Brain Pickings » photography

Harry Benson’s Luminous Black-and-White Photographs of The Beatles, 1964-1966

Maria Popova — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:30:28 +0000

From pillow fights to world domination, or what Beatlemania has to do with Jesus Christ.

The past year has been a boon for seeing The Beatles with new eyes — from their tour manager’s never-before-published tour photos to Linda McCartney’s tender portraits to rediscovered vintage children’s books — but count on Taschen to up the ante on any cultural trope. The newly released The Beatles: On the Road 1964-1966 is a lavish collection of hundreds of Harry Benson’s luminous black-and-white photographs of the Fab Four at close quarters — from ecstatic encounters with fans to quiet moments in the recording studio to playful boyish frolicking.

Benson’s own Beatle story is an unlikely one — in 1964, while boarding a plane for a foreign assignment in Africa, he got a call from the editor of London’s The Daily Express and was dispatched to Paris instead, with The Beatles, to document French Beatlemania. Personable and warm, Benson was quickly welcomed into the Fab Four’s inner circle. At the cusp of their exorbitant global celebrity, he managed to capture some of their most intimate and genuine moments on film. (That famous photograph of The Beatles having a pillow fight at the George V Hotel was his.) From their first visit to the U.S., complete with New York hysteria, to their adventures on the set of A Hard Day’s Night to their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Benson was there to capture it all, even the impact of Lennon’s controversial comment that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus Christ.”

An introductory essay by Benson himself, complete with newspaper clippings from the era, adds first-hand context to the remarkable photos. He writes:

These photos convey a really happy period for them and for me. It all comes down to music, they were without a doubt the greatest band of the 20th century, and that’s why these photographs are so important.

Images courtesy of Taschen / © Harry Benson

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Happy Birthday, Hubble: Celebrating 22 Years of Stunning Space Images

Maria Popova — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:30:20 +0000

From black holes to star births, or what decades of cosmic awe have to do with the future of space exploration.

It’s a bittersweet week for space exploration. On this day in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery. Discovery has just rolled into its “new home” — a polite way to say it’s become space taxidermy — but Hubble’s legacy endures, having engendered some of the most spectacular space images humanity has ever glimpsed, and there’s hardly a better way to celebrate it than with National Geographic’s Hubble: Imaging Space and Time, the most glorious collection of space images since Michael Benson’s Far Out. With more than 120 breathtaking photographs that take us to the very edge of known space, contextualized in the Hubble’s history, the lavish tome looks back on two decades of the telescope’s service in orbit and sets the stage for its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2013.

From black holes to star births to giant galaxies cannibalizing smaller ones, the images capture the thriving ecosystem of the cosmos, with all its magnificent nebulae, dazzling stars, and majestic planets.

Here are some of my favorite Hubble gems of all time.

The Cat's Eye Nebula, one of the first planetary nebulae discovered, also has one of the most complex forms known to this kind of nebula. Eleven rings, or shells, of gas make up the Cat's Eye.

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, all that remains of a tremendous stellar explosion. Observers in China and Japan recorded the supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, in 1054.

Taken within minutes of Mars' closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, on Aug. 27, 2003, this image captures the red planet some 34,647,420 miles from Earth.

A mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. The top of a three-light-year tall pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas that stream from the peaks.

A ribbon of gas, a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago, floats in our galaxy. The supernova that created it was probably the brightest star ever seen by humans.

Saturn's dynamic auroras

Section of M51 with Progenitor Star

Saturn's rings in ultraviolet light

The Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Star birth in Galaxy M83

New red spot appears on Jupiter

Hubble/Subaru Composite image of star-forming region S106

Face-on Spiral Galaxy NGC 3982

The Egg Nebula

Saturn with rings tilted towards the Earth

At a time when the future of space exploration is hanging by a thread, Hubble: Imaging Space and Time is a magnificent living manifesto for just what’s at stake.

Images courtesy of NASA

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A Journey to the End of the World: Tracing Polar Explorer Shackleton’s Footsteps a Century Later

Rachel Sussman — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:00:13 +0000

What a seal bodyguard and 2,200-year-old moss have to do with a watershed moment in exploration history.

