' production as occurs will be performed by robots and Artificial Intelligence - white-collar middle class, look out. And the Internet - Amazon etc - is breaking the retail-outlet ladder to self-employment and personal independence.
History is turning back from linear to cyclic: work, feed, breed. Chances are, your descendants will 'own nothing and be happy'; as a servant in a rich man's house, or a wage-slave in a multinational company. Money has allowed the emergence of emperors without lands to defend.
And yet, what happened to the rich Mayans? Where are they?
Spare us your old man's dreams, Herr Schwab.
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JD comments:
Three videos to see:
Chairman of the FMF Rule of Law Board of Advisors and a former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, Rex van Schalkwyk, delivers opening remarks at an FMF roundtable.
The Mises Forum videos mention the influence of Bill and Melinda Gates in this urge to reshape everything but as I think I have pointed out on previous occasions those leading(?) the 4th industrial revolution and the great reset are not exactly great thinkers, they lack common sense.*
Here is an example of that from Melinda Gates -
"Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive."
That last sentence is a perfect example of 'pious stupidity' ( a phrase I found in the writings of Frithjof Schuon)
* * *
Common sense by the way is not as Einstein described it - 'Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.'
I was intrigued by Wiggia's inclusion yesterday of the photograph below (Cartier-Bresson, Shanghai, 1948) and had to find out what was going on. It turns out this was a scramble to buy gold before the Kuomintang's currency vapourised.
The great days of magazines like Picture Post are sadly long gone, and with them most of the great photo journalists and war photographers that filed so many magazines with their craft. The combination of the photo mags and those first photojournalists gave us what many consider the ‘Golden Age’ of photojournalism.
Today the instant fix of the mobile phone has managed to capture so much that professional photographers never could, the sheer numbers that are are in the right place at the right time has transformed much of what we see today.
Although the immediacy of this type of image making makes compelling viewing as images are flashed across the world by the internet, we have lost that craft and that placement those photographers gave us in the past. There are a few still in war zones plying their trade and also in the field of social photography, but it is not the lucrative trade it once was, and numbers are much reduced.
Newspapers have largely reduced their photographic sections down to the minimum, only sports photography appears to remain on a level similar to that of old and even there television and video have taken away a large chunk of the output. There do not seem even in sports to be the same images we had emblazoned in our memories today as we did in the past: I remember the Guardian, back when it was a newspaper worth reading, had numerous awards for its sports photography.
One of the last remaining war photographers alive, Don McCullin who in 1958 submitted a photograph of a London street gang to the Observer and as they say the rest is history. He worked for the Sunday Times magazine between ‘66 and ‘84 covering war and man made disasters, famines, building up a reputation for the highest quality of work.
In later life he has been involved in recording social life rather than wars, though not entirely and also became a prolific author. A film based on his life in his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour is planned for the coming year.
Coming from an early career based on using film his comment on digital photography is apt: "Digital photography can be a totally lying experience – you can move what you want, the whole thing can’t be trusted really," though film was also manipulated. in different ways, and there are many examples of fakes going back to the beginnings of photography, some of which I showed in an earlier piece I did.
Homeless man
Londonderry
Shell-shocked soldier, Vietnam
The first time I saw this next image was on the wall of my brother's house in London. His first wife then worked for the Marlborough Gallery and knew Bill Brandt who gave her a copy of this image and another as gifts; it is taken on Primrose Hill near Regent's Park and has become iconic.
The artist Francis Bacon, Primrose Hill, London
Brandt was a social and landscape photographer in the main, though of the modernist school his work eschews the use of unusual angles, the impact is from the use of light to create mood.
'When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.' - Bill Brandt
Brandt was also known for ‘staging’ photos to get what he wanted: he used family members in shots, using his brother Rolf and sister-in-law Ester in some early works.
I wonder how today seeing images like this we can speak of poverty in the modern world. We of the older generation saw some of it, in the East End in my case, but even then we were coming out of scenes like this, though aspects of it still existed - when I first met my wife her parents' house still had gas lighting, today that is hard to believe, all in less than 100 years.
War photographers are almost a breed apart, to risk one's life as many did to get the ‘shot’ takes a special type of mindset that puts you in the frontline with nothing else but a camera as a ‘weapon’.
Of all the war photographers Robert Capa is the one who is most referred to, the best is a subjective word in this context and there will always be an image that will prompt one to say that was the best until you see another.
His life was in many ways as interesting as his photography. Robert Capa, not his birth name, was a Hungarian – American war photographer who was also the companion of Gerda Taro herself a photographer. Before he became an American citizen he established himself with his images of the Spanish civil war; in WW11 he covered some of the heaviest fighting in Sicily, Africa, Italy and then the Normandy invasion.
