Scrapbasket
Posted: October 16, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography Leave a commentSome scrap items found on my phone:
1)
I had to stop following Caroline Calloway on Instagram which is too bad, there’s a genius to sentences like this.
2) A view in Pittsburgh:
Pittsburgh is beautiful.
3) Rocks
4) I believe the source here is an interview with Years & Years singer Olly Alexander in Issue 11 of The Happy Reader, but can’t confirm, no longer have the issue. The phrase “Who is the hot boy? Who is the boy that will always bring the looks?” does not appear exactly in a Google search.
5) Seen in Hollywood:
6) Cat on a tray:
7) Portrait of the blogger as a boy:
is this a good photo?
Posted: July 18, 2019 Filed under: photography, the California Condition Leave a comment
was trying to capture the stark steepness of the street across the lake, and the special but unrelenting quality of afternoon sun in LA, and also how LA can look very lush and inviting while also having a kind of washed down, contained, prison-like aspect.
Thought this Vox piece about Antelope Canyon by Rebecca Jacobs was insightful on the meanings of photography in Instagram Age.
What’s the meaning of a tour where they tell you how to photograph it?
first see the rocks early the next morning with a tour group, which is the only way you are allowed to visit them. Before our guide tells us his name, which we find out is Anthony, he asks us the most crucial question of the day: “Do you all have iPhones?”
Anthony instructs all of us except the kid with the Samsung to open our camera apps, click the icon in the top right corner, and swipe to a setting called “Vivid Warm.”
Vivian Maier
Posted: December 2, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history, photography Leave a comment
stole that straight from Artnet.
The tale of who owns Vivian Maier’s work is interesting. Through some twists, John Maloof, the Chicago real estate developer (?) who found and bought most of the physical photos at a storage auction, does not at present own the copyright:
Until those heirs are determined, the Cook County Administrator will continue to serve as the supervisor of the Maier Estate.
Cool photo
Posted: July 1, 2018 Filed under: photography, war Leave a comment
Marines Hit Three Feet of Water as They Leave Their LST to Take the Beach at Cape Gloucester, New Britain. Photographer appears to be Sgt. Robert M. Howard.
Training Literature Field Unit No. 1
Posted: December 24, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, the ocean, Wonder Trail 1 Comment
Helytimes began in 2012. Our idea was
- become good at writing for the Internet
- a writer should have a website
- have a space to collect, digest and share items of interest.
We’ve tried to come up with a mission statement or guiding purpose, but the truth is, this is stuff we had to get out of our head.
The healthiest thing to do was share it.
The best way to put it might be a place to share crazy interesting things we’ve come across.
Since then we’ve published over 1,050 posts. We’re just now starting to get good at it, in our opinion.
Here are the twenty-one most popular posts:
The moral here is probably that we should start a local LA news-and-takes site written by other people.
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Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot (1974)
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Mountaineering Movies on Netflix Instant, Ranked
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Fred Trump
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Cinderella and Interrogation Technique
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The Great Debates
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Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Fascinated by: Ray Dalio
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How Big Was Mexico City in 1519?
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American Historical Figure Who Reminds Me Of Trump
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Losing The War by Lee Sandlin
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Conversations With Kennedy
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Oil Wells In National Parks
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THE WONDER TRAIL
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Gay Hobo Slang
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Vertigo Sucks
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Jackie Smoking Pregnant
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The story of Cahokia
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Ireland should take in two million refugees
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Twenty Greatest Australian Artistic Accomplishments of All Time
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The White House Pool
One lesson here might be to have more local LA journalism written by other people. Keep meaning to start a whole site for that but I do have a full-time job plus several other projects.
In our opinion the most successful post on Helytimes was
Record Group 80: Series: General Photographic File Of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958
although it didn’t crack the top 21, just felt like a time where we added something of value to the Internet and readers responded.