On April 24, 1916, just four years shy of one hundred years ago, five men led by polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the third officer on Captain Scott’s Discovery Expedition, set out on an 870-nautical-mile journey on a 22-foot glorified rowboat across the Drake Passage. Shackleton and his crew were marooned on Elephant Island after losing their ship to the Weddell Sea.

They were coming to their own rescue.

Medusa Kelp in Hercules Bay, South Georgia

I, too, was headed to South Georgia; it was the same trip, though certainly not the same journey. I looked out the windows of the National Geographic Explorer, secure and comfortable, as we rounded the far eastern point of Elephant Island. I saw the cove where Shackleton and his men found some small respite from the icy waters, and drew a mental picture of that place, too depleted after my morning’s efforts to even go get my camera.

A small selection of the 300,000 King Penguins in Gold Harbor (a.k.a. 'Penguinpalooza')

Two days later we were in South Georgia, a veritable paradise of animals, vegetation, and exposed geology, like the story of the world writ large on the landscape itself. And here, too, are etched the final chapters of the Shackleton story; the thumbnail of a beach where they first landed, the spot they set out overland across terrain just this side of passable, a hike over a last ridge that separated an impossible journey of perseverance back into a remote outpost of civilization: a whaling station in Stromness Bay.

Grytviken Whaling Station Torqued Ellipses (For Richard Serra)

The captain pulled us so far into Stromness Harbor we were practically on the beach. Despite some cloud cover and a bit of snow coming in, our conditions were calm that day, and I hopped into a Zodiac with Stephanie Martin, a marine mammal researcher, and we zipped back out into the bay and down one harbor to Husvik. The moss I was now after, my “back up moss,” if you will, is 2,200 years old, and growing on top of a 9,000-year-old fossil bed. Fortified with the research and a map provided from Nathalie Van der Putten who discovered this bank, I once again scanned the outline of the topography to home in on Kanin Point.

Elephant seals in Gold Harbor

The beach and tussock grass was so lousy with seals that Stephanie became my de facto seal bodyguard, and likewise instructed me on how to keep them at bay. The first rule is to make loud noises. The second was to carry a paddle from the Zodiac. One might be tempted to smack a snarling male fur seal on the head, but it isn’t necessary — just tapping them on the flippers is deterrent enough. (Which is not to say that no one got bitten over the course of this expedition.)

Hercules Bay, South Georgia

I climbed through the tussock and saw the ancient mounds of peat. I had found it. I took some photos, this time close in, feeling unbelievably fortunate to have found not just one, but both of these ancient moss banks — the needles in a polar haystack.

2,200-year-old moss bank, growing on top of a 9,000-year-old fossilized bank

Later the same afternoon, I hiked overland from a protected inlet into the plot where Shackleton is buried. My heart was once again clutched with the grip of this place, ancient and primeval in its makeup. It was akin to a wide-eyed first visit to the surface of another planet.

Landscape, South Georgia

View of Elephant Island, looking east

If Shackleton’s story had been written as fiction, surely someone would criticize it for having an unrealistic number of obstacles. He had returned to South Georgia five years after his harrowing circuit, and, as if living on borrowed time, died of a massive heart attack the very night he arrived. He died having no idea he shared Elephant Island with one of the oldest living things on the planet, nor that he would end his journey in South Georgia just a stone’s throw from yet another. But I have a feeling he would have approved of the quiet perseverance of these unassuming mosses, in this landscape that speaks of deep time, the power of the natural world, and the precariousness of life in its clutches.

The Grytviken maritime graveyard, guarded by a giant elephant seal

I poured some whiskey on Shackleton’s grave, and some for me, too.

Rachel Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and photographer. Over the past six years, she has traveled the world to document Earth’s most ancient organisms in her project The Oldest Living Things in the World. Rachel has exhibited across the U.S. and Europe, received numerous awards, and spoken at TED. You can follow her global adventures on Twitter.

