A very seasonal camera

One of my (no doubt many) personal oddities is a love of revisiting the basics of photography. Obsolete methods, sometimes; calotype, cyanotype, gum bichromate and the rest. Pinhole sometimes; my crowning achievement in that direction was a zoom pinhole camera with multiple A5 dark slides. But my particular fascination is with building conventional optical cameras, preparing conventional silver halide emulsions, brewing conventional chemistries, all from scratch materials.

I don't do this all the time, you understand. Just every now and then, when the moon is full, there's an "R" in the month, and the mood takes me.

The most recent adventure started with finding an incredibly poor quality plastic magnifying "glass" in a christmas cracker. Text examined through it waves and ripples and blurs beautifully. A quick test projection onto a wall of the world outside the nearest window established that it has a focal length of 150mm, which in turn suggested^[1] a 105×105mm piece of film.

In practice, though, the image circle diameter was only abut 100mm, and the largest piece of spare photographic material to hand was a long out of date 120 roll of Kodak VPS. Take those two facts together, and an image size of 60×75mm emerges^[2].

All which happened to conveniently fit with the size of a discarded mince pie packet.

Thus was a seasonal camera born: mince pie body, cracker lens. A seasonal subject was obviously needed ... a candle in a frosted glass fit the bill nicely.

I didn't mix the chemistry myself; a friendly lab tapped off a cupful of each required solution from their waste line. Scanning the dried result produce the image you see here... (as usual, double click it for a larger view)

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[1] The rule of thumb is that, to roughly match normal human vision at rest, image diagonal should approximate to focal length.

[2] Pythagoras' theorem

Books in time

I love books of photographs. The book (not the wall) is, for me, the photograph's natural habitat.

Curiously, books which have most affected me are often not books of which I have ever owned a copy. This is often because they impacted my life very early on, when buying them would have been financially beyond my reach or, at the very least, would have financially inhibited making photographs of my own. I haunted libraries in those days, devouring book after book of both text and images. The same is true of individuals: photographers whose vision played a major rôle in shaping my own are not represented on my bookshelves. Now, of course, we have the web ... which is a wonderful thing in itself, but is not the same experience as a book.

Every now and then, the love of my life fills one of more of these gaps – this Christmas, in fact, three of them.

Bill Brandt wandered into my life when I was twelve, and I never saw the world in the same way again; only now do I have two books of his work. I was fourteen when I encountered John Szarkowski's The photographer's eye, and the library copy virtually lived in my house for the next year ... but ultimately wasn't mine. Library copies in widely various places have fed me since; now I have a copy of my own. It was another two years, and I was sixteen, before I encountered Paul Strand; I had, at that time, only just arrived in a new society and a new landscape, and Strand influenced the ways in which I saw both ... again, from the shelves of a library. Now, as of three days ago, I have two books of photographs by Brandt, one of Strand, and my own copy of The photographer's eye.

Looking through these books, I find myself explicitly comparing (for the first time, so far as I can recall) my view of them now with that of my younger selves who first encountered the images shown. The one shown here, in particular, Brandt's "Housewife, Bethnal Green, 1937" (double click for a larger view), makes me want to cry. When I was twelve I loved it for many reasons including its tonality and its documentarity, but didn't think very much about the woman portrayed; four and a half decades on, I see that she is not so very much older than I was myself when I first saw her.

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• Bill Brandt. 2007, London: Thames & Hudson. 9780500410882 or 0500410887 (pbk.)
• Brandt icons. 2004, London: The Bill Brandt Archive. 1874111707 (pbk)
• Mark Haworth-Booth, Paul Strand. 1987, New York: Aperture Foundation. 0893810770 (cased)
  0893812595 (pbk)
• John Szarkowski, The photographer's eye. 2007, New York: Museum of Modern Art. 9780870705274 or 87070527X (pbk) [originally 1966]

Half a trillion words ... plus two

The ever enquiring young mind of Julie Heyward can always be relied upon for penetration to the philosophical heart of any issue without fear, favour or delay. In the case of Google's Ngram viewer and datasets, for example, she maintains this reputation with a comment heroically posted early on Christmas Day:

“How long can it take to run "chicken boogers" through that thing? Surely that was your first and most urgent task, on realizing the power of such linguistic machinery?”