It’s about the work of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, also known as the Training Literature Field Unit No. 1, assembled by the great photographer Edward Steichen.
One thread of Helytimes is attempts to reach into the past and find the sources that give us understanding of the past.
Two personal favorites:
Everything is something.
and
Special Snowflakes
This has been the annual performance review and address to the Helytimes readership:
That photo taken by one of Steichen’s guys, Wayne Miller:
Dorothea Lange
Posted: August 29, 2017 Filed under: photography, the California Condition Leave a comment
Three of the four Arnold children. The oldest boy earned the money to buy his bicycle. Western Washington, Thurston County, Michigan Hill.
Let’s look
Child living in Oklahoma City shack town
at a sample
Cotton picker, southern San Joaquin Valley
of the
Woman in pea picker’s camp. California. “I seen our corn dry up and blow over the fence back there in Oklahoma”
Children of migratory Mexican field workers. The older one helps tie carrots in the field. Coachella Valley, California
Dorothea Lange photos
Pregnant migrant woman living in California squatter camp. Kern County
Japanese mother and daughter, agricultural workers near Guadalupe, California
Mexican girl who picks peas for the eastern market. Imperial Valley, California
Children of migratory workers, hauling water, American River camp, San Joaquin Valley, California
Ansel in Playboy
Posted: July 20, 2017 Filed under: art history, photography, the American West, the California Condition Leave a comment
I’ll explain it this way: Both William Henry Jackson and Edward Weston photographed the American West extensively. But in my opinion, only Weston’s photographs qualify as art. Jackson, for all his devotion to the subject, was recording the scene. Weston, on the other hand, was actually creating something new. In his work, subject is of secondary importance to the total photograph. Similarly, while the landscapes that I have photographed in Yosemite are recognized by most people and, of course, the subject is an important part of the pictures, they are not “realistic.” Instead, they are an imprint of my visualization. All of my pictures are optically very accurate–I use pretty good lenses–but they are quite unrealistic in terms of values. A more realistic simple snapshot captures the image but misses everything else. I want a picture to reflect not only the forms but what I had seen and felt at the moment of exposure.
Playboy: Give us an example.Adams: My Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico has the emotion and the feeling that the experience of seeing the actual moonrise created in me, but it is not at all realistic. Merely clicking the camera and making a simple print from the negative would have created a wholly different–and ordinary–photograph. People have asked me why the sky is so dark, thinking exactly in terms of the literal. But the dark sky is how it felt.
When photographer Alfred Stieglitz was asked by some skeptic, rather scornfully, “How do you make a creative photograph?” he answered, “I go out into the world with my camera and come across something that excites me emotionally, spiritually or aesthetically. I see the image in my mind’s eye. I make the photograph and print it as the equivalent of what I saw and felt.” That describes it well. What he called seeing in the mind’s eye, I call visualization. In my mind’s eye, I am visualizing how a particular revelation of sight and feeling will appear on a print. If I am looking at you, I can continue to see you as a person, but I am also in the habit of shifting from that consciously dimensional presence to a photograph, relating you in your surroundings to an image in my mind. If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense and also an ability that comes from a lot of practice. Some people never can get it.
Playboy: When did you know you could accomplish it?Adams: I had my first visualization while photographing Half Dome in Yosemite in 1927. It was a remarkable experience. After a long day with my camera, I had only two photographic plates left. I found myself staring at Half Dome, facing the monolith, seeing and feeling things that only the photograph itself can tell you. I took the first exposure and, somehow, I knew it was inadequate. It did not capture what I was feeling. It was not going to reflect the tremendous experience. Then, to use Stieglitz’ expression, I saw in my mind’s eye what the picture should look like and I realized how I must get it. I put on a red filter and figured out the exposure correctly, and I succeeded! When I made the prints, it proved my concept was correct. The first exposure came out just all right. It was a good photograph, but it in no way had the spirit and excitement I had felt. The second was Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, which speaks for itself.
