Notable photography

I do regret the delay in posting, and tonight doesn't provide much more opportunity. But I can drop in some photography-related sites which I've found interesting.

The National Geodetic Survey's Notable Photography Gallery provides stunning images of the United States and other places taken from high altitude, such as this one of San Francisco in 1971. This is an excellent "wallpaper" site.

On the other end of the historic scale, Stanford University provides a site dedicated to albumen prints from the mid-nineteenth century. Here is one of geisha resting, from 1885.

And, in the here-and-now, Iranian news photographer Hasan Sarbakhshian presents images of places currently in the news. He also has a weblog in Persian. Don't worry if you can't read the language. He also posts pictures. Today's is particularly fine.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:39 PM

Taglerqet

Those same fingers
felt the snow melt
before he squirted it
into pinniped lips.
"Deserves a drink," he said.
Demands it, really.

   -- from Taglerqet, by Todd Marquis Boutin

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:08 PM

The serendipity of archives

Edward Chalmers Huffaker was one of those men remembered for being someone else's assistant. In the early days of flight he assisted Otto Lilienthal in his experiments with gliders, and served as Samuel Pierpont Langley's aeronautical assistant at the Smithsonian. He wrote a treatise, "On Soaring Flight", which inspired the Wright brothers, and he joined them at Kitty Hawk in 1901. The Wrights were not impressed with him. Katherine Wright wrote to their father after her brothers' return to Dayton: "[They] haven't had much to say about flying. They can only talk about how disagreeable Mr. Huffaker was."

With such a history, it is not surprising that Huffaker's personal papers remained unprocessed for decades. Archives have more pressing concerns than the memorabilia of extremely minor historical figures. But Huffaker's papers have recently floated to the top of the backlog, and the archivist assigned to the collection made an intriguing discovery: the man was apparently an aspiring writer of fantasy.

So far we have found only one page, written in a neat angular hand on the back of a technical document. But it does seem to have been intended as part of a longer work. The numbers at the top of the page hint that it may have been part of a novel. My colleague promised to pass along any other parts of the manuscript he uncovers, but he suspects the find may be unique.

Here, then, is possibly the only surviving fragment of the unsuspected work of Edward Chalmers Huffaker, an exclusive production of this weblog:

51
VII

THE PASSING OF YANYATTA

Thirty five years after inauguration a rumor spread through the tribes of the gipsy world that the health of their beloved queen Yanyatta was failing, and following the rumor there went a sigh of regret and an earnest prayer that the kind old queen might yet have many years of life left her.

But the rumor persisted and was followed by others of a disquieting nature. The good queen's health did not improve, and the question of her succession began to be a matter of some concern. So often was the question discussed at his inn in Babylon that at length it began to find a place in Jansen's thoughts.

"Where, Randle," he asked of his servant, "does this queen Yanyatta live?"

"I think sir," the servant replied, "in Mesopotamia. But she has, I understand, no fixed abode; but lives in a certain queenly splendor wherever it may suit her. She usually spends a portion of each year on the Seashore."

That's all there is. I shall certainly report any further discoveries here.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:33 PM

Increase, as well as diffusion, of knowledge

Fifty years ago when you said the Smithsonian, [people] would have thought of science and research. Instead you think today of the museums and exhibits and public programs.

   -- Jeremy A. Sabloff, chairman of the Smithsonian Institution Science Commission

The Report of the Smithsonian Institution Science Commision is out, and it leaves few toes untrodden. In 133 pages (including 59 pages of appendices), the Commission expresses distress at the decline of Smithsonian science and the attrition caused by budget cuts. For some years now, the Institution has been "cannibalizing" vacant positions to meet federally-mandated cost-of-living increases. Programs have been cut or scaled back. Fundraising has become a primary duty of all senior staff. Yet, as federal employees, Smithsonian researchers cannot apply for National Science Foundation grants.