In 1947 he joined with Cartier-Bresson and others to form Magnum, the first co-operative of freelance photographers and spent most of that period helping others to become established. He did cover the war in Palestine and later volunteered for an assignment with Life magazine to photograph the war in Indochina and was killed by a landmine.
His relationship with Gerda Taro also had a sad ending as when fleeing Spain during the civil war before the borders closed Taro was hitching a ride on a lorry when it encountered a Spanish tank. It went off the road and she died soon afterwards. She was the love of Capa’s life but she would not marry him.
His work includes the controversial Death of a Loyalist Soldier, below, described by many as staged and reputed to be taken in an area different from that as posted. Capa denied all those comments saying ‘In Spain you don’t need tricks to shoot photos, the pictures are there. you just take them. Truth is the best picture.'
The Falling Soldier
Collaborateurs
D Day
Somewhere in France
For many the father of photojournalism was Henri Cartier-Bresson. As with all masters of their craft he had an eye for the moment, so many of his images have you asking how did he manage to get that picture? His portfolio is superb and I was lucky to see an exhibition of his a couple of years back at the Sainsbury centre in Norwich.
Cartier- Bresson was born in France in 1908. He was a humanist, a taker of candid photographs and was really the forerunner to what we call today street photography. He came from a wealthy family in the textile business, went to a private art school but was discontent with what he saw as the rigidity in the teaching. He studied art literature and English at Cambridge University and became bilingual, and his first camera was purchased when he was 21. A convoluted story saw him escape to the Cote d’Ivoire and he sold pictures of game to survive, caught blackwater fever that nearly killed him and returned the same year (1931) to recoup in Marseille.
It was here that he embraced the surrealists, gave up painting and started on his stellar career as a photographer. He purchased his Leica camera and a 50mm lens in Marseille and that served him well for many years. it was the small size of the Leica that gave him the ability to remain unnoticed in the crowd when he took those early street photographs.
His first photojournalist assignment was the coronation of King George the V1 and Queen Elizabeth for a French weekly magazine Regards; his pictures showed the crowds and individuals, not one was taken of the King!
Brussels 1932
Hyde Park, England, 1937
Shanghai, 1948
Margaret Bourke-White was a first in many ways: the first American war photojournalist, she also had one of her photographs on the cover of the first edition of Life magazine and was the first foreign photographer to be allowed to take pictures in Soviet Russia of industry under the Soviets' Five Year Plan.
Her interest in photography started in her youth as a hobby when she lived in the Bronx. She went to several colleges and graduated from Cornell with a BA degree in 1927. A year later she left NY and went to Cleveland, Ohio where she set up a studio concentrating on architectural and industrial photography.
During WW11 she was attached to the US Army and spent time in Italy and Germany and the US Army Air force in North Africa. She flew as the first woman on a lead aircraft in a B17 on a raid on Tunis.
She became known as Maggie the indestructible having been torpedoed in the Med, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow and pulled out of the Chesapeake river when her chopper went down.
Later as she travelled through a retreating Germany with the army under Patton she was present at the arrival to Buchenwald where she says her camera shielded her from the horrors present in front of her.
Kentucky flood, 1937
Buchenwald
DC 4 over Manhattan, 1939
And finally a picture of the lady herself taken by Oscar Graubner as she sets up for a shoot on the 61st floor of the Chrysler building. Despite her 'indestructible' title she had a long 15-year battle with Parkinson's before dying in 1971, but not before photographing Gandhi, Churchill and Stalin; an amazing woman and an amazing career.
Alfred Eisenstaedt became almost as much of a celebrity as those he photographed. In later years his images of stars and prominent people took over much of his work and he himself appeared with them in many shots.
A German-born American he began his career in Germany prior to WW11 and became one of Life magazine's photographers when he went to the States.
He was another who when the opportunity arrived took advantage of the small size of the 35mm Leica camera for its relatively low presence for his candid work.
From Wiki…..
Eisenstaedt became a full-time photographer in 1929 when he was hired by the Associated Press office in Germany, and within a year he was described as a "photographer extraordinaire." He also worked for Illustrierte Zeitung, published by Ullstein Verlag, then the world's largest publishing house. Four years later he photographed the famous first meeting between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Other notable early pictures by Eisenstaedt include his depiction of a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz in 1932 and Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1933. Although initially friendly, Goebbels scowled at Eisenstaedt when he took the photograph, after learning that Eisenstaedt was Jewish.
In 1935, Fascist Italy's impending invasion of Ethiopia led to a burst of international interest in Ethiopia. While working for Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Alfred took over 3,500 photographs in Ethiopia, before emigrating to the United States, where he joined Life magazine, but returned in the following year to Ethiopia to continue his photography.