More:
They were the ones Weston called the fuzzy-wuzzies. They would go out into the street and find some old bum with a matted beard, and they’d get a tablet of Braille and make the old man put his fingers on the Braille. They would place him in an old chair, looking up through a cloud of cigarette smoke that was illuminated by a spotlight. The title would be Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. That must have been done a thousand times. There were also slimy nudes.
I am an Ansel Democrat:
Playboy: You said that earlier. We assumed you were speaking rhetorically. Weren’t you?Adams: Definitely not. We are on a disaster course. A revolution may happen first; and, of course, that may be a disaster anyway. I don’t say it would be a Soviet revolution, but it could very well result in a different order of society. It could be a socialist setup that might work for a while. We don’t know. The point is, I think there may be a revolution if there is not greater equality given to all citizens. We have consistently considered the employer, especially the large corporations, as the most valuable part of the American society. We have consistently overlooked the enormous importance of the farmer, the technician, the educator, the artist, the laborer. I’m not calling for a revolution; I’m calling for greater equality to all citizens. If that doesn’t happen, something will.You see, I believe in a Federalism under which you would pay your taxes to a properly elected and conducted central Government that would, in turn, provide essential services–which would include medical care and other essentials–to the population. I do think there is a basic obligation for everyone to make his maximum contribution to society, but we talk about opportunity for everyone, and the fact is that it is perfectly obvious that equal opportunity does not exist. It’s about time we woke to that fact and clarified the whole social-political structure. Or we’ll be awakened.Remember, ten percent unemployment, no matter how high that is, is an average. There are places and segments of the population with much higher unemployment. People will not continue to tolerate those conditions. What we need is a new set of political commandments that call to attention some of the basic provisions of the Constitution that are often overlooked by our contemporary leaders. There are inalienable rights that are supposed to be guaranteed. It is absolutely criminal that our Government has consistently supported rightist governments that deny citizens’ rights while being paranoid about any liberal concept, which is the concept upon which our country was founded. But, remember, it took a revolution here.
And finally, his martini recipe:
Playboy: While we’re on the subject, that is some strong martini we’ve sampled. Will you share your recipe with us?Adams: The martini I am drinking now is simply diluted–that way, I can have several. But the ones you’re sipping come from a Hotel Sonesta bartender in Cambridge. You take a good-sized glass and fill it with fine vermouth. Then you marinate some big lemon peels in there for days. As the vermouth evaporates or is used up, replenish it. All you need is a glass, ice, vodka and a lemon peel. Rub the lemon peel around the rim of the glass, drop it in, and you have a very dry martini.
Best photos I took in 2016
Posted: January 5, 2017 Filed under: photography, pictures Leave a comment
Vancouver Island
Joshua Tree
Gaililee, RI
Death Valley
Tofino
Cambridge
Victoria
New Zealand
Two Harbors
Los Angeles
Thurgood’s take, and Yoichi Okamoto
Posted: January 2, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, politics, presidents Leave a comment
From Stephen L. Carter’s 2017 predictions, via Tyler Cowen. (Helytimes is increasingly becoming a Tyler Cowen processing center).
Thurgood:
That photo is by Yoichi Okamoto:
Looking a bit like Fredrik Wikingsson there, and here are more by Yoichi:
found at this NYT slideshow of his work from 2013.
SUNDAY TAKE: The Economist
Posted: October 2, 2016 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography Leave a commentThe Economist
Nearly Cloudless Scotland, As Seen From the ISS
The International Space Station’s Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams tweeted this photo recently with the caption “We had a great view of Scotland today…very rare to not be covered with clouds.”
I’m tryna get that big picture view on things. How does it all work?
What’s going on in Bonn?
The search for answers led me to this magazine.
What to make a magazine that has ads like this?
Just a casual classified:
As part of my ongoing effort to become a guy who considers buying barge-mounted power plants, I became a subscriber.