It's not only money; the changing culture of the Smithsonian's administration has also impacted research. Current thinking in high places seems to be that museums are their public faces--the slightly musty but numinous exhibit halls where we boggle at dinosaur skeletons and try to recall just what Charles Lindbergh did to become so famous. But the administration's attitudes are, ultimately, tied to the attitudes of the public. Most visitors don't suspect that behind the dioramas people are putting dead things into glass bottles and filing old letters in acid-free boxes. And, if they knew, most would complain that their tax dollars were being wasted on useless activities. This lack of comprehension translates into a lack of funding; you don't find many major donors who will fund a collection, an expedition or a state-of-the-art phase-contrast microscope.

The new Report is addressed to the Regents, the board that ultimately controls the Smithsonian's direction. Will they sit up and take notice? Will they insist that Congress increase funding to cover increased salaries? Will they suggest that the SI administration educate potential donors about the benefits of funding research and collections management rather than their pet vanity project?

We can only hope. Meanwhile, it's an inspiring Report.

News items here, here, here and here. The full Report, in PDF format, is available here.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:13 PM

Pinniped central

The hard part of holidays, I now find, is catching up with the weblog. Rebecca Blood should have warned us about this.

Two puzzling and worrisome pinniped stories appeared over the holidays. From National Geographic News comes this assessment of the long-term effects of the recent epidemic of phocine distemper in Europe. Although the epidemic is subsiding, the impact on the harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) was so great that another outbreak in the next few years may drive the European population to extinction. If anything in the natural world had seemed safe from extinction, it was the hardy and ubiquitous harbour seal.

Less immediately alarming, but still worrisome: remember Tama-chan, the Arctic bearded seal who took up residence in the rivers of Tokyo and Yokohama? He's not alone. Increasing numbers of Arctic seals of various species are turning up in temperate and tropical waters. Recently, a starving hooded seal (Cystophora cristata) was rescued on Antigua, nursed back to health and and taken to Maine to be released into the wild. By itself, this would only be a charming human-interest story. But "Wadadli" was only one of 130 hooded seals found outside their usual range in 2001. Add to that the 113 harp seals (Phoca groenlandica) rescued on Long Island in the same year (not to mention that ultimate gaijin, Tama-chan), and the pattern becomes strange indeed. Marine mammal experts have no idea what is driving the phocine diaspora.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:00 PM

Coming to the Smithsonian's Freer/ Sackler galleries on March 9: an exhibit of photographs of India viewed from, framed by or reflected in the mirrors of the quintessentially Indian automobile, the Ambassador. Rugged and simple to maintain, the Ambassador dominated Indian roads in the 1960's and 1970's, and still accounts for 5% of Indian car sales. The photographs, by the late Raghubir Singh [more] , will be on display until August 10.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:39 PM

From Metafilter, a grand amateur collection of old dog photos. These are 19th-century and early 20th-century images from tintypes and daguerrotypes, cartes de visite, stereographs, cabinet cards and old postcards. They are well worth an extended visit. The pinniped was, of course, charmed by the image of her relative (a young male California Sea Lion, by the looks of him) consorting with a couple of canines.

If you follow the link down to the home page, you discover that the author, Debra Jane Seltzer, also maintains a charming collection of roadside attractions, and a paint-by-number museum.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:26 PM

Year's beginning

Welcome to the new year, and to the snow, which finally arrived yesterday. It will be gone soon--rain and higher temperatures will see to that. But for now it's bloody gorgeous.

The author of Eeksy-Peeksy, one of the true treasures of the Web, recently posted a snow poem by Thomas Hardy. It's not a bad description of Connecticut Avenue this morning:

Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

(Thank you, thank you Malcom Davidson.)

Welcome, also, to what may be my first child-blog, or at least a blog in which I had some hand in the conception. The Janus Museum, one of those institutions which only exist on the Web, and only could, has launched its own weblog, Panabasis. Mr. Szégy-Légy was kind enough to link to pinniped, and I of course have linked back.

It was Szégy-Légy, in fact, who sent me this link to an article on NMAH in Common-Place. So, obviously the controversy around the Smithsonian and its relation to research ("the rock") and donors ("the hard place") continues. So, too does the controversy around the National Zoo, which lost six large mammals last year. Zoo officials lay it to age, but one does suspect that lack of funds was also partly to blame. The limited monies go to the most charismatic of the macrofauna ("pandas") and the rest get by with what seems from the outside to be cursory care.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:21 PM