... a question which subtly refines Edmund Burke's demand, in 1770, to know “where were the boogers?” Such serious enquiry deserves serious reply, so I immediately applied myself to the task.

The immediate headline answer is ... it took mere milliseconds to establish that the bigram "chicken boogers" seems, between 1500 and 2008 CE, to have appeared ... approximately ... zero times.

Undeterred, I tried the separate words. Boogers seem to first appear in print, as noted above, in the late 18th century. Chickens are immortalised in ink from almost two hundred year earlier, with a 1586 culinary reference from John Trusler – and Sir Philip Sidney, no less, was moved in 1599 to pen the words “O Mopsa my beloved chicken, here am I thine owne father...” (about which, perhaps, the least said the better).

Tracking both words across the same periods of time, chickens appear far more often (by roughly three orders of magnitude) than boogers, which makes a comparative graph on the same axes somewhat unenlightening. Rescaling and using two separate y axes, however, permits the illustration shown here (double click the graphic for a full size view in a separate window) which shows that there is an approximate correlation over most of the past century ... but that in the past decade chickens continue to increase their popularity while that of boogers may (only time will tell) have started to decline.

I am grateful to Ms Heyward for bringing this important and previously overlooked research issue to my attention.

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• Edward Burke, in The Annual register, or a view of the history, politics and literature of the year. 1771, London: J. Dodsley.
• John Trusler, The London Adviser and Guide: containing every instruction ... necessary to persons living in London, and coming to reside there ... together with an abstract of all those laws which regard their protection against the frauds ... to which they are there liable. 1586, London.
• Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. 1599, Edinburgh: printed by Robert Walde-graue.

Like so many actions...

“As to Afghanistan and Pakistan, if the Obama administration continues its current policies, following the December policy review, it is going to have to recognise that, like so many actions by the United States since 9/11, seeking military superiority over the Taliban may prove to be deeply counterproductive, both to the region and to its own wider security needs.”

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• Paul Rogers, "Insecurity and policy choices" in International Security Monthly Briefing 2010 (2010-12).
  

Picking over half a trillion words

Following JSBlog's enthusiasm, yesterday, (“Google just blew my bibliographic socks off”) for Google's new Ngram viewer, I've been busily catching up.

First stop was the viewer itself. Then a start on downloading the raw data sets which lie behind it, for more detailed analysis than the online viewer can deliver. Finally, while the data downloaded in the background (almost two gigabytes of it just for single words in English, even in ZIP form ... nearer to ten when expanded), reading the associated Science article by Michel et al.

It's going to be a good while before anything significant comes of the downloads, but I've done a couple of test drives. They can be intuitively checked with a quick visit to the viewer.

First experiment, resulting from a recent off the cuff discussion amongst a group of students: correlating uses of the words "twat", "twit" and "twerp". It's interesting to find positive correlation between the first and last from 1935 to 1980, but negative between them and "twerp" over the same period – which then reverses so that all three positively correlate over the past thirty years.

Second: the tendency to concatenate "bigrams" into single words. This train of thought was started by Google's example comparison of "child care" with "nursery school" and "kindergarten" ... I tried it out, and then added "childcare" to see if it made a difference. As examples to cut a long story short, "child care" declines markedly as "childcare" slightly increases (a negative correlation) from 1996 to 2008; "brood mare" and "broodmare" show a similar negative correlation from 1960 to 2000 but then "brood mare" recovers and the correlation becomes positive through to the present.

Those are, of course, trivial investigations and show nothing ... I mention them only to show the sort of five finger exercises that I've been playing with since yesterday. Much more interesting is some of the investigation mentioned by the authors of the Science article.

For example:

“Suppression – of a person, or an idea – leaves quantifiable fingerprints... ... ... Such examples are found in many countries, including Russia (e.g. Trotsky), China (Tiananmen Square) and the US (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947)...

We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned... We plotted median usage in German for five such lists ... ... ... The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party members [a 500% increase...].

Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” s for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 – 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925-1933 and in 1955-1965... In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly centered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes... In German, the distribution in much wider, and skewed leftward: suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule... At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression... This population is highly enriched for documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso..., the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and Hermann Maas... ... ... At the other extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dramatic rise... This subpopulation is highly enriched for Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who benefited immensely from government propaganda...

These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlights how culturomic methods might complement existing historical approaches.”

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• Jean-Baptiste Michel, et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" in Science, 2010. DOI 10.1126/science.1199644
  

Latent heat of fusion

More custard

My recommendation of Shake, rattle & custard! is now redundant, outclassed by the ... ummm ... modesty of the author himself...!

Jennifer Government

“Companies claimed to be highly responsive, Jennifer thought, but you had only to chase a screaming man through their offices to realize it wasn't true.”

In case you are wondering, "Jennifer" is a federal agent and the "screaming man" is a murderer whom she is trying to apprehend.

Jennifer is also the Jennifer Government of the title. This novel, a hilariously frightening spoof warning about unrestrained deregulation of markets, describes a near future world in which employees take their surname from their employer – while entrepreneurs and the unemployed have no surname at all. Jennifer takes her name from her government employment; the screaming man is John Nike, whose employer you can probably guess.

That's not all that has changed. Canada, South Africa, Australasia, Indonesia, India and much of south east Asia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the whole of South America, are now integrated territories of the US; Russia and the former USSR partially integrated affiliates. The EU apart from Britain is a separate, competitor block where, to quote a teenage high school character (Hayley McDonalds: she takes her surname from the Burger franchise which runs her school), “the Government isn't privatized, they still have to pay tax and do whatever the Government says, which would really suck”.

Being privatised, the Government requires that Jennifer get funding for every investigation before doing any work on it. In the case of this murder investigation, that means the relatives selling their house. Military functions are purchased by companies from groups such as the Police or the NRA, who may in turn (according to commercial circumstances) subcontract to each other or shoot each other.

Recommended.

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• Max Barry, Jennifer Government. 2003, London: Abacus. 9780349117621 (pbk)

Marine observations

I've just read (on Unreal Nature's recommendation, from which I have copied the post title and for which thanks) a guest post at Foreign policy magazine's site.

It is written by a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan “and above all someone trying to find a healthy balance as a civilian once more”. There's a very great deal, including but by no means limited to the author's headline position, with which I profoundly disagree. There's also a great deal with which I can agree. But neither agreement nor disagreement have anything to do with why I, too, recommend reading it.

Everyone in the western liberal democracies should read it as an honourable example of an intelligent individual speaking unwanted blunt truths as he sees them not only to power but to a fellow citizenry who (as citizenries always do ... and that includes you and me, if we're honest) prefer hazily warm and comfortable myths.

USAmericans should read it in particular because it tells them things they don't want to know about their own society. Europeans (and perhaps also Australasians) should read it because it holds up a clear mirror in which to examine our own myths. Britons in particular should read it because it shows both how radically different are British and American outlooks in areas where we are often assumed to be similar ... and, at the same time, how very similar we are in things which we often like to imagine that we are different.

I'd like to make dozens of points based on, or in contention with, the content of the post ... but that would undermine my hope that you will go there and make up your own mind. And please, don't just read until you feel agreement or disagreement: read the whole thing, or you will have missed the point of going there at all.

A departure

I'm sorry to see the closure of Jim Putnam's Thinking Through My Fingers blog, one of the "other voices" down my left hand margin and for some years one of my "start the day" reads. I would post this as a comment there, but have encountered difficulties doing so.

I can't claim that the news comes out of the blue; I had advance warning about three weeks back; but it's no less of a loss for that.

On the other hand, “I feel as if I'm in a positive place in my personal life” sounds like one of the best reasons I can think of for making a change – so ... all the best, Jim, and I'll live in hope that you might (as you suggest) pop up again somewhere else in time.

Splash!

To correspondent Geoff Powell, thanks for this link to a wonderful set of high speed photographs freezing the moment when a water filled balloon bursts.

Mayfair

Bus stop

I met a very interesting person, today.

It was seven in the morning, and the air was bitterly cold as I arrived at the bus stop. My bus was due in ten minutes. The man already standing there with no hat told me that he had been waiting for half an hour, he had given up on the bus he'd come for and was now looking forward to the next.

