seeing & being seen

Much driving and visiting has seriously delayed this.

I’m almost tempted to create a whole category for future relevant entries.

From Japan Trend Shop:

Ever wonder what your dog does while you’re away? Wonder what life looks like at his level?

Wonder no more. The Wonderful Shot pet camera from Takara Tomy allows you to send your pet off to take photos of its day with a tiny and light 0.35 megapixel camera connected to its collar. You can take the photos manually anytime with the mini remote, or set the timer to take pictures at certain intervals.

Of course, Wonderful Shot is great for cats or any pet with a collar that has daytime adventures that you want to know about.

According to the highly questionable authoritative Time Magazine happiness index for American workers, curmudgeonly photographers rank low, low, low - with a mere 20.8% indicating that they are “very happy.” Slightly happier are welders, slightly less happy are bartenders.

Above images from Square America, a fantastic repository of vernacular photography.

Errol Morris has a new post on his NYTimes blog, wherein he systematically begins to address some of the points raised by commenters to his previous blog entries. Lies, truth, intentional fallacy, posing, etc., in the context of the photographic image, are further explored and dissected. Again, what’s not to love?

I would be lying if I said I have already digested it in its lengthy entirety. I’d best hurry, however:

Later this week I plan to post a statistical analysis of the first 910 replies. And there will be more responses to come. I also am working on an additional series of essays. Contrary to the many people who suggested (or stated) that the contemplation of images might be pure self-indulgence and a waste of time, I would like to offer the following argument: It is much better in a free society to be aware of the role that propaganda and images play in how we see the world, than to remain oblivious to it.

Meggan Gould. Dogs, Bombay. 2005

Picture-sorting dogs show human-like thought:

Next time you sort through your holiday photos, maybe your dog could lend a hand. It seems dogs can place photographs into categories the same way humans do, an ability previously identified only in birds and primates.

Friederike Range at the University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues trained dogs to distinguish photographs that depicted dogs from those that did not. “We know they can categorise ‘food’ or ‘enemies’ from experience,” says Range, “but this is the first time we’ve taught them an abstract concept - ‘a dog’ - and shown they can transfer this knowledge to a new situation.”

In the training phase, four dogs were simultaneously shown photographs of a landscape and of a dog, and were rewarded if they selected the latter using a paw-operated computer touch-screen. When the computer-savvy dogs were shown unfamiliar landscape and dog photos they continued to identify those containing dogs. And when shown an unfamiliar dog superimposed on a landscape used in the training phase, they were still able to pick it out in preference to an image of just a landscape, showing that they could distinguish a dog by its features

Stephen Shore. U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973

Meggan Gould. Somewhere in Wyoming, April 9, 2007

Photographer Unknown 1950s

Is Photography Dead? From this week’s Newsweek Magazine. I thought we had moved on from this tortured subject. The article is problematic through and through, but here are some particularly choice irritating bits:

… What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and ’40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and ’60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing. . . In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head . . . The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography’s flight into fable.