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The Geometry of God: The Striking Kaleidoscopic Patterns of European Cathedral Ceilings

Maria Popova — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:00:57 +0000

Photographer David Stephenson captures architectural triumphs at the intersection of art and mathematics.

If you’ve ever set foot in one of Europe’s Gothic or Romanesque cathedrals and looked up, you likely found yourself spellbound by the striking vaulted ceilings. If you haven’t, photographer David Stephenson allows you to do so vicariously with his Heavenly Vaults project — a series of magnificent kaleidoscopic photos that capture the singular blend of ethereal magic and patterned precision in these architectural triumphs at the intersection of art and mathematics, flattening the vaulted ceilings and distilling them to their essential shapes, recurring fractal-like patterns, and intricate detailing.

Many of these structures, particularly the Gothic cathedrals, were constructed in an era actively occupied with ordering the heavens and expressed in their mathematical nature was a microcosm model of the universe — perhaps a paradoxical proposition that rationality and logic could explain or convey the might of God to which these temples of worship aimed to attest.

Heavenly Vaults is a follow-up to Stephenson’s 2005 book, Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture. More of Stephenson’s stunning images can be seen on his site.

ᔥ Visual News ↬ It’s Nice That

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From Jell-O to Ballet, 7 Ordinary Things is Extraordinary Slow-Motion

Maria Popova — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:00:50 +0000

What German ballet has to do with tea parties, eagleowls, and the hidden beauty of pollination.

When Proust observed that “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,” he was, of course, being most metaphorical. But, had he lived on to see today, he might have marveled at the way in which our literal “new eyes,” in the form of bleeding-edge camera technology, have enabled us to explore new horizons of perception. Gathered here are seven short films of everyday objects seen in ultra-slow-motion to a striking effect that fascinates, inspires awe, and challenges our most basic assumptions about objects, materials, time, and the fabric of reality.

JELL-O

Pure mesmerism: Jell-O bouncing at 6200 frames per second, a teaser for Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, one of the 11 best food books of 2011.

CYMBAL

Vibration materializes in this footage filmed on a Phantom HD Gold camera at 1000 frames per second.

↬ The Kid Should See This

BALLET

To take your breath away, Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua of Staatsballett Berlin perform several exquisite jumps captured at 1000 frames per second.

↬ Swiss Miss

TEA PARTY DEMOLITION

Exploding eggs, shattering porcelain, and other tea party destruction delights shot with a Phantom Flex camera at a frame rate between 3,200 to 6,900 frames per second.

EAGLEOWL

What buildup, what visceral crescendo in the last five seconds. Show on Photron Full HD High Speed Camera SA2 at 1000 frames per second.

WATER DROP

A spellbinding, sculptural water drop shot at 5000 frames per second with the Phantom Flex camera.

↬ Explore

POLLINATION

Originally featured here in January, alongside Louie Schwartzberg’s chill-inducing TEDxSF talk, this mesmerizing montage of high-speed images reveals the intricate beauty of pollination in a teaser for Schwartzberg’s film, Wings of Life.

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A Glorious Enterprise: The Making of American Science

Maria Popova — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:00:44 +0000

The institution is conceived for the purposes of rational, free, literary and scientific conversation… We meet also to compare the advances of the sciences in the rest of the world with our own… We are lovers of science.

So began the story of a small group of amateur scientists, who gathered in an equally small apartment on the corner of Second and Market streets in Philadelphia one chilly Saturday evening on January 25, 1812, several blocks away from a rival group — the American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin some seventy years prior. Our heroes had been excluded from APS for “social reasons” — immigrants and self-made men, they had been shunned by the APS, a place for the socially prominent American gentry. But, passionate in their love for science and natural history, they remained undeterred and on March 21 of the same year they named their gathering the “Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia,” which stands today as the oldest natural history museum in the Western Hemisphere.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Academy, University of Pennsylvania Press at my alma mater has published A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science — a magnificent, epic tome that tells in 464 lavishly illustrated pages, weighing in at nearly 10 pounds and over a foot tall, the story of the Academy and its quest to acquire and disseminate knowledge of the natural world.