The editor of The Economist is Zanny Minton Beddoes:
Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo Monika Flueckiger. This was taken at Davos, duh.
The Economist states its mission on the table of contents:
Per Wikipedia:
It takes an editorial stance of classical and economic liberalism which is supportive of free trade, globalisation, free immigration and cultural liberalism (such as supporting legal recognition for same-sex marriage or drug liberalization).
To say it takes that stance is to put it mildly. The Economist believes in free trade and globalisation the way other people believe in gravity. For example, casual assumption what is “sensible” for Paraguay:
Per Wikipedia again, linking to this 1999 Andrew Sullivan snark attack:
[Andrew Sullivan] also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College.
Not true! Zanny Minton Beddoes was in St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University!
Sullivan says:
as a weekly compost of world news and economics, it’s very hard to beat–a kind ofReader’s Digest for the overclass. It’s written in the kind of Oxbridge prose that trips felicitously into one ear and out the other, and it subtly flatters some Americans into feeling that they are sitting in on a combination of an English senior common room and a seminar at Davos. Besides, it’s hard to dislike a magazine that can run a photo of the pope meeting with Bill Clinton over the caption: “That’s 1,000 Hail Marys.”
That’s all true. The subtle flattery is what I’m paying for. Plus I love a good compost.
Sullivan has harsher criticisms, some of which still seem relevant seventeen years later. I like his take that The Economist‘s no bylines policy is suspiciously socialist. He’s criticizing The Economist for not being free markety enough!
More from Wiki’s “Criticism, accusation and praise“:
The Guardian wrote that “its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation”
To which The Economist might respond, “and where are we wrong?”
True to their hero, Adam Smith, The Economist hovers between brilliant and goofy.
Here are some things I’ve learned from reading The Economist in the last three weeks:
- “global internet traffic will surpass one zettabyte for the first time this year, the equivalent of 152m years of high-definition video”
- Under Emperor Augustus, military wages and pensions absorbed half of all Rome’s tax revenues.
- Norway’s sovereign wealth fund owns more than 2% of all listed shares in Europe and over 1% globally. Its largest holdings are in Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Nestlé. The fund is worth $882 billion.
- The United Arab Emirates recently started a Ministry of Happiness
- There’s so much cannabis grown in Albania that in 2014 it might’ve had a value equal to half of the country’s GDP
- bluefin tuna are down 97% from their peak in the early 1960s
- Japanese people are obsessed with Portland
How about this take: reporting on the Russian elections, where only 48% of people bothered to vote on the selected candidates they were allowed to, here’s how The Economist sees the problem:
Mr Putin’s latest victory turns the Duma into more of a sham. As a result, he risks becoming detached. In the view of Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former adviser to Mr Putin, Russia’s leaders are like pilots flying in heavy turbulence with the cockpit dials all painted over.
What a take! Like: democracy is meaningful mainly as a source of information for dictatorial technomanagers!
Wonder if I would’ve been smarter if instead of classes in college I read this magazine cover to cover every week, as Bill Gates says he does.
Hamatsa emerging from the woods – Koskimo
Posted: June 23, 2016 Filed under: art history, photography, pictures Leave a comment
good photo from the Edward S. Curtis archives / Library of Congress.
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Princess Angeline (Duwamish)
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Posted: June 1, 2016 Filed under: photography Leave a comment
found by the Bookbinder.
Moon
Posted: October 13, 2015 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, pictures, science Leave a comment
Went through NASA’s new Flickr of the Apollo missions looking for good ones I hadn’t seen before. 
Some very great shades of blue.
Camping!
Mexico!
Earf
NASA’s foil game is so on point
Goodbye spaceman!
Making movies
Wish traffic in LA were like this. 
The Duke of Abruzzi
Posted: June 16, 2015 Filed under: heroes, Italy, mountains, photography, Tibet, travel, writing 2 Comments
This one prompted me to pick up a book I’d been hearing about for awhile. Wade Davis has been featured on Helytimes before.
