Showing posts with label whitman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whitman. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Friday, December 29, 2017
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Anaglyph and asymptote: San Francisco, 1906, color
At
http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/09/6231373-color-stereo-photographs-of-san-francisco-after-06-quake-found
the amazing news is that six color stereopticon slides of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake have been found. The blogpost reproduces three of the slides, and I've converted one to an anaglyph, viewable in 3D with a pair of red-and-blue glasses.
Click to enlarge. The anaglyph is color-balanced (not very well) and interpolated, and for me the stereo effect is strongest when I fixate on the utility pole along the image's left margin.
The image itself is blotched and blurry, and it depicts only the ruins of some uninteresting buildings. If it fascinates us nevertheless, that may be because it has brought us a step closer than previous photographs to one of the limits that separate us from the past. Color, a twentieth-century supplement to a nineteenth-century technology, has added one more image to the metaphor of something growing into our transient lives from a larger life that will never change. A tree, say. Maybe a tree like Whitman's live oak, uttering itself to us in green leaves.
We might enjoy believing that we can feel its trunk now, and think that at any moment we'll also be able to see through the dark bark beneath which light pulses upward. But that outer limit will never become transparent. Image's colored core will always remain just behind it, in a dark where it will be 1906 forever. To admit our mortal light to that darkness would bring it to its end.
http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/09/6231373-color-stereo-photographs-of-san-francisco-after-06-quake-found
the amazing news is that six color stereopticon slides of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake have been found. The blogpost reproduces three of the slides, and I've converted one to an anaglyph, viewable in 3D with a pair of red-and-blue glasses.
Click to enlarge. The anaglyph is color-balanced (not very well) and interpolated, and for me the stereo effect is strongest when I fixate on the utility pole along the image's left margin.
The image itself is blotched and blurry, and it depicts only the ruins of some uninteresting buildings. If it fascinates us nevertheless, that may be because it has brought us a step closer than previous photographs to one of the limits that separate us from the past. Color, a twentieth-century supplement to a nineteenth-century technology, has added one more image to the metaphor of something growing into our transient lives from a larger life that will never change. A tree, say. Maybe a tree like Whitman's live oak, uttering itself to us in green leaves.
We might enjoy believing that we can feel its trunk now, and think that at any moment we'll also be able to see through the dark bark beneath which light pulses upward. But that outer limit will never become transparent. Image's colored core will always remain just behind it, in a dark where it will be 1906 forever. To admit our mortal light to that darkness would bring it to its end.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Whitman teaching aid: Brooklyn Ferry in 3D
First published in 1865 by Edward and H. T. Anthony in their collection Anthony's Instantaneous Views, this stereopticon card is downloadable from the museum of photography at George Eastman House, http://geh.org. It bears the luminous title
"Ferry Boat Running to Atlantic Street, Brooklyn."
When I teach Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, students are impressed by the news that Whitman was back in Brooklyn in 1865, and so he might (who knows?) have been on this boat at the very instant one of the Anthony brothers framed his view and then squeezed the shutter release bulb.
However, you'll need a stereo viewer to make the picture reach off the page and grab you the way Whitman does. So here (with thanks to Georges Rosset for his freeware program Z-Anaglyph) is a convenient, Net-friendly, anaglyphic version. To enter the depths of the image, just commandeer the nearest kid's red-and-blue cellophane glasses.
"Ferry Boat Running to Atlantic Street, Brooklyn."
Click to enlarge.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
However, you'll need a stereo viewer to make the picture reach off the page and grab you the way Whitman does. So here (with thanks to Georges Rosset for his freeware program Z-Anaglyph) is a convenient, Net-friendly, anaglyphic version. To enter the depths of the image, just commandeer the nearest kid's red-and-blue cellophane glasses.
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