In 1935 his family and himself emigrated to the USA as the threatening situation for them in Germany became more obvious.
The Kiss, one of the most iconic images of all time, taken in Times Square on VJ day. The two participants did not know one another and Eisenstaedt said at the time he was in such hectic surroundings he failed to get their names; they were revealed decades later.
Of his earlier images in Germany and Ethiopia there are several that stand out, the German ones for historical reasons.
With Goebbels by then knowing that Eisenstaedt was Jewish this is not a look that would have given the receiver any joy.
I have to admit this is one photographer with whose work I could easily fill a whole piece. His almost endless list of stars and important people as well as those in the street are a joy to behold, all on top of all his other work.
The one below is from a series taken in Paris pre-war at an outdoor puppet show.
His other works included many using symmetry as the main ingredient, nowhere better than this one taken at La Scala.
And another combining the symmetry and the human element; the waiters are in St Moritz in Switzerland awaiting the performance of Sonya Henie the Norwegian ice skater who won three Olympic gold medals and ten world titles.
Impossible to nominate just one of his hundreds of stars and important people; who to leave out? Well, all but the two that I have chosen, not because they are necessarily the best but because of the warmth it shows in the subject; again one of a series, the name doesn’t have to be mentioned it is self-evident, taken in 1961.
The second is a rare candid shot of Churchill complete with cigar and siren suit. Churchill was not an easy subject as having an artistic bent he thought he knew better than Eisenstaedt about where and when the pictures should be taken.
My God, though, how we need someone of that calibre today!
I think most people will be familiar with the song "Baker Street" as well as the Stealer's Wheel song "Stuck in the middle with you."
Both were written by Gerry Rafferty, the latter co-written by Joe Egan. Both songs were commercially very successful. If there is a Gerry Rafferty song on the radio it will be one of those two and their success has tended to overshadow the fact that he was one of the best songwriters to emerge from the popular music scene of the 1960s which is why I have not included them here. There is so much more to choose from and all of it is very very good.
I start with with Wiggia's closing statement about sustainable energy production and climate change:
The climate change scam is not so much a conspiracy but is more in the nature of starry eyed ignorance. If you look at the politicians, the civil service, the XR 'children' advocating this nonsense and other academics doing various studies, what they have in common is a lack of any practical experience: in other words they have never done any real productive work, they have never got their hands dirty, they have never mended anything, they have never had to solve a problem such as Wiggia's lawn mower not working. They are ignorant, not in the perjorative use of that word but they simply do not know. Book learning is the sole source of their knowledge and the theories expounded in book learning are all derived, with few exceptions, from the trial and error of practical experience. [1]
Victoria Coren wrote that she did her own mini repair with polyfilla on a skirting board and it gave her enormous satisfaction. And I smiled when I read it because she had done something which was a skill that is non verbal, she had done something which did not require her usual mode of thought and that would have been a revelation to her. [2]
One of the main ideas proposed by the Great Reset is that robots and artificial technology will transform our lives -
"Unprecedented and simultaneous advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, materials science, energy storage, quantum computing and others are redefining industries, blurring traditional boundaries, and creating new opportunities. We have dubbed this the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another." - Professor Klaus Schwab, 2016. [3]
My response to that is to reprise part of a post I wrote in January 2019 [4] -
"The big idea of today is that human beings are unreliable and should be replaced by computers" John Michell; The Oldie magazine, October 2005.
"What began as a way of duplicating human skill on a greater scale will end by replacing skill altogether in order to produce goods regardless of any human intervention. As a necessary part of the process any call for the control of machines, however desirable in human terms, is bound to seem illogical since it amounts to the destruction of the system for generating the wealth needed to perpetuate the consumption that underpins the social fabric."
"Such is the remorseless pressure of this process that it becomes, in due course, a sort of cannibalism, first of all destroying the machine minder through automation then in a further step destroying the machine by an economy based on the virtual reality of computerised information. At this stage the question of human needs hardly arises, having been displaced by the internal demands of the productive system itself. This 'system' possessing no vision of an end other than its own perpetuation, must eventually bring about its own destruction."
The current drive to a greener future and the desire for technology to play such a large part in our lives are both doomed to fail; the green future for the reasons set out by Wiggia in his post and the 4th industrial revolution for the reasons explained by Brian Keeble in his book, quoted above.
The proposed 4th Industrial Revolution is in fact a re-statement of the principle underlying a Techocracy; it leads inevitably to authoritarian governments and social engineering. [5]
So far in 2020 we have been given ample evidence of both of those trends. We are still, in the old phrase, lions led by donkeys.[6]