He is the real deal.
The opening chapter of this book is intense, vivid writing about the British experience on the Western Front during World War I. Thought I’d read enough about that horror show: Robert Graves and Paul Fussell and Geoff Dyer. Maybe the guy who hit me in the guts the hardest was Siegfried Sassoon, in part because of what a groovy idyllic life got catastrophically ruined for him.
But Wade Davis makes it all new again. One paragraph will do:
Also fascinating:
Click here if you want to see a photo of Mallory’s dead body, discovered in 1999, seventy five years after he was lost on Everest. Only halfway through Davis’ book, at the moment I’m deep in Tibet suffering along on the painstaking surveying expeditions.
A character keeps popping like a fox into the story and then disappearing — a rival mountaineer, the Duke Of Abruzzi.
(You can read about Abruzzi, why I’d be interested in a duke from there here.) What a life. Says Wiki:
He had begun to train as a mountaineer in 1892 on Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa (Italian Alps): in 1897 he made the first ascent of Mount Saint Elias (Canada/U.S., 5,489 m). There the expedition searched for a mirage, known as the Silent City of Alaska, that natives and prospectors claimed to see over a glacier. C. W. Thornton, a member of the expedition, wrote: “It required no effort of the imagination to liken it to a city, but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.”[citation needed]
Another witness wrote in The New York Times: “We could plainly see houses, well-defined streets, and trees. Here and there rose tall spires over huge buildings which appeared to be ancient mosques or cathedrals.”
If you’re climbing K2 you’re liable to be on the Abruzzi Spur:
Late in life:
In 1918, the Duke returned to Italian Somaliland. In 1920, he founded the “Village of the Duke of Abruzzi” (Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi orVillabruzzi) some ninety kilometres north of Mogadishu. It was an agricultural settlement experimenting with new cultivation techniques. By 1926, the colony comprised 16 villages, with 3,000 Somali and 200 Italian (Italian Somalis) inhabitants. Abruzzi raised funds for a number of development projects in the town, including roads, dams, schools, hospitals, a church and a mosque. He died in the village on 18 March 1933. After Italian Somaliland was dissolved, the town was later renamed to Jowhar.
Jowhar found here, I hope user Talya doesn’t mind: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1569979. From wiki: “On May 17, 2009, the Islamist al-Shabab militia took of the town, and imposed draconian rules, including a ban on handshaking between men and women.”
Let’s skip to the best part of any Wikipedia page, “Personal Life:”
In the early years of the twentieth century the Abruzzi was in a relationship with Katherine Hallie “Kitty” Elkins, daughter of the wealthy American senator Stephen Benton Elkins, but the Abruzzi’s cousin King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy refused to grant him permission to marry a commoner. His brother, Emanuele Filiberto, to whom Luigi was very close, convinced him to give up the relationship.[8] His brother later approved of young Antoinette “Amber” Brizzi, the daughter of Quinto Brizzi, one of the largest vineyard owners in northern Italy. In the later years of his life, Abruzzi married a young Somali woman named Faduma Ali.
Here is a picture of the Duke of Abruzzi:
That was taken by Vittorio Sella.
The high quality of Sella’s photography was in part due to his use of 30×40 cm photographic plates, in spite of the difficulty of carrying bulky and fragile equipment into remote places. He had to invent equipment, including modified pack saddles and rucksacks, to allow these particularly large glass plates to be transported safely.[6] His photographs were widely published and exhibited, and highly praised; Ansel Adams, who saw thirty-one that Sella had presented to the US Sierra Club, said they inspired “a definitely religious awe”.
More on the Duke by Peter Bridges at VQR
Hey again I just yank photos and stuff from books from all over — not sure if that’s like an ok practice but this is a non-profit site, try to credit everyone, the whole point is that maybe you will want to go look at/read the originals.
