seeing & being seen

Thanks, Aurora:

Oops. A lapse.

William Eggleston  Untitled  1975

A major Eggleston retrospective is up at the Whitney, reviewed rather reverentially here in the New Yorker and here in the NYTimes.

Wow. I won’t say it was what most surprised/pleased me last night, but… CNN was all aflutter with flaunting its new holographic technology for live interviews. Wolf Blitzer complimented Jessica Yellin on what a nice hologram she made:

It’s still Jessica Yellin and you look like Jessica Yellin and we know you are Jessica Yellin. I think a lot of people are nervous out there. All right, Jessica. You were a terrific hologram.

Forget trying to render coughs - that was so yesterday’s technology! I’m setting up 35 cameras in my studio today in a tent and I’m not leaving until I can beam things up. Here is a minimal explanation of how I’ll start.

The Guardian allowed itself to be reasonably snarky on the subject:

Why? Because we can. We COULD have a correspondent that could say what she says perfectly well in 2D on a normal screen. But why should we, when we can have a hologram?

There was always the hope that she was going to pull a Princess Leia and refer to Obama (or anyone else) as her only hope, and she even mentioned it herself, but not even a cheerful, self-referential gag could get away from the fact that this was one of the most gleefully pointless election-night gimmicks of them all.

A cough. Garry Settles/Penn State

I have a documented weakness for attempts to photographically examine the invisible. The NYTimes caters thereto recently: The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film. A fairly enigmatic outline of the exact workflow:

The process involves a small, bright light source, precisely placed lenses, a curved mirror, a razor blade that blocks part of the light beam and other tools that make it possible to see and photograph disturbances in the air.

I’ll be in my studio all day, then, coughing and trying to curve a mirror, if you want to find me.

A hair dryer. Garry Settles/Penn State

I have written briefly about the sad demise of the Polaroid era here and here. Fret not, however, you who suffer from Polaroid nostalgia: Poladroid to the rescue! A cute little program with a charming interface that allows you to create virtual Polaroids - complete with the clunk of the Land Camera shutter, the time delay of development, the color shifts therein, and the texture of the frame. Golly. Above, I have shamelessly violated sampled from the history of photography - my Poladroid renditions of an Anna Atkins 1852 cyanotype, left, and Niepce’s 1826 window view, right.