And what a story it is — from how Ernest Hemingway shaped the field of ichthyology to what Edgar Allan Poe was doing in the oldest-known photograph taken inside a museum, it’s a story brimming with rare glimpses of strange specimens and obscure images, laced with tales of scientific rivalry, boundless inspiration, ruthless pursuits of scientific immortality, and perseverance in the face of terrible odds, with cameos by Thomas Jefferson and James Bond, among other unlikely heroes.

Edgar Allan Poe (right), who spent time at the Academy doing research on mollusks; Joseph Leidy, a young medical student (center); and Samuel George Morton (left in top hat) were photographed in the Academy's new building at Board and Sansom Streets during the winter of 1842-43. This daguerrotype, possibly by Paul Beck Goddard, is the oldest-known photograph of an American museum interior.

'Leaf insects' (a lineage of tropical walking sticks). These remarkable Phasmida are found in rainforest canopes of tropical Asia. Included in this group are many newly described specimens from the Philippines. The others are from New Guinea and the Seychelles.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) admires a catch aboard the Pilar, 1934. His understanding of the game fishes of the Atlantic, communicated through the Academy, made significant contributions to the field of ichthyology.

American Flamingo by John James Audubon, hand-colored engraving by Robert Havell Jr. for The Birds of America (1827-38)

Skulls of the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) presented to the Academy by Thomas B. Wilson in 1846

Kirtland's owl (Saw-whet owl), hand-colored lithograph by George White for John Cassin's Illustrations of the Birds of California, Teas, Oregon, British and Russian America (1856)

Members of the American Entomological Society on a collecting trip circa 1900

Coconut crabs (Birgus latro) collected on Flint Island (an uninhabited coral atoll four hundred nautical miles northwest of Tahiti in the Central Pacific) by C. D. Voy in 1875

Shed snake skins collected by George M. Feirer in 1942

The skull of 'Pierce', the cannibalistic Englishman from Australia

Agricultural seed samples collected by Charles F. Kuenne, 1948

Joseph Leidy's original drawings of rhizopods (protozoans). Leidy was 22 years old when he became a member of the Academy in 1845.

Magnificent in both its scope and its ambitious physicality, A Glorious Enterprise is a fascinating miniature museum in and of itself, exploring the cultural history of natural history with equal parts rigor and romanticism — the hallmark of great science.

↬ Science Times; some images courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Press / ANSP and Rosamond Purcell

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Joel Robison’s Whimsical Photographic Abstractions of the Joy of Reading

Maria Popova — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:15:51 +0000

Imaginative visual vocabulary for that feeling you can’t put your finger on.

As a lover of books and advocate for reading, I was instantly enthralled by photographic artist Joel Robison’s whimsical visual abstractions of the reading experience and the joy of books that capture with equal parts imagination and reverence the familiar mesmerism of getting lost in a great book, the pleasure of curiosity tickled, and the explorer’s wonder of discovering new worlds.

Some of Joel’s prints, though sadly not the reading ones, are available on Etsy. You can see more of his wonderful work on his Flickr stream.

↬ r/books

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William Gottlieb’s Iconic Photos of Jazz Greats, 1938-1948

Maria Popova — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:00:14 +0000

Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mister, Billie Holiday’s dog, too.

In the 1930s, a young reporter by the name of William Gottlieb set out to cover the boom of the jazz scene for the Washington Post, only to find the paper didn’t care to dispatch an official staff photographer. So Gottlieb, a self-taught photographer armed with his Speed Graphic and an ample supply of flashbulbs, took it upon himself to photograph the subjects of his interviews. Between 1938 and 1948, he documented the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., and created what eventually became some of history’s most iconic portraits of jazz greats. The Golden Age of Jazz gathers 219 of those, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan (who would have been 88 today), Billie Holiday, and Thelonious Monk, along with original text from the photographer contextualizing the images and their subjects.

On February 16, 2010, Gottlieb’s photographs entered the public domain and are now available online, courtesy of The Library of Congress, who also have rare footage of Gottlieb speaking about his photos.

Sarah Vaughan, Café Society (Downtown)(?), New York, N.Y., ca. Aug. 1946