Record Group 80: Series: General Photographic File Of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958
Posted: May 22, 2015 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, the ocean, WW2 1 Comment
Fair to say I’m more interested than most people in old photos.
There are amazing collections of old photos in various US government archives, but they’re not always easy to find or sort through online.
Somehow I stumbled on this US Navy photographic archive.
“Pilot Tells of Dive-Bombing Wake Island in ready room of USS Yorktown (CV-10), 10/1943” is the title of that one.
“Pin-up girls at NAS Seattle, Spring Formal Dance. Left to right: Jeanne McIver, Harriet Berry, Muriel Alberti, Nancy Grant, Maleina Bagley, and Matti Ethridge.”, 04/10/1944″
“Sign on Tarawa illustrates Marine humor and possible lack of optimism as to duration of war., 06/1944”
“Much tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey, 12/1944”
“Crewmen aboard USS Yorktown (CV-10) dash to stations as general quarters sound., 05/1943”
“Filipinos with their ‘bancas’ loaded with wares, paddle out to anchored destroyer to trade with crew., 06/1945”
“Personnel of USS LEXINGTON celebrate Christmas with make-shift decorations and a firefighting, helmeted Santa Claus., 12/1944”
“Graves of U.S. Marines who died taking Tarawa, before headstones were prepared. In background are the first tents put up after occupation of the island., ca. 11/1943”
“Marines installing telephone lines under fire on Peleliu. In the background is seen part of famous Bloody Nose Ridge, scene of the fiercest fighting on Peleliu., 09/1944”
“Sailor asleep between 40mm guns on board the USS New Jersey (BB-62)., 12/1944”
“F6F taxies into position after landing on board the USS Lexington (CV-16)., ca. 11/26/1943”
“Sailor eating sandwich beneath propellers of torpedo being loaded aboard U.S. submarine at New London, Connecticut., 08/1943”
“Children in Naples, Italy. Little boy helps one-legged companion across street., 08/1944”
“Torpedomen relaxing beneath rows of deadly torpedoes in torpedo shop., ca. 05/1945”
Lord knows what you’d find if you dig through the archives in person. This is just what’s digitized and online.
Happy Memorial Day, errboddy.
The ’70s
Posted: March 1, 2013 Filed under: America, photography Leave a comment
Do not miss these rad photos from the 1970s, from an EPA project to document “America’s Environmental Problems and Achievements,” found at the consistently terrific Big Picture.
Theory
Posted: January 18, 2013 Filed under: photography, the California Condition Leave a comment
If you take a picture of anything in California, then put it in black & white, you can pass it off as being by Ansel Adams.
Near McKittrick, California
Posted: November 5, 2012 Filed under: photography, the California Condition Leave a comment
Boston Globe’s Big Picture is the king of Sandy photos
Posted: November 2, 2012 Filed under: photography Leave a comment
This particular one credited to Craig Ruttle/Associated Press
The Faroe Islands
Posted: October 16, 2012 Filed under: photography, pictures Leave a comment
From The Atlantic’s In Focus, pure The Helytimes bait: photos of the Faroe Islands. These two are credited to Arne List.
Traditional Faroese food is mainly based on meat, seafood and potatoes and uses few fresh vegetables. Mutton is the basis of many meals, and one of the most popular treats is skerpikjøt, well aged, wind-dried mutton, which is quite chewy. The drying shed, known as a hjallur, is a standard feature in many Faroese homes, particularly in the small towns and villages. Other traditional foods are ræst kjøt (semi-dried mutton) and ræstur fiskur, matured fish. Another Faroese specialty is Grind og spik,pilot whale meat and blubber. (A parallel meat/fat dish made with offal is garnatálg.) Well into the last century, meat and blubber from a pilot whale meant food for a long time. Fresh fish also features strongly in the traditional local diet, as do seabirds, such as Faroese puffins, and their eggs. Dried fish is also commonly eaten.
Helytimes 
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