We got chatting, as people do when they stand for any length of time together in the dark and the cold. We compared notes on this and that, and eventually got around to what we do.

He is a doctor, a GP working in a practice at the other end of two bus routes. That already puts him above me in the scale of things; the world needs doctors more than it needs mathematicians. But as we talked, there was more. He is Senegalese. He trained at the University of California medical school at Davis. He runs a free clinic in Senegal.

Hang on ... wind back a bit ... if he runs a free clinic in West Africa, what is he doing at a bus stop on the western edge of Europe?

He is, I learned, one of several doctors at the clinic. Since free clinics generate no income, and since this one is unfunded, money has to come from somewhere to pay its running costs and to feed the families of the staff (medical and otherwise). So, the doctors take it in turns to take contracts in developed economies. The income from these contracts goes to maintain the clinic, its staff, and their dependents. My bus stop companion is in his sixties and half way through a two year contract, a year away from his family whom he misses desperately and with another year to go.

That this system is able to work depends, of course, on the same asymmetry which makes it necessary: the yawning gulf between first and third world economies. This doctor, and his colleagues, live and work at one end of an economic gravity well where money is scarce so costs and incomes are low. They have found a way to exploit that same gradient, using it to make a first world salary run a clinic, pay operating costs (including salaries), and provide pension provision for old age.

I've seen a fair amount of quiet heroism in the face of third world poverty and health needs. In the field, I've carried bedpans or washed bandages or ... but then I've always scuttled back to my comfortable first world billet. I've supported campaigns to fund third world medicine ... but never for even a day to the extent that this man and his partners do, across whole lifetimes. Any of them could stay permanently in our more comfortable settings, bring their families with them, reap the rewards of the hard work which gained them the qualifications and expertise which they now possess ... but they don't.

I didn't get around to asking where the pump priming finance came from, to put him through a US medical school in the first place. Wherever it came from, though, it wasn't used to buy his way out of hardship; it has been ploughed back over a lifetime into his roots.

Four of the charity links at the top left of this page point to organisations concerned with the third world; two of them are medical; one is dedicated to helping communities meet long term health issues and thus escape a cycle which they can't afford to break on their own. If you have money which you are inclined to donate, any one of those charities (and many more besides) would be a worthy recipient – but, after my bus stop conversation, Health Poverty Action (formerly Health Unlimited) is the one that will get any extra that I have available this festive season. And if you want to combine a lifeline with present giving, they have a selection of ideas starting from as little as US$8/€6/£5 (a contribution to child health monitoring) running up by easy increments ($16/€12/£10, $24/€18/£15...) through a set of surgical instruments ($160/€120/£100) to the top whack installation of a life saving water system ($630/€470/£400).

Brillo

Rambling in two directions

Julie Heyward keeps forcing me to spend money on buying books I hadn't otherwise encountered ... most recently, The philosophy of childhood.

The final chapter of this book considers, at length, a favourite hobby horse of mine: the assumption, a priori, that art generated by children is necessarily inferior to that of adults. Every now and then, somebody enters a painting by a child into a prestigious art competition and then, when it is accepted, crows that this shows the meaningless of that competition, or of modern art, or of the sponsoring institution, or the incompetence of the judges, or whatever ... whereas to me it seems more to suggest poverty of perception on the part o the prankster. Why should this assumption of inferiority be made? Many things are (or, at least, can be) gained and refined with time as we grow ... but many things are lost, too. It seems to me that at the root of the assumption is a subjectively ruthless and objectively unjustified need to believe that we are better "now" than we were "then" ... whether or not it is actually so.

Moving back from the book to the person who suggested it ... I continue to prepare the lecture series on landscape art, and intend to use one of Julie Heyward's "composited" photosculptures to illustrate particular points. But which one? Yesterday I spent several hours wrestling with the task of choosing not just a single example but even the preliminary selection of a series from which that example is to be chosen. As today draws to a close, I am no farther for'ard. Any choice made is going to leave a forest of heartbreaking choices regretfully abandoned.

Ah, it's a hard life...

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• Gareth B Matthews, The philosophy of childhood. 1996, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 0674664817.